Today we’d like to introduce you to Wendy Colonna.
Hi Wendy, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where music was the soundtrack to everything, swamp pop at the crawfish boil, dancehalls, festivals, front porches. I was a kid who never fit anyone’s boxes, which turned out to be the best luck of my life. In high school I finally found my people: a bunch of misfit kids who held midnight meetings at Shoney’s and somehow turned an old downtown shoe store into a real punk venue, hosting touring bands from all over the country while we were all still teenagers. We named it Pourquoi Pas, meaning “why not” inspired by the French we grew up around in Cajun country. I had no idea then that question would thread through my whole life.
The music business found me before I went looking for it. I was at Louisiana’s Scholars’ College, this rad interdisciplinary program where I could see how philosophy and economics and ecology were all related, woven together, one conversation. I started writing songs in the middle of all that. A friend set up a live taping just to document what we were making and the studio owner offered us a record deal that same night. I was basically thwarted into the music business before I knew what was happening. Pourquoi pas?
I moved to Austin in 2000 and built a life in music: nine albums, touring the country and the world. Then one day a call came in asking for a custom song — which ended up at the center of a Coca-Cola campaign playing in millions of homes. That commission became a reconciliation for me. It healed some broken beliefs I’d been carrying about my ego and my persona as a musician, and let me get to doing music as a deeply human thing.
That realization grew into Lyriculture™. At its core, the company exists to strengthen and nurture music as a key element of our cultural, mental, emotional, and community health. In practice that means two things: I develop and consult with artists to strengthen their brands, their presence, and their impact and I work with organizations to harness music as a force for connection, empathy, and culture. When my son was born in 2017 and I shifted my focus from touring to laying deeper roots, I got certified as a career coach and built a real practice around it. Nine years and hundreds of artists and organizations later, it’s still the work I wake up most excited about.
Somewhere along the way I realized I’d grown a portfolio career, recording and releasing music, writing anthems for organizations, keynote concerts, coaching artists and creative entrepreneurs, developing education and resources for music communities. Nobody plans that on a whiteboard. It grew organically, the way the best things do, into work that serves something I care about deeply: strengthening the cultural connective tissue that music uniquely provides, in a world that needs its magic and its messy and magical human essence. And there are a couple of big projects launching this year that I’m sure we’ll get to.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Smooth? I’ve been in the music business since the mid-90s. I’ve watched the entire economy of music collapse and reinvent itself multiple times, the CD boom, Napster, streaming, and now the wild west of AI. Building a career on ground that keeps moving will teach you things no business school can.
But the industry was easier to navigate than some of the other struggles. The real ones were sneakier.
Early on I kept saying yes to con-artists. The music business has an endless supply of them, the middleman with all the right names to drop, who sees “something special in you that nobody else sees.” It’s a seduction aimed straight at the ambition of a developing, hungry artist, and I fell for it more than once. Every time, my gut knew first. I just kept talking myself out of trusting it — which, looking back, is its own kind of comedy.
The deeper struggle was the story I carried inside. I had absorbed a very clear picture of what a “real artist” looks like: broke, struggling, untouched by commerce. So when my song landed in a national Coca-Cola campaign, playing in front of millions of people the same summer I released my most artistically ambitious record, Nectar, I hid it. I changed the subject when it came up. I carried this beautiful thing like it was something to be ashamed of. It took me years to see that the poverty mentality running through creative culture is a cage, and that I had built mine so carefully I could barely see the bars.
Eventually all that self-betrayal caught up with my body and I got seriously sick. That was the turning point. I rebuilt my life and career and personal relationships on my own terms and every time I trusted my gut and leapt, doors opened that no gatekeeper could have unlocked.
Here’s the gift in all of it: those struggles are exactly why I can do the work I do now. When an artist sits across from me tangled in fear of success dressed up as integrity, or a founder who’s been shrinking to fit someone else’s model, I recognize it immediately. I lived in that terrain. I know the way through because I walked it.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Everything I do lives at one intersection: music, culture, and creative business. I’ve spent nearly thirty years working every side of it, and it turns out that’s a bit of a rare vantage point.
