Brian Koppelman

You know, comfort crisis was a really huge thing and really did come at the perfect time for me a couple years ago.

Yeah, pretty much from age... I was born in Flushing, which is Queens, but pretty much my whole life's memories were on Long Island until I went to college.

And then relatively little Long Island time from college on.

Yeah, I mean, it's an incredible thing to have been part of her rise and to have been a very early voice advocating for her music and her artistic brilliance.

It's been written about a lot and I've talked about it a lot.

I was 19 years old when I first saw Tracy play Talking About a Revolution.

Yeah, at the college that both of us went to.

She was two years ahead of me.

And it was kind of the defining thing in my life for a long period of time.

It was my entire focus of most of my sophomore, junior, senior... Most of my sophomore year and my junior and senior year and led me into this first... The first stage of my career until David and I wrote our first script.

I would say...

The lessons that were the most important lessons that I took from that, and these are broadly applicable to anyone listening, is I was young enough not to believe experts when they told me that

I was wrong that Tracy's music could appeal to many people across many different demographics.

For me, at 19, I had spent a lifetime in recording studios even though I was young because my dad was in that business, so I knew about that business.

So I had a certain amount of knowledge, a certain amount of reps thinking about things like what makes somebody a great songwriter?

What makes a song a great song?

What makes an entertainer incredibly compelling?

But I was young and innocent enough to

not think that the monolith of an industry knew better.

Because all I thought was, well, if this moves me to tears, and I'm not an easy cry, if this makes me stay up all night lost in what this music is, then other people are going to be like me, and they're going to feel the same way.