There's a moment in every artist's journey where they're standing at a crossroads, one path leading forward and the other leading away. For Canadian singer-songwriter Matt Bazinet, that moment came last year. He had no producer, a publishing deal that wasn't gaining traction, and a physio school rejection letter sitting on his desk. He was, by his own admission, five steps out the door from music entirely.
Then something unexpected happened, changing Matt’s entire journey and setting him on his path of purpose.
A Guy Who "Just Made Music"
Matt grew up in a small town in Ontario, far from the music industry, in a family where nobody sang and both parents were, as he puts it, "literally tone deaf." From the age of 10, though, Matt was drawn to music in a way he couldn't explain, something that felt less like a hobby and more like a biological need. When he wasn't playing guitar, he was playing sports and shouting at refs. When he picked the guitar back up, he felt like himself again.
"It's like a disease," he says laughing. "Once it finds you, you can't get away from it."
He spent years building around his passion: a distribution deal, a publishing deal, and a growing catalog of songs. But by the summer of 2025, everything seemed to collapse at once. His team started to slowly fall apart, opportunities thinned, and the dream felt distant. Music just wasn't getting made.
"I was ready to quit," he says, plainly.
A Weekend That Wasn't on the Plan
Through his involvement with Folk Music Ontario's developing artist program, Matt received an email about an opportunity in New Jersey, our annual Mentor Meetup retreat, where our community of youth and young adults come together to learn and grow. He had a few weeks to say yes or no.
"I didn't really know what it was. I didn't know what the vibes were going to be. But everything was failing, so I thought: why not go?"
He flew to New Jersey skeptical, emotionally depleted, and convinced he was probably going to quit music when he got home. What he definitely didn't expect to find was the deep community and mentorship that would quietly rewire how he talked to himself.
That first night around the campfire, Matt played one of his original songs. Seal, one of our TPF board members, was there, stood up, congratulated Matt on his work, and then asked for the guitar and played his famous song "Kiss from a Rose."
"You can't buy that moment," Matt says. "And the only thing that led me to it was the music I'd been pushing myself toward."
The Inner Critic vs. The Inner Champion
Matt will be the first to tell you he's not a "woo-woo" guy. He comes from a community where toxic masculinity is, in his words, "a way of life," where men don't open up and where depression is framed as a choice. He came into The Person First weekend ready to participate without judgment, but not necessarily ready to be changed.
The framework he encountered at The Person First, rooted in Dr. Jim Loehr's decades of research at the Human Performance Institute, centers on a concept the program calls Y.O.D.A: Your Own Decision Advisor. The idea is that every person has an inner voice guiding their choices, and that voice can either be untrained and reactive (Inner Voice One) or deliberately developed into something wise, compassionate, and aligned with your deepest values (Inner Voice Two).
"The difference between someone doing something successfully and unsuccessfully is largely their confidence in how they go about it," he says. "It's not what they're doing. It's how they do it. That was a huge revelation."
Even so, it didn't click immediately. After the weekend, Matt went home, got a full-time job, and pretty much stopped making music. He applied to physio school and got rejected. Somewhere in that rejection, though, something The Person First weekend had planted started to take root.
"I realized I'd only been letting my inner critic speak for months. So I thought: I've got two options. Be unhappy and not try music or be unhappy and try music. I might as well do the second one."
.png)
