I Remember Music (from “Senses”)

“Senses” is a show built around the concept of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself under various circumstances. In this song, Staff Sergeant David Grife – an Afghanistan War marine vet and former violinist who lost his ability to hear while protecting his troops from a grenade – has his auditory nerves restored by a revolutionary surgical procedure. As David hears again for the first time in ten years, he is flooded by a hundred happy memories which until now have been far too painful to recall. But as these happy memories return, David must also confront and relive the trauma that changed his life forever.

The concept and character of David actually came to me in a dream – a man in uniform, walking through an Armageddon of fire and shrapnel, holding his hands over his bleeding ears and whispering the words: “I remember music.” I wrote down the dream, and soon after I began interviewing marines about their experiences in war, determined to tell David’s story as truthfully and specifically as I would if he were a real person. Then something happened that changed the course of my entire life: I tore the cartilage in both of my wrists, and was told by specialists at both the Hospital for Special Surgery and the Mayo Clinic that I would never play piano again. I was shaken to my core, as everything I had ever wanted for myself suddenly seemed like it would be forever out of reach. Thankfully, years of painful procedures proved the doctors wrong – and when I could play again, this was the first song I wrote. And so David’s story intertwined with my own, as I wrote my gratitude for the music that returned to me… and my grief from all I had lost along the way.