One year after losing his home of more than 20 years in the Palisades fires, Breitbart’s Jon Kahn is turning devastation into a new song and video: “After It Burns.”
It’s intimate. Hard-edged. A reflection on loss, anger, and the resolve that shows up when everything familiar is reduced to ash. The song is raw and honest — but it’s not nihilistic. There’s beauty in it. And more importantly, there’s hope.
The video opens with real Ring doorbell footage: Kahn’s white picket fence engulfed in flames, the kind of scene that doesn’t feel real until it’s playing back on a screen. He watched it with his father from only miles away. “I looked at my Dad and said, ‘it’s gone,’ and he just nodded. There wasn’t much to say,” Kahn recalled.
From there, it tightens into a close, character-driven portrait of Kahn performing the song — personal without turning theatrical. Aside from the Ring footage, the video avoids catastrophe porn, even as it gestures at the scale of what happened in the Palisades and Altadena on January 7, 2025, when thousands of homes were destroyed and lives were lost.
Kahn didn’t write a song for months after the fires. He simply, as he put it, “walked by all his instruments, looked at them, and then kept walking,” but eventually he sat down at an out-of-tune piano, and “After it Burns” poured out.
And we’re so happy it did.
Watch the video for Jon Kahn’s “After It Burns” above.
[h/t Breitbart News]
