Music Saved My Life

I sat on the couch – five and a half months pregnant. My husband pointed at my belly and said, “I can’t do this. You are the strongest woman I know. You’ll be fine.”  He walked out forever.  And I spiraled swiftly and deeply into a depression that seemed to have no bottom. I stopped singing. I stopped eating until my unborn child reminded me that I was supposed to be eating for two. I ate. But I didn’t sing. I canceled all my musical gigs. I had no will to sing. I took a day job and when others took smoke breaks, I slipped away for cry breaks. I wept. I rocked my newborn to sleep with no lullabies. Magic and music both seemed to require more from me than I was able to offer. Jesse was six months old and there was no altar, no song.

I have sung my entire life, and my magic has been wrapped up in it, even when I could not articulate that concept. My voice, music, and songwriting are the weft and warp of my own soul. For the first time in my life, I could not sing. Somehow, I knew that I would never heal until I found my voice again. I understood that my child would need my song, as well, as he grew. I had to find a way forward. 

I made up a flier to post at local music stores. This was pre-social media, so, you know, the flier reads “Experienced Female Vocalist” with phone numbers on tear off tabs at the bottom. I drove around with 20 copies of that flier in my back seat for 2 weeks.  Swore I was going to post them all around town. But I didn’t. I could not summon the energy. Still, I did not sing. But I did pray a very tiny, unsung prayer to the Goddess for healing.

“Gina, there’s some guy on the phone for you,” my Dad handed me the phone. 

“Hello?  This is Gina.”

RT introduced himself as a local bandleader.  They were looking for a vocalist.

I really tried to down sell myself.  “I just had a baby and I’ve gained a lot of weight.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’m 32 and I’m not pretty like a lot of young singers.”

“I don’t care. Look,” RT asked, “Can you sing?”

“Well, yeah.”  It was at this moment I realized I had never put up any fliers. “Um, how did you get my info?”

He found a flier I had posted years ago and kept it in his Rolodex. Each time he needed a singer, he called and my folks told him I was on the road working. He figured a working vocalist was a good vocalist and kept my number all those years. (Thank you, Goddess.) We arranged an audition, and the first time that I opened my mouth to sing in a year was in his living room with the band. “Desperado” seemed such a perfect song for where I was in my life. 

I sang with that cover band three nights a week for three years. At first I sang because it was a job. In time, I allowed each note from within and without to vibrate through every physical cell and deep in my soul. I began to sing to my son. It was another 18 months before I would have my last cry break. Without that band, without singing regularly, I might have lost my voice forever. I came so close to losing my will to live. Singing, for me, was not a quick fix, but it was the best way forward toward healing.

Whether we create or listen, many of us have that moment, perhaps even a specific song that helps us heal, to grow well into whom we are becoming.  Here are a few stories of how music helped my friends heal.

Healing as a Musician/Artist

Morganthe Wylde is an accomplished musician, and I am grateful that they shared a bit of their early story with me. 

“Music saved my life when I was in 6th grade. I was heavily bullied and decided to play violin that year. I hid from the bullies in the practice rooms and played every morning before classes started and in the afternoons while waiting for the bus to go home. I even used practicing as a way to escape my mom who at the time wasn’t the nicest person either. It became my way of dealing with the world. World sucks? Play violin and focus on just the music. Bullies? Play violin and hide where they can’t go. It also made me feel good because i was genuinely good at it and knew it. To this day, music is the reason I’m here. It gives me purpose and makes me feel like I’m worth something.”

Morganthe’s most recent CD release Time and Relative Dimensions in Sound is an extension of their story, and an expression of who they are becoming. 

You can hear it here: https://morganthe.hearnow.com

SKYDANC3R, electronic musician and producer, shared this.

“Music saved my life … probably multiple times as a teenager … being able to play out my emotions, and also the joy of clubbing with my friends and losing myself in trance music … but the main time was 2014 … I was suicidal, and basically gave myself carte blanche to do whatever tf I want in life, so I decided to focus on music and see where it went … a week in LA became 3 months, became music school, became SKYDANC3R as I became a music producer, DJ, vocalist and artist. Life. Saved.”

Feel the dark tension and the journey toward resurfacing in SKYDANC3R’s Swimming in Stars. 

As artists, the process of creating music is inherent to our personal decomposition (pun intended) and  potential healing.  It is between the last note and the next where we listen to all the possibilities and choose who we are becoming.

Pagan Song’s own fearless leader/editor, and songwriter/musician Alane Brown found her

“power as a woman of spirit back in the early 90s through cassettes by Diana Earthmission, Lisa Thiel, Pomegranate Rose, and many others. I loved learning that I am a Goddess. Music is how I think, and those goddess spirit songs taught me to think about myself differently.”

With two spectacularly curated music radio shows on KZUM (www.kzum.org), Philipp Kessler understands the powerful healing nature of music, and shares with his listeners on both Murphy’s Magic Mess (facebook.com/themess89.3) and Lavender Hill (facebook.com/lavenderhill89.3).

“My intro to Pagan music really made me feel as if I had come home. I was 15. Leigh Ann Hussey’s Homebrew tape … and Denean. I had Homebrew on cassette and wore it out. It was a dub of a dub of dub. When I finally got everything on, they were on repeat in my multi disc player for months at a time. I still listen to much of that today.”

Healing Through Listening

“The night you and I sat up and you were writing ‘Blood Moon’ and you sang it for me. It was amazing and it really changed my perspective on things that were happening in my life at the time.”  FB

“All that time of” my husband “slowly dying. I was overweight, overwhelmed and … overtired. And I had one horrible night. I was just scrolling through YouTube videos and I found ‘Sekhmet Speaks’ from Shining Wheel Pagan Chorus on their ‘Chants of Balance’ CD.  It literally saved my life.”  SP

“I had recently had a falling out with my mother who was verbally and emotionally abusive towards me all through my childhood and long into my adult years. I was feeling very, very low because she had severed all ties with me, and my heart felt shattered. I was … listening to a playlist … and your song “Worthy” came on. All of a sudden, I realized that everything would be okay. I didn’t need the negativity. I didn’t need the constant reminders of the absence of compassion. I am loved by others. And I am worthy of their love … And after I heard that specific song for the first time, I realized that THAT is what a life saving song is like.” JJ

“ … when my world was ripped apart by someone I called family, I discovered SJ Tucker’s ‘Neptune’. While I held things together and rebuilt and was strong all day for my little family, at night I would put it on endless repeat ‘there’s no light where you are … to the mountains I will fly … free from the waves … back to the realm of the sky’, I would sing while I let the shower waters pour over me and quietly break down. I grieved those losses there, and eventually, moved through them into the next thing, but for so many months, that song carried me. It holds a special place in my heart to this day.”  TM

Thank you for sharing your vulnerability, heartbreak and the music, much of it by Pagan artists. It gives me hope that we can continue to heal ourselves and each other, individually and in this great Circle. 

As powerful as music is, we are no longer a Circle unto ourselves. I would be remiss if I did not provide the following excellent professional resources.

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is a United States-based suicide prevention network of over 200+ crisis centers that provides 24/7 service via a toll-free hotline with the number 9-8-8. It is available to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress.

A list of international crisis hotlines is here: https://blog.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines

For more information about Mama Gina, including her collected articles here on Pagan Song, her bio, and links to Gina’s sites on the web, check out Gina’s page on Pagan Song.

Cover photo of birds on a wire by Glen Carrie

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