Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Logan Lowery. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Logan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

The day after I applied to the military, I broke both of my legs. I had graduated college less than a year before my accident. Having been accepted to a top graduate program for film composition, I decided to forgo going to grad school in the spirit of pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors. The trouble was I had yet to come up with a solid idea. Nine months after college graduation I decided to pursue a lifelong desire to join the United States Military. The morning after I emailed my application I fell off a building and ended up in the hospital for ten days, in a wheelchair for eight weeks, with a cane for a month, and in physical therapy for six months. Needless to say, I had plenty of time to come up with an idea. Not only that, but it felt like I was being a clear sign to slow down and take the time that was given to me. I wrote down a slew of ideas I had one day on a nearby pizza box lid and that resulted in starting Pizza Box Media (the pizza box lid is framed on my wall). I also spent a ton of time honing my music composition and music production skills with all of the creative energy I had at the time.

During that time I developed an idea for a software that would make royalty free and stock music feel like it was made for a specific video. I knew that I wanted to figure out how to use the emerging technology of artificial intelligence to fit the creator workflow. The question was how. The motivation was to provide content creators a way to have creative control over the music that they secure through legal channels like music libraries while encouraging an expansion of their vocabulary, knowledge, and understanding of how to make music in a space that they already know and are comfortable with. I felt, and still feel, that if content creators could have the benefit of a constant musical companion throughout their edit that they would be able to create content with superior musical quality. Make it unique. Make it feel like every part of the video was done on purpose.

A year later, partnering with college friend Andrew Scofield, we are approaching our minimum viable product (MVP) of Build-A-Score which is essentially a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) and music library that integrates into video editing software and uses AI tools to allow users to seamlessly tailor the music to their video. The concept of collaborative AI is one that we are excited to be developing by combining parts of large language models (LLM’s) that we train on our own data sets and generative AI to create small snippets of materials for users to utilize. The AI will auto-cut a piece of music to a video based on user input and provide suggestions for how exactly to continue editing the track, leaving the creativity in the hands of the user. The software is intended to be sold as an add-on to well-known royalty free music libraries.

Logan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Originally from Birmingham, AL, I live in Nashville, TN with my wife (Haley) and my dog (Cassie). I’m working on getting my MBA from Cumberland University, having received a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Birmingham-Southern College in 2022. I teach music lessons in the small town that we live in outside of Nashville and I’m working all the time on various pieces of content. For instance, I’m working currently on editing the final version of a first edition of a music theory book with a companion card game intended to help groups of people and individuals write music with prompts. At the same time, I’ve been writing a fiction book since 2020 and it has a corresponding musical album that I’ve been writing and self-producing for two years. I hope to release all of these things in 2025 along with launching my software. I’ve been grinding away at these projects and some other film composition projects with director Maximos Tatum from Birmingham. Check out Haunted Henry, You’re Already Somebody, and The Pink Snake Pit by Frameworx Productions on YouTube to see some of my latest film composition works!

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I’ve had to unlearn this idea that I am well-experienced in everything. For a long time I’ve felt that to be inexperienced is a bad or shameful thing. Recently I’ve learned to lean into this idea! I’m 24 years old and have my hands in several pies that I’m excited, passionate, and serious about. Will all of them pan out? Highly doubtful. Is that ok? Absolutely! The beauty of creating is that you’re putting things out into the world, even if you keep it for yourself, and it will someday get a return. It will come back to you. Everything is win or learn, and being inexperienced does not mean that you are incapable or unserious – it means you’re green. Untested.

I am perfectly happy these days being inexperienced. It’s exciting! I mean how exciting is it that any of us, at any time, can be at the beginning of a journey where we get to learn. Hopefully the learning isn’t painful, but I find that painful lessons often occur because we put too much stock in ourselves. Take yourself seriously, but don’t be anyone that you’re not. I’m at the beginning of what I hope to be a long and successful career (who doesn’t hope for that?), but that doesn’t mean that I’ve earned the right to act as if I’m highly successful.

