Whether it’s playing a musical instrument or writing in a journal, cultivating a creative practice is transformative in navigating turbulent times and gaining a better understanding of ourselves and each other.
Join this session on healing with music and words with Grammy award-winning musician and composer Jon Batiste and Emmy award-winning journalist, author, artist and advocate Suleika Jaouad.
At Davos, Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad reframed creativity as a practical tool for endurance. Their relationship began at “Bandcamp,” but their partnership now functions as a creative system: Batiste “workshops” ideas with many voices to discover what he believes, while Jaouad protects early drafts until she has taken them “as far as I can.” Each also imports methods from their discipline into the other’s: Jaouad helps sequence songs by asking for the “narrative arc,” while Batiste sharpens her prose by listening for when “the rhythm of this paragraph…isn’t landing.”
Healing, they argued, is often a private act. During Jaouad’s cancer recurrence and isolation after a bone marrow transplant, Batiste composed and sent “a lullaby every single day,” showing that “survival [is] its own kind of creative act.” Their shared journaling practice extends that logic into communication: writing letters creates a productive delay and “a more direct line between the subconscious… and what emerges.”
On creative blocks, Jaouad relies on “the writing that doesn’t count” and begins with “I don’t want to write about…” until curiosity appears. Batiste broadened the lens: culture and music operate as “energy…frequency,” seeding intention that becomes action.
Hey, everyone. Welcome. It's a privilege to be here, especially with two people whose work has changed. Not just how we experience art, but how we experience ourselves. We often talk about music as entertainment, but today we're talking about music and words as medicine. The Recording Academy. A lot of what we do is is celebrating excellence. It's awards, it's performances, moments on big stages. But this is about something quieter, more personal. It's about what happens when the lights are off and the audience is gone. And when music becomes something we go to, to survive, to understand, to heal. So today, I invite you to think about the music that has maybe carried you through hard times. Think about how it's how it's moved you. This is a conversation about healing and the power of music. I hope it's meaningful for all of you. I want to bring to the stage our moderator, Doctor Adam Grant. Good to see Adam. Of course, our Grammy Award winning, incredible, amazing artists, Jon Batiste. And his very talented and incredible wife, Suleika Jaouad.
So excited for this conversation. Welcome, John and Suleika.
Hi, Adam.
It's always a joy to have an Emmy winner, a Grammy winner, and me on stage.
Multiple times over new York Times best selling author.
Which one of these is not like the others? So stop. Stop redirecting. I'm in charge here, you two. Listen, I met the two of you, I think about a decade ago. Did not know that you knew each other, let alone loved each other. And the moment I found out that you were in love, it just made more sense than I think. Any relationship I'd seen in a long time. I think the audience needs to know how you met and fell in love.
That's easy. Two words. Bandcamp. Yeah.
Bandcamp is is an amazing thing. And just to let you all know, here at Davos, this is a veiled advertisement for Bandcamp. We we met it was, first sleepaway camp that I'd ever done in upstate New York. And I'm coming from Louisiana, so I hadn't seen snow and I hadn't seen any of these landscapes. And these people were very different than the people in my community. And then I see this girl, and she's carrying around a huge double bass that's about twice her size, and she's wearing Birkenstocks, and she has a bunch of books and is trekking through the, the woods, Saratoga Springs and the Skidmore campus where the camp was, is just completely submerged in woods. And I was like, whoa, where am I? And who is that?
It was also John's first time ever seeing Birkenstocks, which he was very confounded by.
Yep. That's what how do you remember it?
You know, John had been playing the piano for about a year or two. I think I was 13. You were 14, and it was immediately obvious to me, and likely everyone else in the room, that we were in the presence of rare genius. I also remember that you were incredibly awkward. And very, very shy. So the biggest source of surprise, I think, to anyone who knew you back then, is to see you gracing these stages with ease and confidence and comfort. But there's a real beauty and humility to staying in touch with the people that, you know, long before you arrive in rooms like this one. And it's been the great privilege and joy of my life to, to get to share my time here on, on this big rock that we live on with you.
Well, this is I mean, this is relationship goals right here. Who has not wanted their partner to call them both a genius and extremely awkward in one sentence.
Right there.
Okay, so I want to talk about the genius of the two of you because you are both brilliant creatives, and I actually love for the two of you to tell us about each other's creative process. So, Suleika, what have you learned from watching John make music? John, what have you learned from watching Suleika write and make art?
