When Words Fail: How Music Carries What We Can't Say Yet

Layla Minoui, an award-nominated film and television composer whose credits include DreamWorks, Disney and Netflix, spent nearly two decades writing music that tells other people's stories before she turned the same craft inward. In a conversation on the Soulful Sound podcast, hosted by Simone Niles, she traces how improvising at the piano gave her a way to feel grief, anger and the exhaustion of survival mode without trying to fix her circumstances, and how that work became Journey to Rebirth, a project born from her battle with cancer. Her thinking runs through a few distinct ideas: rhythm as a form of identity, the gap between understanding something and embodying it, and the practice of meeting yourself with curiosity instead of judgment. What follows explains each one, drawing on what she said in the episode.

What does a child hear when music arrives before words?

Minoui's first memory of music is physical. She remembers sitting on her father's lap while Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon played, and being absorbed in the sound. What stands out in her account is that she noticed her own response even then, the way the music landed inside her. She describes herself as curious from the start about how music affects people emotionally, a question that would eventually shape her entire career.

The host, Simone Niles, mentioned a memory of her own: touring with a Pink Floyd tribute band that performed that same album, and singing the Great Gig in the Sky vocal, which she called one of the hardest of her life. Minoui's answer was that the piece is her favorite on the record and that she has covered it herself. It is a small exchange, but it captures what makes the conversation work. Both women treat a recording as a living score with real demands on the body and the voice, not as background.

How does growing up between two cultures shape a musician?

Minoui was born in the suburbs of Detroit to parents who had immigrated from Iran at a young age. She describes growing up immersed in two cultures as both enriching and isolating. It taught her how to move between worlds, but it also left her without a clear sense of where she fit. She calls it an in-between state, a feeling of belonging in neither culture fully.

Music was where that changed. She describes discovering it as the place she could finally speak, and she said so plainly on the podcast:

"Music was this way that I was able to speak and felt like I finally landed in a place where I belong in myself. And it was a way for me to express in ways that I couldn't in the outside world."

Layla Minoui, Soulful Sound podcast (3:05)

She is careful about how she describes the pull toward music. It was not a plan she made. "It was almost like it was calling me forward," she said, and she followed it. Her father's wide taste, which took in music from many genres and many parts of the world, gave her a broad ear early on.

Why does rhythm matter so much to how she plays?

The influence she names most specifically is rhythm. She says it shaped her sense of musicality more than anything, and that her approach to the piano is unconventional as a result. In her words, she almost plays the keyboard like a drum, because she is so driven by different rhythmic types that imprinted on her. Each musical culture she absorbed, she suggests, has its own rhythm, and each rhythm carries its own feeling. Her sense of what makes her music distinct comes from that layering rather than from a single style.

For anyone who plays an instrument, the point is practical. A rhythmic identity is not a metronome exercise. It is the way your body expects time to move, and it shows up before you decide anything. Minoui's keyboard approach makes that concrete: the piano becomes a percussive instrument when the player's body is organized around pulse.

What did two decades of scoring other people's stories teach her?

Minoui's film and television work began long before Journey to Rebirth, and the early version of her craft was already present in childhood. She remembers telling friends to act out a scene while she played along on the piano, promising to be their soundtrack. That instinct to answer a story with sound stayed with her.

In professional composing, she explains, you adapt. You enter the world of directors and producers, and you work with the subtext and the underlying emotions that an audience may never consciously notice. She says she became fairly good at that skill. The craft is about listening beneath the surface of someone else's story, which is precisely the discipline she later turned on her own life.

"It was almost like I came back home to the essence, the truest... what music was for me at such a young age is what I eventually came back home to in creating Journey Rebirth."

Layla Minoui, Soulful Sound podcast (6:50)

Journey to Rebirth is different from the rest of her catalog, she says, because it is the first time in her working life that she has told her own story. The project is inspired by her cancer diagnosis and treatment, and the process was, in her description, completely transformative.

Can improvising at the piano help you feel what you can't name?