I’m a recording artist first. Nine albums, and a new project called BANNED currently in production. For the last two years I’ve been in a book club reading the books being challenged and pulled from shelves across America: Caste, The Nightingale, Fahrenheit 451, The Color Purple. I kept noticing the same thing. Underneath each of these books live questions that make us squirm. Questions about power, memory, erasure, what we’re willing to look away from. I’m fascinated by that discomfort. So instead of retelling the stories, the songs sit inside those questions and hold them long enough for us to feel them. The first single, Nightingale, grew out of Kristin Hannah’s novel. It asks what it costs the women who hold the world together during war, in every country, in every era. It just came out, and watching reviews arrive from Brazil, Portugal, and Mexico, places I’ve never even played, has been one of the great delights of my career.
The rest of my work lives under Lyriculture™, the company I founded at the intersection of music, branding, and creative entrepreneurship.
For organizations, that means putting music to work: custom songs, anthems, sonic branding, keynote concerts. I’ve written for Coca-Cola, Cirrus Logic, tourism boards, and national conferences. My favorite thing in the world is opening an event with an anthem written specifically for and by that community, watching a room full of professionals hear their own language sung back to them for the first time. One conference co-chair told me the song galvanized the crowd and set the tone for the entire event. That’s the work: your organization has a culture, and music can make it felt.
For artists and creative entrepreneurs, Lyriculture is where they come when they’re looking to build careers in full alignment with who they are. Nine years ago I got certified as a career coach and built a practice around a methodology that starts on the inside, with vision, mission, values, and identity, and builds outward to strategy, positioning, and revenue. I’ve walked with dozens of artists, from Grammy-nominated performers to songwriters releasing their first album. This fall, I’m launching the Mojo Hub, an online community with career support, weekly office hours, and programming for artists building creative careers on their own terms.
If anything sets me apart, it’s probably that I’ve lived every seat in the room. I know what it feels like to write the song, sign the bad deal, tour the world, reinvent when the industry collapses, and build a business from scratch. Clients tell me that’s what they value most: a strategist who understands stages and spreadsheets in the same breath.
What am I most proud of? A friend once told me she sang my Coca-Cola song to her miracle baby every day she carried him, and I received a video of herself holding him for the first time, singing it through tears. Songs go places we never will. Getting more songs out there, and watching the people who make them build lives that sustain the work, that’s what I’m proudest of.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
So many ways, and each one delights me.
If you love the music, come find me. The songs live everywhere you stream, plus backstage goodies on Patreon, where I share demos and the making of new work. And if you want to experience it live, I perform everywhere from theaters and listening rooms to libraries and conferences. Booking inquiries go to booking@wendycolonna.com.
If you’re planning a conference or event, let’s talk about opening it with an anthem written for your community, or a keynote concert that weaves live music, storytelling, and a real framework. Attendees have never heard their own language sung back to them. They will not forget it.
If you lead an organization or a brand, Lyriculture is how music can make your culture felt: custom song commissions, sonic branding, and facilitated workshops where your team becomes the co-creator.
If you’re an artist or creative entrepreneur looking to build a career in full alignment with who you are, I work with clients through ongoing one-on-one advisory and Deep Dive Strategy Days for anyone at a crossroads. And this fall the Mojo Hub opens: an online community with weekly office hours, peer connection, and programming calibrated to where you are in your career and your life. The waitlist is at wendycolonna.com.
And BANNED is actively seeking partners. I’m looking for grants to support studio production, and for libraries, universities, and literary organizations who want to host performances and conversation built around the songs and the books they came from. If your organization is invested in free expression and the freedom to read, I would love to hear from you. Patreon is where individuals can step in and watch the project come to life.
Start anywhere. It all connects at wendycolonna.com.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.wendycolonna.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/wendycolonna
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/wendycolonna
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendycolonna/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/wendycolonna
- Other: https://patreon.com/wendycolonna