So to describe John as a musician or an artist is reductive. John is a polymath. He is a voracious reader. Everywhere he goes. He has 2 or 3 books. He came with me last week. To chemo at 7 a.m., and he had two books, one called The Great Pianists by the New York Times music reviewer, Harold Schoenberger. And then the second was The Radical King, which was a collection of edited essays put together of Martin Luther King. Not my choice of 7 a.m. hospital waiting room reading. But he is someone who is. A true genius. Not just musically, not just when it comes to pattern recognition, not just when it comes to being a student of history. He's also a brilliant writer. I call him a YouTube historian. Every night he becomes obsessed with a moment in history, an individual, and I'll wake up and find thousands of browser tabs open on my computer. Which is evident of whatever late night fascination, he has. But your intellect, your ability to work across so many different mediums and to master them is nothing short of breathtaking.
Okay, so you heard it here first. Your late night YouTube binge is creatively stimulating.
I love that.
All right, John.
Rabbit Hole City.
What have you learned from Suleika?
Oh my goodness. Okay, so this could be the whole panel. I can express the depth of humanity of this individual in every choice that she makes, the integrity of every choice, the purity of the intention of every choice, and how it's never forsaking the path to true North of of of the first intention, the pure intention of the work. It's never forsaken it for money, for fame, for any sort of accolade or trend that could come and just disrupt the signal. It's the most pure intention of anyone that I've ever seen create. And I'm talking about from legendary people who I've been in the room with in any genre of creativity, just to the integrity. And it spans beyond just the work. It's in the way that she treats the people she works with. Thank you so much. Yeah. It's in it's in the way that she keeps the, the the culture that is surrounding the work and the intention of, of each individual on course. But with grace is a very firm hand. It's also very graceful. And that combination, it's it's so powerful to witness with what she's going through every day. The possibilities of that in you are just, it makes me emotional just to think about witnessing it day in, day out, day in, day out. Then there's the craft. Talk about the rigor of the craft that the toil of craft that it takes to. To really know exactly what you're saying, exactly what you're doing. To know your stuff to the point where you just know it. Cold. Somebody wake you up cold 6 a.m. in the morning and say, break down to me the thesis of your latest work. Can you tell me the philosophy behind why this is interconnected with that and why it led you to this direction? Yeah. Well, actually, John, this is a this is a person who has done the work. Anything you see publicly, there's been years of excavation and silent meditation and reading and research and development and all of it's just undergirded with the deepest integrity. So I find that to be an inspiration because it's very easy if you have a gift to to hone it. And I won't even say it's easy to get to a level where you're, you're you're able to express something that's very original. But many of us in these rooms can do that. But to have the other piece, the humanity. I don't it's I could count on a single hand.
Given the reverence that you have for each other. What is it like to critique each other's creative work? Do you wake up in the morning and say, I'm sorry, that's actually bad? Suleika. Does John miss John, do you have to tear apart any drafts? So notice the awkward pause here, I love it. Tell us what you really think of each other's worst work.
So John is a work shopper. He loves to collect an array of different voices and feedback, and he's able to ask questions and to pick and choose what matters to him. I'm a little bit more protective and moated around my first drafts. I show no one my work until I've taken it as far as I can. That has changed in recent years, in part because of John's example. I think, you know, the challenge as an artist is to hold true to what it is that you're trying to say, and to pick your first readers, to pick your first listeners wisely. And John gives me advice and feedback all the time that I don't like.
What's an example?
What's what's a recent example?
Okay, so I have some. So I think that because of, and we actually had funny, we had a conversation about this, the three of us. I think that you need to delegate more.
Second, a lot more.
It was two versus one.
I think that you can still transmit the care and the depth of the work that you're doing and do less, but the result speaks for itself. So you know it's kind of we give advice that's like and I love on the other hand, I love the kind of advice that Zuleika gives. And I seek out advice that's very brutally honest and contrary to what I would think, because a lot of times I'm workshopping to see what I actually believe. And a good friend of mine, he will say that John asked a thousand people and listens to none.
Of them.
And he explained that to me, and I didn't know that he was like, it was like a mirror. I was like, oh wow. But I will say that I listened most to Zuleika's feedback because it's just it comes from a place where she knows obviously me more than anybody, but she sees things in a way that it's not clouded by a lot of things that ultimately become superficial in the final act of creation.
I'll also just add that I think there's such an interesting cross-pollination when you collaborate with artists across different disciplines. So John, for example, will play me a list of songs that are on an album and ask me how he should sequence them. And I'll say, what is the narrative arc here? And I'm thinking of it from a writer's mind. Sometimes I'll show John a draft and he'll say, the rhythm of this paragraph or this sentence isn't landing. And that feedback is is so eye opening and, and expansive and has fundamentally changed the way that I think about how to write a sentence.
