When people ask me why I decided to become a therapist, my canned response is: “Well, I was turning 40 and I realized that it might no longer be feasible to write about Simple Plan professionally for the rest of my life.” This is not the full answer, but it is partially true. (No offense to Simple Plan, I just had to pick an early ’00s pop-punk band to put in that slot and they seemed to be the most inoffensive.)

The truth is that it was a confluence of influences in my life, many of which were logistical: getting older, moving to a new place and settling down with my now-wife, my well of freelance writing gigs drying up, etc. However there was something else, too, more existential. After co-editing a zine in college, working as music editor at Alternative Press, and hustling as a freelance writer for almost 15 years, I couldn’t write about punk music anymore.

I was with Jimmy Eat World in London in 2001 at a sweaty rock club called the Garage, a few weeks before they released the album that would launch them from the emo bubble into mainstream consciousness. I sat with Thursday as they discussed the possibility of having the #1 album in the world when War All The Time was released in 2003. I even slept at singer Geoff Rickly’s parents’ house for a cover story and ended up starting a band with him a couple of years later. I remember sitting in My Chemical Romance’s manager’s car on the Asbury Park boardwalk as Gerard Way proudly played me and my colleague his band’s new single, “I’m Not Okay (I Promise).” (I thought it was “too gimmicky,” which probably explains why I never worked in A & R.) I even got a shout out from Good Charlotte in my hometown of Cleveland when they said I was “the only journalist they liked.” I still have a signed poster in my closet where their singer Joel Madden wrote, “You are the only person who understands us.”

I did understand Good Charlotte and Fall Out Boy and Thursday and all of these bands. I worked for eight weeks on the Warped Tour in 2002, sleeping on a sponsor bus with 22 other twenty-somethings, drinking too much and frying our eardrums watching Bad Religion every night. But as I approached 40, these conversations not only became nostalgic, they became something that I felt was only a part of my larger self. I saw friends who had headlined major tours starting to deliver food in order to pay their bills. New music started to sound like slightly different permutations of things that I had heard already heard over and over. DJs started throwing parties where people would pay a cover charge just to dance to the bands they were too young to have seen in their heyday. Ironic merch was made. Magazines were going out of business. Suddenly, the skinny jeans that seemed to be part of my uniform for so many years started to look outdated. It was like growing out of adolescence all over again, except this time I could injure my neck just by sleeping on it in a weird position.

Throughout this time period, of the bands that I listened to constantly was Frightened Rabbit, and I had maintained sporadic contact with their singer/guitarist, Scott Hutchison. I have a theory that everyone in the music industry ultimately just wants to befriend their favorite bands. This was certainly the case with me and Scott. I had him on my podcast Going Off Track in 2017 with the ulterior motive of becoming his friend and previously had seen the band play small shows when they were starting out at clubs like the Mercury Lounge. I remember Scott would come down on the floor of the club with an acoustic guitar and lead the crowd in sing-alongs on songs like “Music Now!” from 2006’s Sing The Greys. I couldn’t believe that a band who were this good who had come all the way over from Scotland were playing such small clubs in the Lower East Side, places that I had paid to play with my own band not too many years earlier.

“That’s something that we tried to make work in our favor is the intimacy or that there’s something unique about each Frightened Rabbit show where it’s not the same as the night before,” Scott told me during our recorded conversation. “Which is not necessarily untrue, but because of the nature of some of the material people really absorb it into their lives, and that gives kind of a unique dynamic between the band and audience because we’re so involved in their personal lives in a lot of ways.” I was one of those people who absorbed that music into my personal life, so it wasn’t easy for me to play it cool when at the end of our interview Scott asked if he could get my email address and if I wanted to hang out sometime when he was back in town. We would email sporadically, or he would comment on my Instagram posts. The last time we saw each other was following a Frightened Rabbit show celebrating the 10th anniversary of The Midnight Organ Fight at the Bowery Ballroom in 2018. Scott gave me his number and told me to call him the following day to meet up, but I didn’t.

A few months later, his body was discovered washed up at Port Edgar on the shore of the Firth of Forth.

