Into the Daylight: Music as a Path to Reflection and Healing

Some people find their way back to themselves through a book, a faith, a group, or a mentor. Some find it through a song.

In 2003, Joe Garcia shot and killed a man during an argument over a drug deal in Los Angeles. He was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to forty-three years to life. His parents both died while he was inside. He wasn't able to be with either of them. In April 2024, after more than twenty years in prison, the Board of Parole Hearings found him suitable for parole. He walked out that September.

For much of that time, the soundtrack in his cell was Taylor Swift.

The New Yorker's short film “Daylight” follows Joe through his release and his first steps home. It's an unlikely pairing, and that's part of why it's worth watching. Healing rarely arrives in the form we expect. As Joe put it, “When I listened to her music, I felt that I was still part of the world I had left behind.”

“Daylight,” directed by Jon Kasbe. The New Yorker. About 18 minutes.

Music asks us to look inward

Every parole hearing comes down to three questions. Joe heard them from Heidi Rummel, a parole attorney and reform advocate at the University of Southern California who later represented him at his hearing: What did I do? Why did I do it? And how have I changed?

Those questions can't be answered by memorizing the right words. Joe saw men in the prison yard quizzing each other on “causative factors” and “coping skills,” and he wrote that he didn't like the idea of rehearsing what they thought the Board wanted to hear. He realized that any path to freedom would need “a real sense of self-actualization.”

That kind of understanding comes from reflection: slowing down long enough to notice what we feel, and why. Music is one of the oldest tools people have for doing exactly that. A lyric can name a feeling we didn't have words for. Sometimes we hear our own story in someone else's voice, and for the first time we can see it from the outside.

Joe found it in “Anti-Hero.” Hearing Swift sing that she'll stare at the sun “but never in the mirror,” he thought of the small plastic mirrors sold in prison. He saw that for years he had cast himself as “the antihero in my own warped self-narrative,” and he asked, “Do I want to see myself clearly?” He wrote, “I'm guilty of more than murder. I abandoned my parents and my sweetheart, too.” In “Karma,” he heard the Board's questions before he ever faced them: What have I learned? What do I have to show for my twenty years?

Hearing “that's me” in a song can be the first honest step toward saying “that was me” in a hearing room.

Music heals

Joe's darkest stretch came near the end. After years with a clean record, he received a disciplinary write-up and was placed in administrative segregation, the Hole, for six months. He felt “new depths of shame and self-loathing.”

He had no pen, only the thin ink tube from inside one. He had no music player, only a hand-crank radio. Night after night, he listened through the static and kept writing. One song he returned to was “Daylight,” which ends with Swift speaking: “I want to be defined by the things that I love.”

Music reaches places that talking sometimes can't. It can steady a person in isolation, hold grief that has nowhere else to go, and remind someone that there is more to them than the worst thing they've done.

Music transforms

Change is not a single event. It's thousands of small decisions made differently, day after day. Joe's write-up didn't erase his growth. It showed him where his growth still needed to happen. At his hearing, he told the commissioners he could have handled it “with more tact and less bluster.”

The Board pressed him hard. They questioned how he described his crime and asked whether he was engaged in “impression management.” That's a reminder that insight is never finished, and that the Board is listening for honesty, not polish. In his closing statement, Joe said: “I'm asking for the chance I never gave Earl — the chance to walk free out into the daylight.”

That sentence holds what rehabilitation asks of a person: accountability for the life that was taken, alongside hope for the life still ahead.

Music builds bridges

Through all those years, music connected Joe to the woman he loved before his crime. Her name is Ambere. When he heard Swift on the radio, he thought of her. When they reconnected by phone, they talked and teased each other about his taste in music. In his final months inside, she listened to every Swift album, trying to hear what he heard.

She was waiting across the road the morning he was released.

For families, this is something you can do right now. Ask your loved one what they've been listening to, and why. Share a song that has meant something to you. These small exchanges build the honest connection that matters so much when someone comes home.

Music creates community

Joe described the Eras Tour, his first concert after prison, as sixty-nine thousand people who “felt like my people.” During one song, the crowd sang together until “we became an instrument of our own.”

It started long before that, on prison yards where every table belonged to a different group. Joe confessed to the men he worked out with that he was waiting for a Taylor Swift album. They laughed, and then two of them turned out to be Swifties too. Neighbors yelled at him to turn it down, and then yelled requests. “That girl's got jams,” one admitted.

Inside prison, choirs, drum circles, worship teams, songwriting groups, and band programs offer something similar: a place to belong that isn't built on fear or status. Making music together takes listening, patience, cooperation, and showing up for others. Those are the same skills that make reentry work. After release, a church choir, an open mic, or a recovery meeting that ends in song can become part of a healthy support system.

Bringing it into your own reflection

If you or your loved one want to use music as part of growth work, here are a few gentle prompts:

• What song describes who you were at the time of your life offense? What draws you to it now?
• What song describes who you are becoming?
• Is there a song you can no longer listen to? What does that tell you?
• What song would you share with someone you love, or someone you've harmed, and why?

There are no right answers. The point isn't the song. It's what the song helps you notice.

This article provides general educational information and is not legal or mental-health advice. Every parole case is different, and past results do not guarantee a particular outcome.