Okay, let's level the playing field a little here. So, John, you want Zuleika to delegate more? So what's your feedback for John? What does he need to work on creatively?
I want John to focus his genius more. I think.
I'll endorse that one to.
The gifts of of being able to master so many different genres and disciplines. Is that you do all of them, but I'd be really interested to know what would happen if Jon Batiste did one thing for an entire year.
I don't think I've ever done that before.
You haven't.
And I love that this is on the record, because now you're both accountable for having to take each other's advice. Okay. So I want to I want to talk about healing. You both have been major forces for healing in the world. Suleika. Literally, that's when you rose to prominence, right? Writing about the early stages of your experience with cancer. John, I think last night at the opening concert, one of the most frequent comments was John is healing us in part by making us dance together. Talk to me about the power of music to heal and the power of writing to heal.
So I'll give you one example that involves John. Three years ago, I had a recurrence. I went through a second bone marrow transplant, which involved multiple weeks in the hospital. And because of a surge in Covid and the infection risk. There was a period of time where John and I weren't able to be in the same room about a week or two. And John responded to that challenge by deciding to compose lullabies and sending me a lullaby every single day, that I could listen to on loop, as a way of enveloping me with his presence and his love. And of course, not everyone has a spouse who can compose them lullabies.
Yeah, that's not fair.
But what struck me about that is how, you know, everything we do requires creativity and especially survival. We've talked about the notion of survival being its own kind of creative act, figuring out how to stay connected when you're deep in isolation, figuring out how, to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, to find a still point in the spinning world when your life feels like it's mired in chaos. That requires creativity. Figuring out how to tap into your imagination when you're confined to a hospital room, or to sell a cell to move beyond the confines of whatever your space, is that you find yourself in requires creativity. And so I think that small act for me, which was not public facing, there was no goal. It wasn't part of some album project has changed the way that I think of my own small creative acts outside of my creative work.
When you you asked the question, I started to recall our recent tour. We went on a tour together. This is the first time that we were on stage together last year, and we did this. Really, I didn't know it was possible to bring your living room on tour. I did the closest thing that you could. We set up our. It was basically the, the, the couch from our living room, the rug, some of the lamps, even some of the decor. And then we had books. And Suleika has been journaling since she was a kid and has trunks of journals, and the show was basically reading from the journals, reading from the book, and us making music together. And that was it felt like a creative church. The people that were in the audience were such a range of different experience, different, different generations, just a culmination of so many different life forces and the energy of all the people being so focused and invested in something that feels super just with the stakes of everything in the world today, us hanging out in our living room, it felt so consequential. It was so deep in a way that reminded me. And I'm reminded every time we get the blessing to play and perform. And as a musician, when I listen to all the musicians, my peers and also the greats who I admire, I'm always conscious of that. But this was a different it was like, it was it was a soul cleansing. Everybody brought their souls and and we all cleansed our souls together. And then we walked out and it was like, wow, we can just have moments like that. That was powerful. That's to me. What brought to mind your question? Brought to mind?
I don't think I've ever heard the word soul in Davos before.
You know, Harvey opened by talking about music and and the arts as more than entertainment. But to anyone who's read something or listened to a song and felt less alone, more connected, to anyone who's been moved, than, you know, that the arts is is is more than entertainment. I think artists are often translators of history, translators of the moment, torchbearers often of the future. And they're able to synthesize the human experience, be it despair or heartbreak, or great joy and success, and to something that doesn't just make sense but allows for meaning, to be taken in and and metabolized.
Okay. I have to pick up on the journaling theme. John, you mentioned that Suleika is an obsessive journaler.
Truly, truly.
And of course, we know that would mean that you also have to start journaling, but you have gone farther. The two of you have a shared journal. What in the world is that?
Yeah.
I love the idea of communication lessons and learning how to communicate, learning how to be a better communicator. And for me, I'm oftentimes trying to think of ways to build my skill in that area with music. Ultimately, we're trying to communicate, even if it's an instrumental song, we're trying to communicate meaning making. If it's, if it's a conversation, we're trying to communicate things that oftentimes are not possible to be fully transmitted in words, but through our inflections, through the way that we we're able to put our ideas together, references, we can get closer and and in relationship. We value that so much because there's so much that's on our soul, there's so much on our spirit every day. How do we figure out how to communicate that in the bustle of life, when everything is moving, the pace of things is it's gone. And there's so many significant moments, there's so many milestones, there's so many hardships. Sometimes you can be at a loss for words. And I learned from Suleika that the journal, you know, it's really a very sacred place, but it can also just be something that helps you to, to communicate. So we decided to start writing each other letters.