The emotional center of the conversation is Minoui's use of improvisation during illness. She describes moving through feelings she had struggled to express, including grief, anger and what she calls being in survival mode. What makes her account useful is the goal she set for herself. She did not sit down at the piano to solve her circumstances. Rather than trying to fix her situation, music gave her a space to feel what was actually there, and over time it changed her relationship to the experience.

She found that telling her own story through sound let her witness parts of herself that were asking to be seen, heard and felt. The work depended on meeting those parts with curiosity. That is a subtle shift from the usual approach to a hard feeling, which tends to be either suppression or analysis. Improvisation offers a third option: you let the feeling move through your hands, and you listen to what it does.

For readers who want to try something similar, the practical takeaway from her account is to set aside the question of whether the playing is good. The aim is contact with the feeling, not a finished piece. Minoui frames her instrument as the place where she could say what she could not yet put into words, and that framing does not require any particular skill level.

What does a difficult medical appointment reveal about choice?

One of the turning points Minoui describes came in a difficult medical appointment. She recognized that she still had a choice in how she met the unknown. Nobody can know exactly what is going to happen, and in that uncertainty she found a question she could answer for herself: how she would meet it. The shift was not about controlling the outcome. It was about recognizing the part of the experience that remained hers.

This connects to a theme she returns to throughout the episode, that success is not the achievement you are chasing. Minoui frames success in terms of slowing down, checking in and noticing what is alive in an experience. She is explicit that she does not want to remold herself into something that does not serve her.

"Success to me is slowing down, checking in and recognizing where is my aliveness, where... what is showing up for me in this experience. What can I learn from that? It's a completely new understanding of wholeness. Success to me is wholeness."

Layla Minoui, Soulful Sound podcast (opening segment, 0:00)

What can a child's play teach an achiever?

Minoui says that spending time with her young son reminded her of the wonder, curiosity, play and presence that can easily get buried under the pursuit of the next achievement. Her son became a teacher in the most ordinary sense: he showed her what attention looks like when it is not aimed at a goal. The host also picked up on the value of a child's curiosity, and the two framed it as something adults can recover rather than something they outgrow.

The distinction is worth stating plainly. Play is not a reward for finishing work. It is a state in which you are fully present to what is in front of you, and it is available during the hardest seasons, not only after they end.

What is the difference between knowing something and embodying it?

The episode also explores intuition and embodied wisdom, and the gap between understanding something intellectually and truly embodying it. Minoui places weight on the hunch, the quiet feeling that arrives before the reasoning does. When we override that signal in favor of tidy answers, we are not gaining clarity. We are losing contact with our own knowing.

Self-trust, in her account, is built by slowing down enough to notice these signals and then acting on them with some agency. That is the thread connecting her piano practice, her parenting and her health decisions. In each case the lesson was to pay attention to what the body and the feeling are already saying.

What is Journey to Rebirth asking listeners to do?

Journey to Rebirth carries a specific meaning of rebirth. In the episode, rebirth is framed as coming home to yourself, a return to your authentic self rather than a fresh start that erases what came before. The project also reflects a desire Minoui describes in her broader work: to create immersive musical spaces where people can slow down and reconnect with who they are.

That aim explains why her story matters beyond her own biography. A piece of music that asks you to listen closely, without a deadline, creates the same conditions that let her move through grief and anger at the piano. The music does not fix anything. It makes room.

Where to go from here

The most useful next step is to listen to the full Soulful Sound episode, where Minoui tells the story in her own voice and in greater detail than any summary can capture. Pay attention to how she moves between craft and feeling, and to how often she returns to curiosity as the stance that makes hard material bearable.

If you want to test one of her ideas, try a short improvisation at whatever instrument you have, including your voice. Set a timer for a few minutes, skip the goal of a good result, and notice one feeling that arrives. Name it only if words come easily. Otherwise let the sound do the naming. That is the practice at the heart of Minoui's work: letting music say what you have not yet found the words for, and then coming back to yourself.