For podcast hosts and producers
What kind of conversation do you want to have?
One guest, many doors.
Colin O'Donohoe. Composer for network television. Legally blind since 25. Son of a Purple Heart Vietnam veteran buried at Arlington. Thirty years on five continents. Pick a door below, or tell me who listens to your show and we'll build one.
Audio-Technica AT4050 · Pro lighting · Treated room · Hardwired ethernet · Local backup track every time
Sits right here, above everything else. Shot on the AT4050 with the mic in frame. Opens on: "You don't need another guest with a book to promote. You need an episode your audience is glad they heard." Then the six doors, fast. Ends on: "You know your listeners better than I do. Tell me who they are."
Hear him talk
Ninety seconds is all you need to decide.
One funny. One that lands emotionally. One that's just interesting. Label them by what they are, not when they happened. Show names and logos underneath, no dates.
Six doors
Open one. Take the questions. They're yours.
01 Third Hand Smoke The war ended in 1975. In some families, survival mode didn't.
Vietnam → PTSD → the family → addiction → fatherhood → breaking the pattern
Questions you can steal
- What is third hand smoke?
- What did you understand about your father only after he died?
- When does resilience turn into a liability?
- Can a child inherit a war they never saw?
- What does it mean to stop surviving?
At an airport, my daughter said going home felt like a North Korean soldier going back. I tried to comfort her and handed her the war instead. It took a therapist a month later to tell me what I'd done.
02 Composing Without Seeing I write music for television. I can't see the screen.
Vision loss at 25 → network television → conducting → how the work actually gets done
Questions you can steal
- How do you write music you can't read?
- How do you conduct? What are your hands and ears actually doing?
- What can you hear now that you couldn't hear when you could see?
- What was the first thing that stopped working?
- What do people get wrong when they're trying to help?
The first professional session where I couldn't fake being sighted any more. What I did in the next ten seconds decided the next twenty years.
03 The First Instrument Did Neanderthals make music? A bone in a Slovenian cave has had scholars fighting for thirty years.
Archaeology → a thirty year argument → a new composition built from the evidence
Questions you can steal
- What is the Divje Babe bone, and why can't anyone agree?
- Make the case it's a flute. Now argue the other side.
- What was it like standing inside that cave?
- Your piece takes its rhythm from the measurements of the holes. Explain that.
- Does it matter to you whether a Neanderthal made it?
I don't need it to have been a flute. My first drums were stones. Either way, we found a way to make this bone sing.
04 I Didn't Find Home. I Built One. What happens when survival is over and nobody taught you how to live?
Addiction → divorce → a city where I knew nobody → building a life on purpose
Questions you can steal
- Why Cleveland, when you knew almost no one there?
- What does building a home consist of, day to day?
- When did "I only work well in chaos" stop being true?
- What does calm feel like to a nervous system never trained for it?
- What would you tell someone three months into starting over?
The night I noticed that stability felt unfamiliar, and realized I'd been calling that feeling boredom for twenty years.
05 The World Became My Music School You can't learn someone's music without learning how they see the world.
Senegal → Brazil → Turkey → Togo → an orchestra with no shared language
Questions you can steal
- What's it like inside the drum line at Rio's Sambadrome?
- What did you get wrong when you first arrived in Senegal?
- How do you keep a culture from becoming decoration in someone else's arrangement?
- What did you do when two traditions couldn't physically play in tune with each other?
- What would you tell a manager whose team has stopped hearing each other?
Two in the morning in Lomé, Togo. No phone, no wallet, no keys. A waitress I'd never met emptied her wallet into my hand.
06 My Dad's Survival Manual Years later, therapy sounded strangely familiar. My father had taught me the same principles in a completely different language.
Combat veteran → social worker → a 123 page war memoir → skills in words a veteran will accept
Questions you can steal
- Why do the words we use for emotional skills stop most men cold?
- What does an after action review have to do with therapy?
- What did you find in your father's memoir?
- Give us one tool, in the language you'd use with a veteran.
- Where is the mental health world losing the people who need it most?
Emotions aren't commanders. They're scouts. Anger reports that a line got crossed. Scouts report. You decide.
Colin speaks about these skills from lived experience. He is not a clinician and does not present himself as one.
Don't see your episode?
Tell me who listens to your show and what you want them thinking about when it ends. I'll build the conversation for them. You don't have to fit your show into my book campaign.
Why he's worth an hour
- Music on The Dr. Oz Show
- BBC Sport · Access Hollywood · Chrisley Knows Best
- Credited composer, Discovery and Animal Planet
- 10M+ documented streams
- Master's, Carnegie Mellon
- Founder and conductor, Pangean Orchestra
- Work across five continents
- Author, Third Hand Smoke
- Ohio Arts Council grantee
Want live music on the episode?
For the right conversation Colin can bring an instrument into the room, from frame drum or flute to a playable reconstruction inspired by the Divje Babe find. Ask when you book.
The remote studio
Media kit
Everything you need five minutes before we record.
Suggested introduction, 40 seconds
My guest today is Colin O'Donohoe. He writes music for television, and he's done all of it since going legally blind at twenty five. His work has been on The Dr. Oz Show, Discovery, BBC Sport and Access Hollywood, and his recordings have passed ten million streams. He's performed on five continents, and he founded an orchestra of musicians who didn't share a language. His father was a Purple Heart Vietnam veteran who came home, became a social worker, and spent his career counseling other veterans. He's buried at Arlington. Colin's book, Third Hand Smoke, comes out on Veterans Day. Colin, welcome.
Bio, 25 words
Colin O'Donohoe is a Cleveland composer, author and speaker. Legally blind since twenty five, son of a Vietnam combat veteran, and author of Third Hand Smoke.
Bio, 60 words
Colin O'Donohoe has written music for network television since losing his central vision at twenty five, with credits including The Dr. Oz Show, Discovery and BBC Sport. He has performed on five continents and founded an orchestra of musicians who shared no common language. His book Third Hand Smoke, out on Veterans Day, is about what a war leaves behind in a family.
Bio, 140 words
Colin O'Donohoe is a composer, author and speaker based in Cleveland. He lost his central vision at twenty five, partway through a music degree, and went on to write music for The Dr. Oz Show, Discovery, Animal Planet, BBC Sport and Access Hollywood. His recordings have passed ten million documented streams. He founded and conducts the Pangean Orchestra, and has performed and studied across five continents. His father was a Purple Heart Vietnam combat veteran who came home, earned a master's in social work, and spent his career counseling other veterans. He is buried at Arlington. When Colin finally read his father's 123 page handwritten war memoir, he found a man using the same survival principles Colin would meet again decades later in his own recovery. His book Third Hand Smoke publishes on Veterans Day.
Name and pronunciation
Colin O'Donohoe. Say it oh-DON-uh-hoo. Capital O, apostrophe, capital D, no space.
Headshots, book cover, specs
Horizontal and vertical headshots, the book cover, and the studio spec sheet. Ask and they're in your inbox the same day.
So. Which door?
Name a number and pick a date, or tell me about your listeners and I'll build something that only fits your show.
Cleveland, Ohio · Eastern time · Remote worldwide, in person around Cleveland and New York · Third Hand Smoke publishes 11 November 2026