Well, and I think, you know, the practice of writing letters is increasingly a lost art form. And there's benefit, especially in romantic relationships, to having a lag between what you have to say and the response. I think of, you know, Rilke's Letters to a Young poet. There's a way in which when we're in conversation, we're not always able to say what it is that we want to say, and sometimes we don't even know what it is that we want to say. And when you put pen to paper, I think there's a more direct line between the subconscious, between the unsaid, and, and what emerges. And so because we're millennials, we weren't actually mailing each other letters. I would write a letter to John and my journal. I'd snap a photo of it and text it to him. He would write a letter and his and text it back to me. But I think we had conversations that we never could have had on the phone or even in person.
I don't think our audience knew they were getting marriage advice today, let alone that it would be to become pen pals with your partner. But I think it's time for audience questions. We can take a few. I just want to remind everyone for Andrew Ross Sorkin that questions end in a question mark. Alan Fleishman, Mike is coming to you.
You guys are such beautiful couple. I have you thought about writing a book together? I love your book. I love your music. Have you thought about taking that collection and putting it to publication?
We did start toying with the idea. I don't know if it's a book or a musical. But the title came to us called Bandcamp because Bandcamp, I feel like, is such a fun playground for. Yeah, so many of the joys and challenges and the glorious awkwardness of of coming of age. Yeah.
Bandcamp look out for when? Whenever it happens. I think that would be a dream of mine. I'm going to start with a book that I'm writing, and suleika will help me, because I'm going to need the help. And I'm excited about, Bandcamp, because it is what we did on the tour, the blending of the mediums, the cross. It's a cross translation. It's a translation between mediums that I'm very interested in. And I think that our relationship, it really represents very well.
Hand over here.
Thank you. From the National. You're both incredibly talented, but all of us sometimes hit a block on creating, writing, expressing yourself. So how do you deal with it?
I am someone who feels blocked more often than not. And the reason? I think I've been an obsessive journaler my entire life is because it's the writing that doesn't count. It's a rare space, especially in our world today, where there is no audience unless you have a very nosy mother who's reading your journals, where you get to show up as your most unedited, unvarnished self. And so often, when I don't know what to say, I begin by writing. I don't want to write about, and then I write into that. And inevitably it's an indication of what I'm most curious about. I think also just refilling the well outside of whatever your discipline is for me is always what inspires me. Listening to music, reading poetry out loud or going to an open mic night, rereading books that influenced me as a child. All of that, inevitably sparks some idea or some little igniting moment. That leads me to the next thing.
And Jen, we want to hear how you get unblocked. But because Suleika is too modest, if you have not read her Book of alchemy yet, it is the best guide to overcoming writer's block and all kinds of creative blocks that I've encountered. Highly recommend.
That was literally about to give her that get.
Give that advice. I would just say read Zuleika's book.
That's the.
There's there's so many great, great lessons in, I would highly recommend that the Book of alchemy.
John, you're a gamer. Do video games help you creatively at all?
For sure, 100%. Before I left, I was, sitting on the couch. We watched some films, and then suleika when you went to sleep, I went and put on NBA two K. I was Steph Curry because I love I just love the I always would escape into a game, especially RPGs, where you could become the person and live in the world through that person's eyes. That was a beautiful thing. Something about that really is connected in some way to my music making. I couldn't explain how, though.
All right, we have time for one more question right there. We'll do it quickly.
Hi, John. I'm Vinicius, I'm Brazilian, and I love, love, love my country. I love my culture. And I think that I love my country because I love my culture. And you've been showing so much respect for Brazilian culture by bringing artists to the spotlight. And I want to ask you, nowadays, I work with climate and I work with that because I love my country. And I would like to ask you about healing the world with sounds and words. How do you think that we are saving the world through culture.
In 30s or less? Go.
Okay, well, so.
I think about that all the time. I love the idea of thinking about music as energy and as frequency and frequency emits intention, and it also plants the seed of intention. And that intention sprouts in your subconscious and then in your conscious mind as ideas, ideas become things. If you look at, you know, we had the birthday of the great Martin Luther King Jr, the civil rights movement and the music that preceded it was the soundtrack. And also one of the things that gave it a life force in a different way that it would not have had without that energy frequency permeating every moment, every March, every bus ride, every protest, all of this is important in we have a superpower in music when we view it as not only entertainment, but as a spiritual practice.
Well done. I would call the two of you a national treasure if we were in America, but we're in Europe. You are an international treasure. Thank you both.
Thank you Adam. Thank you.
Thank you.