A musician’s journey into wellness
By Gussie Fauntleroy.
Fairly early in his musical life, Nicholas Penn abandoned the mainstream musician’s attitude of “Look what I can do!” and shifted instead to: “Look what you can do.” He tried the conventional approach for a few years, writing songs and playing in bars and clubs, mostly in the Lexington, Kentucky area where he’d graduated from Georgetown College. But he was miserable in the competitive world of self-promotion, and even the fanciest clubs involved an enormous imbalance between effort required and what he got paid.
So, in 2016, he decided to stop playing those gigs. Over time he transitioned into using music and sound to help others open to their own creative expression and facilitate their own healing. While that didn’t happen immediately, all along his intention has been to benefit others and the planet, an approach inspired by his parents whose religious beliefs motivated them to be of service.
Nicholas was born in 1990 in Mexico (and still holds dual citizenship) while his parents were living there as Baptist missionaries. When he was 18 months old the family moved to central Kentucky, bringing with them his brother, adopted in Mexico. Later they lived for 10 years in Durham, North Carolina, where Nicholas was active in sports of all kinds. His other passion was music. Both sides of the family contained Baptist ministers and missionaries, many of them also musicians, including his parents.
As a boy, Nicholas took piano lessons, sang in the church choir, and at 11 received his first guitar. Yet even before then, he was making up songs. “I was writing love songs in the fourth and fifth grades. I was a hopeless romantic. It was tragic,” he said, smiling. As a teen his taste in music shifted from praise and worship to folk/rock and pop. With it came the prevailing idea of musical success as ego-driven performance and money.
He quickly discovered not only that high dollar gigs are scarce but that many musicians pay a price in terms of mental health. In the larger view, the club owners’ business standards ran strongly counter to his values. As a sociology major in college, he had focused on social movement theory and other areas of ethics. He studied Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Dorothy Day. Then he emerged into economic reality. “I realized the world revolves around money,” he said. “It got me to thinking: To get people to change beliefs, you need to convince them to spend money on things based on better principles. That was the only way I could get into the business world.”
Following this philosophy, for more than six years Nicholas helped grow an organic cold-pressed juice company that eventually numbered six stores in Kentucky and Ohio. He managed daily operations for all locations and served as the primary chef and product developer. Embracing a startup, whatever-it-takes mentality, he and his co-workers put in 60 to 80 hours a week until, as he put it, they “followed our leader off a cliff” to total burnout.
For a time, Nicholas did online marketing and business development for an Irish company producing music software. Then he was hired by Sounds True, a Boulder-based company that disseminates spiritual wisdom through books, audio and video programs, and online courses. He and his partner Remy Olson had already fallen in love with Colorado after discovering Valley View Hot Springs on a cross-country road trip.
In early 2020 they moved to Boulder and soon after to Crestone, where Nicholas was also a partner in a local venture selling steel tongue drums. (He’s no longer involved with that company.) Working remotely for Sounds True for three years, he produced multiple videos and Spotify albums every week, along with other projects. Once again, he was working too many hours. When he found himself part of a major layoff in 2023, it was a relief.
All along, he was also writing and performing his own music, including flowing, finger-style guitar arrangements for yoga and meditation, both of which he practices. He toured a number of yoga studios playing live for classes and is currently editing a recorded version. While moving more into relaxing and meaningful music, he became aware of therapeutic sound. In 2022 he was certified in sound healing through the Globe Institute. “I’ve always been interested in wellness, and I wanted to overlap that with music,” he said.
Today Nicholas offers therapeutic sound through his company, 1:11 Sound Healing. Not to be confused with the cannabis retail shop One-Eleven, the name refers to the master number in harmonics and numerology. Among his areas of focus is what he calls the Hummin Being Bootcamp, a DIY approach to sound healing and stress relief using the voice. The practice, which he teaches, combines elements of humming, toning, and chanting. “We all have a built-in instrument, the voice, and this is the easiest way to use it,” he said. “It’s like having a vibrational massage tool on the vagus nerve to regulate the nervous system.”
Along with offering therapeutic sound workshops and individual sessions, Nicholas explains the technique and its benefits in a series of YouTube videos. “My approach is not to ‘give someone a fish’ but to ‘teach them to fish.’ I’m not a healing practitioner, I’m more on the educational side,” he said. He also offers individual lessons in songwriting, guitar, and tongue drums. “I try to make musical expression as easy and attainable and enjoyable as possible. Ultimately, I believe we’re all channels of creativity. I see it as a process of opening up to divine inspiration instead of wrangling our own creative genius.”
Nicholas’s personal musical expression continues to involve songwriting and performance, occasionally at live venues as a solo act with guitar, suitcase kick drum, and foot tambourine, but more often via Spotify and his YouTube channel. Living in Crestone/Baca has allowed him to disentangle from his previous self-identity as an artist. “Now I create because it’s who I am, rather than needing something from it,” he said. “I feel so lucky, it’s just been one steppingstone at a time and the right things come at the right time.”
Nicholas’ website: 111soundhealing.com/pages/meet-nicholas-penn-sound-therapist.