On The Unexpected Wisdom of Concussions

“I had a professor tell me once that there is, like…a lid at the top of your head and there’s a lid at about your solar plexus. And in order to be creatively fluid, you have to let things come in, and you have to let them flow out. And if one of those portals is blocked, you’re fucked.”

-Maggie Rogers, in a 2023 interview on the “Best Advice” podcast

I read that Maggie Rogers went to Harvard Divinity School and got her masters recently. This might seem like a surprising left-turn for her, but to me that makes perfect sense. At some point all musicians have to grapple with the fact that we don’t know where inspiration comes from and we don’t know when it’s going to show up again. And I do believe that if we want to continue on the artist’s way, we have to do some inner work around this. Because having so little control can be maddening.

Why is it that on one night there’s just this great, free feeling when we’re playing a guitar solo or writing a lyric, this feeling like there are no wrong notes, or the words just flow out effortlessly, and then the next night we try for the same thing and that free feeling is nowhere to be found?

Anybody who’s taking a crack at being an artist has to face this, even if they don’t want to. I didn’t want to.

Which brings us to my concussion.

Since I started writing songs back when I was 15, I’ve pretty much always written from the ground up, by which I mean I’d start with a beat, or a loop, or a chord progression, and then record all of that and then some more, and then only after a lot of the groundwork was laid would I begin to explore what the song was actually about. I think this might be how a lot – or maybe even most – songs are written these days. You just start fiddling around on your laptop with sounds and build a nice little bed, and then you write the “topline” after that. Which for me meant that the lyrics and story of the song were an afterthought. It was something I kind of hurried through at the last minute. And I’d been kind of in a rut for a couple years with this system.

Then in June of 2021, I got a pretty serious traumatic brain injury.

It’s a stupid story, but basically I was playing with my kids and jumped off a bed and wacked my head on a big slab of wood that was part of the structure of the house – and that big slab of wood turned out to be harder than my head was. So I got a concussion. One of the symptoms of my concussion was that I couldn’t look at screens without getting a terrible headache. Or read books. Or drive. And this went on for the better part of a year. 

Did I mention I couldn’t look at screens at all?

No making music the way I’d made music since forever, no watching Youtube or scrolling through social media. I couldn’t even focus my eyes to read a book! I had to take a 2-month break from my job as a therapist, and then after that I could only handle about 8 clients a week. 

It was like an enforced spiritual retreat. And it sucked. 

I suddenly had a tremendous amount of time on my hands that I couldn’t distract myself from. And I had to re-figure-out how to be a musician, which meant I had to learn how to write songs without a computer.

Boo-hoo, right? You mean I have to go back to how humans have written songs for thousands of years? But I’m telling you, it was tough! At first it was slow going. It had literally been me and a computer writing songs for 2 decades, and before that it’d been me and a 4-track or 8-track — and I didn’t own a 4-track or 8-track anymore! So I wrote a lot of bad songs on my guitar and piano. Many bad songs. I went deeper into my daily meditation practice. I did yoga. On the advice of my therapist, I started praying, which was very unusual for me (both of my parents are atheists; I’ve only been to church a handful of times, and always as a guest of friends or family). 

And then slowly, over several months, my mind started to settle.

I remember the first moment I noticed this. I was lying on the couch and listening to an audiobook, and both of the kids were gone. It was winter, and very quiet. And I heard the clicking-on of the forced-air heat from the basement. In our house there’s always a little click right before the hush of the warm air starts coming through the vents. And as I listened to that click, I thought to myself, wow, that sound is so peaceful.

And then, sometime later, after writing a whole bunch of not-good or just-fine songs, the character for a song came to me. Poof. Just like that. I suddenly knew who the character was, what he was like, how he talked, where he was, what his job was, and what he was going through. That had never happened to me before, ever. And I had no idea where it came from.

My prayers up until that point had been something like, god, tell me what to do, and I’ll do it: help me see how to be a better parent, and I’ll do it; help me see how to be a better husband, and I’ll do it; and (of course, you’ve read this far, so you know) help me see how to be a better musician, and I’ll do it.

And I learned it was all about figuring out how to get my mind still, and listening.

Duh, right? Particularly with music. How can I get better at this thing that is literally made of sound? I don’t know, maybe, listen? I’d been rushing past the most-important part.

So this song came. The main character and point of view, and the melody and words came shortly after. I’ll never forget it. A part of me – the part that wants to wrestle things to the ground, the part that is very worried about impressing everybody and being “good” and “doing things well,” the part that wants to rush through the listening part — just stepped aside and rested for a minute, while god or the universe or whatever just spoke through me, sending me the idea for this song.

I call it “god or the universe or whatever” because I’m not sure what to call it, but I do know this: it was not me. That’s the feeling. It was something coming through me, that was not me. Is it the best song ever written? No, that would be either “Think” by Aretha Franklin or “If I Told” by Courtney Marie Andrews or . But was it a huge leap forward for me as an artist? Absolutely. You can listen to it here.

I opened up a channel by clearing away the clutter of my mind, because I was forced to. God or the universe or whatever forced me to unscrew the cap on the top of my head and unscrew the cap on my belly, and only then did the songs start coming.

My concussion is all healed-up (thank you, Canadian concussion doctors!), but I will always, always be grateful for the wisdom that it taught me.