Who is Tyler Seaman
"It's not a hobby"
Music can do more for us than even the biggest fans might expect. It can make good moments great and great times unforgettable, but when the stakes are higher, it can also heal us and help us endure. Tyler Seaman was eight years old when he attended his first concert, and even when he was little his friends knew he was a music fanatic. His passion and interests expanded as he grew up.
During his freshman year of high school Tyler was diagnosed with a clival chordoma, a rare type of spinal cancer. Over the next three years he endured dozens of surgical procedures, radiation treatment, physical therapy, and chemotherapy. Those crises didn’t make music any less important to him. Almost every spare moment was filled with music that was shared with friends and family. Often his choice of songs spoke for him and said things he couldn’t have expressed any other way.
When Tyler began plucking the strings of his red Epiphone bass in 2006, there were constant three guitar jams in his home. He received the gift of a drum set in 2008, and truly found his instrument and another way to express himself. When The Make-A-Wish Foundation offered Tyler a chance to do whatever he wanted most in 2009, he chose to stay in New York and see ten Allman Brothers concerts at the Beacon Theater with friends and family. None of us have ever forgotten the amazing music and the love we experienced over those weeks. At the end of his life he made a collage of pictures and concert tickets and summed up his feelings about music in these bright words: “It’s not a hobby.”
Tyler died in October 2010, surrounded by his family. We miss him every day because he was one of a kind, but we also know there are a lot of young people in situations like his. That’s why his family created Music Never Stops: the Tyler Seaman Foundation. The foundation will fund music therapy programs, a music room, and projects that use the healing power of music to help young people in need. With your help, Music Never Stops will pay for therapists, instruments, recording equipment and software, albums, music streaming accounts, concert tickets and playing space. It will be a big hand to people in need. We think Tyler would approve, and we hope you will, too.