When “Soundcheck: Mental Health in the Canadian Music Industry” – the first national study of its kind – revealed this month that 94% of music professionals consider mental health issues “prevalent” in their industry, and that 53% have felt that life was not worth living, Jon Mullane was not surprised. He has lived on both sides of that data for most of his adult life.
He arrives at this moment with considerable momentum behind him. His recently released EP The Road – co-written in Nashville with Grammy-nominated hitmakers Michael Dulaney and Michael Jay – has already produced a number-one single on the Yangaroo/DMDS chart with “Moon on Fire,” while “Remember in November” won Best of Canada Music Video at the 2026 California Music Video Awards. Across five albums, multiple Top 40 Billboard singles, placements with NBC’s Olympic Games coverage, and stages from the House of Blues in Hollywood to the Molson Canadian Centre, Mullane has built the kind of career that lends weight to everything he says about what it costs to sustain one.
Mullane is available to media as a credible and compelling expert voice on the study’s findings. He brings to the conversation something rare: the lived experience of a working Canadian artist, the academic grounding of a university degree in psychology, and a decade of active partnership with mental health organisations including the Canadian Mental Health Association and The Campaign to Change Direction in the US. He is not an observer of this crisis – he is someone who has navigated it, written about it, and has been a strong advocate around bringing it into the open.
That work began in earnest with his single “Born Beautiful,” whose uplifting music video (which has an anti-suicide, self-empowering theme) earned four awards across the US in 2016–17, including wins at the Hollywood Music in Media Awards and the Music California Video Awards, while receiving commercial radio airplay and generating international attention. The song was not simply a hit – it was the foundation of partnerships with mental health organisations that Mullane has maintained and deepened ever since. For him, the Soundcheck findings are not statistics. They are the backdrop against which he has been making music for years.
His own story gives that perspective its texture. Mullane lost both parents while still very young, overcame a potentially career-ending case of tinnitus, earned a psychology degree, and briefly considered law school before being drawn back to music by those who recognised what he was capable of. That combination of personal loss, academic training, and hard-won professional resilience gives him a vantage point on the Soundcheck study that few in the industry can match – as both subject and analyst.
The Soundcheck study calls for systemic change – for labels, agents, and industry bodies to take seriously what the numbers are now impossible to ignore. Jon Mullane is the kind of artist who can help translate those numbers into a conversation that reaches beyond the industry and into the public.