A meeting during a Bloomington visit has turned into an international campaign to get a dead teenager's music heard. Ed Schwartzman, owner of BuffaLouie's, has spent 19 years trying to share the songs his son Ben recorded before his 2007 suicide, and now British social media stars Josh and Jase are asking their millions of followers to help finish the job.
Josh Cauldwell-Clarke and Jason Riley, the Nottingham-based creators known online as Josh and Jase, met Ed Schwartzman during a visit to Bloomington, according to WISH-TV. The pair built their massive following, now nearly 10 million combined, after a 2021 video of them tasting an American Twinkie went viral, and their videos feature travel, reactions to American culture and stories about communities, according to Wilcox Newspapers. The duo's stop in Indiana coincided with fans gathering for the Indiana University football game against Ohio State, per the same WISH-TV report.
Josh said he was moved by Ed Schwartzman's story of trying to keep his son's memory alive, and wrote in a post that a meaningful takeaway from the trip was a conversation with a father who simply wanted his son remembered, per WISH-TV's account. Ben Schwartzman began performing in coffee shops, playing in bands and writing original songs by age 16, but struggled with bipolar disorder and depression before he died by suicide in 2007 at age 19, according to Josh's post as relayed by WISH-TV.
From Cassette Tapes to a Streaming Campaign
Ben recorded 11 original songs before his death, and his father spent 14 years pitching that music to local artists and producers before finally getting it finished, according to WTHR. The breakthrough came when filmmaker John Armstrong and audio engineers at Bloomington's Airtime Studios digitized and cleaned up Ben's home cassette recordings, after which local musician Zach Riddle uploaded the finished tracks to Spotify and Apple Music in late 2021, the station reported. The resulting 12-track album, Falling Star: The Songs of Ben Schwartzman, pairs those 11 original recordings with one tribute song, Your Choice, written and performed by Ben's sister Hayley Schwartzman, according to JamBase.
Every dollar from streams and sales of the album goes directly to Centerstone, a major behavioral health provider delivering mental health care, crisis intervention and addiction treatment across Indiana and Tennessee, per Centerstone's own account of the project. Josh encouraged his followers to search for Ben Schwartzman on Spotify or Apple Music, listen to the songs and share them further, framing it as a chance to finally give Ben's music the audience his father always hoped it would find, according to WISH-TV.
A Family's Long Fight Against a Local Crisis
BuffaLouie's sits inside Bloomington's historic Gables building at 114 S. Indiana Ave., a 1914 structure once home to the Book Nook, where Hoosier composer Hoagy Carmichael drafted portions of his 1927 standard Stardust, according to the Indianapolis Business Journal. The Book Nook was a gathering spot for Indiana University students until the 1930s, the outlet noted, giving Ed Schwartzman's restaurant an unlikely tie to the city's musical past even as he works to secure his own son's legacy.
Touring musicians have taken notice too: in April 2025, New Jersey band Dogs In A Pile performed the first-ever live cover of Ben's song Big Man at HI-FI in Indianapolis with Ed Schwartzman in the crowd, JamBase reported.
A Broader Mental Health Concern
The effort lands against a backdrop of troubling statewide numbers. Indiana's 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey reported that 47% of high school students experienced depression in the previous year.
A Familiar Playbook for the Viral Duo
Josh and Jase have a track record of turning their travels into fundraising moments. During a January 2026 Midwest road trip, the pair raised more than $40,000 for Mel Trotter Ministries, a Grand Rapids homeless shelter, as Hoodline previously reported. That history suggests the Bloomington campaign fits a broader pattern for the creators, who have built their platform around spotlighting American communities and the people they meet along the way, including their stop in Indiana where they encountered Ed Schwartzman and his two decades of advocacy.
For now, the ask is simple: find Ben Schwartzman's music on Spotify or Apple Music, listen, and pass it along. Nineteen years after his death, his father's hope that his son's songs would finally reach an audience is riding on a push from two British creators who happened to pass through Bloomington.