I hope to never stop learning. It’s the gold standard to me. The fear of being inexperienced, or coming across as such, has led me to stunt my own growth in learning. This has been a tough lesson for me to unlearn! Sometimes growing up you hear, “Oh, you’re so mature for your age.” This can kind of mess with you on an ego level, because in your heart you start acting bigger than you are. I’m learning to view myself as serious and capable, but still inexperienced. Its been a big change in where my confidence is rooted, but I feel better about myself as a result.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

There’s a backstory to the backstory of breaking my legs. So I’m a first generation college student and that alone was a challenge, but upon graduating I was set to attend Indiana University for a masters program in scoring for visual media. I was over the moon excited. Over that summer I lived on-campus at Birmingham-Southern College working in Student Development seeking to save up enough money to be able to move and live in Bloomington, Indiana. I was starting with basically nothing. Add studying for my entrance exams and I was a stressed out lil boy at the time. In my stress, I was looking for options for living – ignoring for the moment the large sum of student loans I would need to take out – and kept coming up short. Dollars matter. My plan was to sell my car, which had actually appreciated in value because the car market was INSANE post-COVID, and just downgrade and use that remainder as a deposit, first month/last month rent, and groceries for the first month. I was dissuaded from this idea and instead decided to try my luck with van life. I’ve been into tiny houses and van living since I was in high school, always thought it was so cool.

In my stress, I decided that I was perfectly capable of walking into a car dealership and coming out the victor. I was not. I allowed myself to be put in a situation where I had a Franken-van. It was a 15 passenger van that had the wrong axle in the back and the front suspension was absolutely shot. This was unbeknownst to me when I bought it because I didn’t know anything about the mechanics of vans and thought everything was fine. So I had to sell it at a loss. Now I’m carless and the weight of the impending student loans that I’d have to take out to go to graduate school took hold. I decided to defer a year to see how things went. I thought, “Well crap. This situation is worse than it was. I should take a year and build myself back up.” So I did! Bought a crappy little stick shift with the money I had left, then learned how to drive a stick shift. I worked three jobs to keep my head above water – one time working every day for four straight weeks – and fixed up my little blue 2004 Toyota Matrix. Pretty sure I changed the front shocks in a parking lot. It was a big learning curve. I also got a dog (Cassie) and my first tattoo during this time.

During the Fall of this last second gap year I decided to move to Nashville because, “Why not?” While trying to find a job long distance, I changed my location on some dating apps and met a girl named Haley. We get to talking and start hitting it off for a couple of weeks. The job I was looking at fell through and so I decided to hold off going to Nashville. This was November/December. Through a last minute decision, I drove to Nashville on New Years Eve to have my first date with Haley watching the music note drop. It went very well. Great conversation, comfortable silences (an underrated feature of a good relationship),that good ole giddy feeling, and even our first kiss at midnight. I drove back to Birmingham (in my stick shift) that night to be at work the next morning. So we start dating long distance. It was great.

And then two months into our relationship is when I decided to apply for the military. If you haven’t noticed, this was a point in my life where I was sort of at a loss of what to be doing. I was a post-grad and everything else had fallen through (for better or for worse, because of my own mistakes or otherwise). I had wanted to join the military since I was thirteen and thought that was a good time to do it! I was even watching a 9/11 documentary when I filled out the application. But the next morning I was at work, on a building, and then suddenly I wasn’t. Any chance of me going to Indiana University was now shot at this point. So two months into a long distance relationship and I’m down for the count for another four or five months. But Haley is the best. She stuck with it, and so did I. This was March, and by October I had finally moved to Nashville (a year after starting the process). We get engaged in November and married in January, 2024.

So that’s the backstory to the backstory. It was marked with uncertainty, fear, and the incessant desire to create something bigger than myself. Everything that I’m working on these days I do because I have this desire to create something that outlives me, and I want to see it succeed. It’s important to know your strengths and weaknesses, and for all my weaknesses I’ve learned that my strength is in creating and remaining determined to do so. I can’t not. It’s like breathing. I breathe in my observations about life and the world I live in, and breathing out is the act of creating. The last couple of years has made me only more eager and more excited to create. It’s taught me a lot about my limitations and an appreciation for how hard the process can be, but we here baby. We doing it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.loganlowery.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/loganwlowery/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/logan-lowery-635ab2226/

Image Credits

Photos by Cameron Carnes. Illustrations by Logan Lowery