Life & Mortality Quote by Jon Crosby

Jon Crosby captures the odd dislocation an artist feels when a private creation is swept into the spectacle of cinema. He wrote a song with one set of emotions in mind, then watched Leonardo DiCaprio, in a life-or-death frenzy, shouting "I'm not going to die today!" as that song thundered beneath the scene. The result is a collision of intentions: the quiet, interior impulse that gave birth to the music meets the amplified, high-stakes narrative of a blockbuster moment. It makes sense that it felt surreal.

The remark also acknowledges the double-edged nature of recontextualization. Film and television frequently repurpose songs to conjure intensity, irony, or catharsis, and their reach can permanently tint how listeners hear the track. A piece that may have been about longing or transcendence becomes, overnight, synonymous with survival and adrenaline. That shift is both unsettling and valuable. Crosby calls it a good thing, suggesting an appreciation for how a new context can expand a song’s life, introduce it to new audiences, and reveal facets the creator did not anticipate.

There is a quiet humility in admitting that the last thing on his mind during writing is what most people now picture when they hear it. Once art is released, meaning is no longer singular or controlled by the artist; it becomes a negotiation among creators, curators, and audiences. Sync licensing makes that negotiation vivid, binding audio to image in ways that can eclipse origin stories. Yet the dissonance here is part of the thrill. The song’s mood clearly resonated strongly enough to anchor a scene about refusing death, even if its original seed was elsewhere. That gap between intention and reception is not a failure. It is proof that music is elastic, capable of carrying multiple truths, and that cultural memory often writes the loudest verse.