Nathaniel Hoff and Jillian Speece, a husband-and-wife singing duo, left their Brooklyn, New York apartment on Jan. 2, 2016, to embark on a Unity Collective Tour. They drove their Volvo station wagon across the country, stopping along the way to perform and inviting fans and onlookers to write a message of unity on the outside of their vehicle as they filmed and documented their 264-day tour.

“The State of Unity” began when Hoff scrawled “Ever Upward” — the first message of unity — on his car, the English translation of “Excelsior,” the official Latin motto of New York state.

“We just have to continue to strive for a better democracy, a better republic, and that [idea] was the beginning of this journey — that no matter how bad things got, we could just keep moving forward,” Hoff said.

Speece then wrote a second phrase on the car: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

As she and her husband led the tour from city to city and state to state, they encouraged people to write their own statements of unity on the station wagon.

“All the different people who were signing [the car] felt that they were a part of this art piece that’s moving peacefully all over America,” Speece said.

Hoff explained that the journey of understanding people, not as he wants them to be but as they are, was one of the most difficult journeys of his life. Speece agreed, adding that the road they traveled was lined with vandalism, the theft of $10,000 of their gear, homelessness and financial woes, but that they continued to charge ahead in spite of the challenges.

Hoff said that their own adventures were not necessarily the film’s focus, but they did provide a linking narrative underlying the film’s effort to define unity.

“As an artist, we have a great responsibility to use our art as a platform to bring people together and to make people’s lives a little bit better,” Hoff said. “Music was always something in my life that helped me feel a lot better. I’d feel very inspired and encouraged to go out into the world and do something for someone else.”

In the film, David Anderson Hooker, an associate professor of conflict transformation and peacebuilding at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, said “Unity is not a shared narrative of a future but building a narrative of a shared future.”

“[What Hooker said was] poetic, to the point and also focused, but also very transferable,” Hoff said. “I think people can walk away from a film and see that in action, and then hear that quote, and really feel like they can walk away with something that they understand better. That was really important for us, to be able to give people something when they leave the film, that they feel like they’ve actually learned something as opposed to — it’s not entertaining.”

“It was a mic drop moment when David spoke those words,” Speece said. “It’s OK to disagree and be peaceful in a non-violent way,” Speece continued. “That’s where we need to really be focusing our energy on, because there’s actually a lot of beautiful things from both sides of the line that both groups are trying to create.”

The Bergamot

Speece and Hoff grew up in Indiana. Speece said that her family listened to vinyls of Motown, James Taylor, Carole King, the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac, while Hoff’s family listened to Pink Floyd, the Dave Matthews Band and Phish. They both attended Marion High School, which was where they met. Speece was 15, and Hoff was 17. With the encouragement of their high school teacher, they began writing songs for a statewide competition.

“We loved writing together and had chemistry,” Speece said. “We laughed when we were together. We love talking to each other and so we ended up writing this song, and out of thousands of entries, we made it into the top 10 in the state of Indiana on our first song ever. “We’ve been writing music since 2003. So this is our twentieth year of writing music together, singing together and blending our voices, becoming kind of one entity with The Bergamot. We are very unity focused, so everything’s about harmonies, layers, lush depth and dimension in the songs and playfulness, and there are a lot of themes within the music.”

The name of their band, The Bergamot, was inspired by an essential oil used to induce happiness and relieve stress.

“We noticed how cool the word bergamot was and thought that it would make a rad band name, and the name stuck,” Speece exclaimed.

The duo describes their music as indie pop rock with folk elements, or as alternative, yet all of their songs have stories woven into them.

In Sedona

In 2022, after seven years of work, Speece and Hoff finished their film, “The State of Unity.” Although they consider themselves to be storytellers rather than filmmakers, they entered the documentary in the 2022 Sedona International Film Festival, where it won the Marion Herrman Excellence in Filmmaking Award. They have since entered 36 international festivals, winning 20 awards. Speece and Hoff will be returning to Sedona from Sept. 1 to 3 to showcase the film at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre, with a Q&A session to follow.

The duo concluded their tour in October 2016. Their Volvo station wagon, bearing thousands of signatures that turned it into a visible representation of unity, was auctioned off on eBay and Speece and Hoff donated the proceeds to the music therapy department of Memorial Children’s Hospital in Indiana.

“Music is the great unifier and that is why I wanted to use music as a means to bring people together in a year when the country was starting to divide more vigorously than I’d ever seen before,” Hoff said. “In our culture, we’re bred to believe that we can’t make a change, that we can’t have a social impact. We wanted to resist that idea. We wanted to stand up and say even with the meager resources that we had living paycheck to paycheck, we wanted to stand up and say that we can participate in the future of this country.”