Communication through music.
Jon grew up in a music-filled, Jesus-glorifying home — music loved for its own sake, and as a way to express love to God. Decades later, with AI-assisted production finally catching up to the melodies in his head, he's using music as a language to say something.
The Story
Before any instruments of his own, there was the Davis Family Sextet. Mom and Dad sang together at church and in the choir, and as the kids arrived they got lined up in front of the fireplace to learn the parts. The whole family sang at church regularly — one of the standards was In My Heart There Rings a Melody, an old hymn, the kind tucked into the back pages of a worn hymnal.
Music and media ran beyond the household, too. Jon's maternal grandfather founded the first Christian AM radio station in Idaho; his mom's family, the Shaws, ran it through the 1960s and 1970s. His dad did some management at that station, radio work in a few other places, and for a stretch ran a newspaper in Caldwell. His oldest sister went on to sing professionally and did radio announcing in her younger years. His second-oldest sister became a full-time radio DJ and is now a regular public speaker. The blend of music and media was in the blood.
He picked up piano basics at age 6. Added acoustic guitar in 7th grade, tuba in 8th, and started leading worship for the church youth group in 9th. Somewhere in there he dreamed of becoming a studio musician and producer, with stage performance a distant second. His model was Michael W. Smith: Jon grew up on Smith's first four albums, wore out The Big Picture and Michael W. Smith 2, and followed him all the way through Change Your World. Smith was an absolute genius musically, and Jon wanted to be like him.
Then Smith stepped away from music for a season and pastored for a couple of years — what he'd later publicly describe as God dealing with him on idolatry, about "trying to be a rock star." Jon happened to be going through his own weird transformative stretch at the same time, and abandoned the rock-star dream right alongside him. Steven Curtis Chapman was the other big one — Chapman shaped how Jon played and sang with an acoustic guitar, and still does.
Through high school he craved CCM CDs and always studied the production notes on the inside of the jacket. He tracked who produced what, who played on what, who kept showing up on his favorite records — and one name kept surfacing: Brown Bannister. Jon never had a studio of his own, and the producer dream stayed a dream — but Bannister's productions fed that dream endlessly. The handiwork, the versatility, the genius across records that didn't sound alike. Not the face on stage, but the person in the control room shaping the sound.
After high school, a faulted attempt at general ministry sent him sideways. He pivoted to computers and software — which became his career — and music became a lifelong hobby. He's kept producing casually ever since (26 Hundred Hertz), and sometimes still picks up the guitar to sing (Jonathan Michael). But the gap between what he could hear in his head and what he could physically produce stayed wide. Until now.
The AI Era
Generative music tools — Suno, Udio, and the wave behind them — closed that gap. He's no longer gated by studio time, session players, or the ceiling of his own instrumental chops. What he's gated by is the thing he actually cares about: having something worth saying, and finding the right musical language to say it in.
That's what the current projects are about.
Psalms Remixed (YouTube) is intense study of a psalm, projecting the original author's emotion and communicative intent through modern musical language. Anger and demand for justice becomes some variation of alternative rock. Heavy lamenting regret for sin and consequence becomes blues. The verbiage is restructured into verse/chorus/verse/chorus so modern ears can ingest it — and so the key messages stick.
Michael Or — Renewal Patterns (YouTube) is Jon's pseudonym for IDM, EDM, dubstep, and any variations in that family — basically a dumping ground for electronic experiments. Within that channel, the Renewal Patterns album is where the communicative intent lives: key phrases of New Testament doctrine repeated in IDM format — "Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness" as the entire chorus of one song, for instance. The music keeps playing in the background of your day, and the phrase keeps replaying in your head when you're not actively listening. Meditation by design.
Jon Davis and His Two Talents (YouTube) is the catch-all — thoughtful worship songs, testimony songs, motivational songs, and more scripture meditation that didn't fit the other channels.
Jon burned a physical DVD of this collection for a local prison that has no internet access. The page linked below is a working web simulation of that DVD menu — same three sections, same organization, playable in a browser.
Open the DVD simulation →