Many people know Shawn Patterson as the Academy Award–nominated songwriter who wrote the smash hit "Everything Is Awesome" from The LEGO Movie. Few know the unlikely story behind the song—or the long road that led to it.

As a guitarist, composer, and songwriter, Patterson built a career from the ground up, leading bands in Massachusetts clubs, working odd jobs, and taking production assistant work before eventually building a career in film and television as a dialogue editor, music editor, music producer, composer, and songwriter, earning Academy Award, Emmy, Grammy, and Critics Choice Award nominations along the way.

The decades that followed taught him that songs, films, and television shows may be born from creativity, but their fate is often shaped by leverage, timing, perception, and competing interests. Despite all the triumphs, setbacks, surprises, and absurdities along the way, nothing proved more challenging than protecting his children while trying to hold together the life he was building around them.

Funny, candid, heartbreaking and frequently absurd, Everything Is Awesome: My Life in Music is a behind-the-scenes look at an ever-changing entertainment industry, a tribute to the dreamers stubborn enough to pursue impossible goals, and a story for musicians, songwriters, animation fans, movie lovers, and single parents alike.

And for everyone who has ever stepped on a LEGO in the middle of the night—or seriously considered jamming corks into their ears to escape a certain song about awesomeness—Patterson finally reveals how any of this could possibly have happened.