This book sits at the intersection of music, disability, recovery culture, and visibility politics. It asks who gets to be seen, who gets to be famous, why we demand perfection from public figures, and what responsibility comes with a platform - especially when the body or voice on that platform refuses to conform to what is considered “normal.”

John straddled several disparate worlds: the West Coast jazz scene of the ’70s and ’80s, where he was known as a passionate, spiritual, and technically gifted pianist; the glossy weirdness of 1990s Eurodance, where he became an unlikely global star; and the international stuttering community, which continues to fight for visibility and accurate representation.

Threaded through all these worlds is the tension between control and surrender - between what audiences want to hear and what a person needs to say. Jazz improvisation and twelve-step recovery philosophy overlap in that both require relinquishing control. Both demand presence, vulnerability, and trust in uncertainty.

So does the concept of disability pride, particularly in the case of stuttering. There has long been pressure on people who stutter to sound more fluent - to “fix” or “correct” their speech to be socially acceptable. But why? All it takes is a bit more time on the part of the listener. Some people who stutter pursue smoother speech for personal reasons (for example, to reduce physical tension), but that choice should be self-directed - not a prerequisite for dignity or belonging, or because society says you’re inferior if you stutter. John understood this instinctively.

Dance and techno music are rarely associated with depth, but John’s lyrics carried a clear manifesto: fluency and perfection are not the same as worth. If I can do it, he sang, so can you. He knew exactly who his audience was: outsiders, the bullied, the different. Kids like me. When he won a major award in Germany and stuttered through his acceptance speech, he didn’t apologize or hide. He stood there and spoke anyway. Hearing John talk about stuttering, while stuttering, made me - and millions of others - feel seen for the first time.

My path to writing this book goes even deeper, because I was a stuttering teenager on the brink of suicide when his music - and later his words and friendship - gave me a way through. Years later, writing this book required me to do the thing I feared most: speak. Conduct hundreds of interviews. Stop hiding behind text. In that sense, John helped me again, across decades. He believed that only a stutterer could truly tell the story of a stutterer. To write this book, I had to live that belief and do his story justice. 

Ongoing thread. More from Gina Waggott to follow.