I bring up Scott not because we were great friends or I knew him well — we only hung out in person those two times. However, as a huge fan of his art and spirit, his passing did have a massive effect on me at the same time I was trying to reevaluate my life after moving from Brooklyn to Western Massachusetts to join my partner. I couldn’t stop thinking about the connection between music and mental health. Something that Scott and I talked about on the podcast was this dichotomy between his melancholic lyrics and engaging personality and the fact that people assumed that he would be more mopey based on his writing. Like many musicians, I believe he viewed his music as an outlet for these feelings so that they didn’t consume him. Correspondingly, I wanted to understand the intrinsic motivations behind artistic expression. Why do some people have a need to express their inner torment in such visceral ways and what draws us to these acts as listeners?

For once, I was less concerned about the amp settings or instrumentation as opposed to embodied emotions behind the music and why some people were able to connect with their own suffering in such a tender and relatable manner. I read a lot of books: The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, And Body In The Healing Of Trauma by Bessell van der Kolk, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity And Love by bell hooks, My Age Of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, And The Search For Peace Of Mind by Scott Stossel. It was like re-discovering my favorite band from childhood on a progressive loop. While my attitude toward new music had calcified over adulthood, learning about the human brain and the way it connected to music felt simultaneously familiar and completely new. It was like opening a book that’s been sitting on your shelf for years and noticing a personalized inscription from an old friend for the first time.

In the fall of 2019, I was accepted into Antioch University’s Clinical Mental Health Counseling program, a low-residency online degree that would take approximately three years and put me on the path to being a licensed therapist. I know what you’re thinking, this is the part of the essay where I talk about how COVID happened and changed my plans like it did for literally every other person living on Earth during this time. Actually, no, that’s not where I was going. Shortly after gaining admission into the program, I went to a routine physical where I was told that my bloodwork showed that my platelet count was very low. I knew this on some level: My doctor in Brooklyn had pointed it out to me in the past, but it didn’t seem urgent. It felt like someone telling me that the timing belt on my car was getting worn out, something to be aware of that also felt like an abstraction in the future, nothing to do about right now.

After furthering blood testing and a bone marrow biopsy, which involved me lying on my stomach while my oncologist inserted a gigantic needle into my back to extract a chunk of bone to be analyzed in a lab, I was informed that I had Hairy Cell Leukemia. In case you aren’t familiar with the disease, which you probably aren’t, HCL is a very rare and chronic form of cancer where the bone marrow makes too many lymphocytes resulting in cells that look like they have little hairs coming off them. While this sounds pretty cute, it can result in fatigue, infections, and weakness. I was told that we would monitor the disease, and during a trip to Europe, I ended up contracting pneumonia, sweating through the sheets and being scheduled for five days of IV-administered chemotherapy during the first semester of graduate school.

I cut back on my course load, my mom came up to stay with us for a few weeks, and eventually my blood counts began to inch up toward normal levels. Then the pandemic hit. Since I was in an online program, it didn’t shift my educational journey too much with the exception of my two five-day residences being moved from New Hampshire to the ubiquitous Zoom square layout. As my health improved, my base of knowledge also increased as I learned more about diagnostic tools and assessments and eventually earned a certification in trauma. On the side, I participated in a work-study program producing a podcast for one of my professors and continued to write about music for publications such as SPIN, Flood, and Talkhouse. In 2021, I launched a nostalgia-driven podcast on iHeartMedia with my sister Vanessa (who you may know as a former cast member on Saturday Night Live), which helped support me while I was completing an unpaid internship in the children and adolescent department of a local community mental health and substance abuse clinic. I learned that artists weren’t the only ones in my community that were suffering.

This may seem like a major career change, but there are a lot of similarities — and often some unavoidable level of overlap — between a journalistic and therapeutic interview, especially in today’s mental health conscious environment. When you’re talking to a musician about the inspiration behind a song or what led them to this point in his or her life, there is often a particular event or experience that has informed it just as much as the music itself. In recent years, I’ve tried to focus on the intersection between music and mental health, whether that’s talking to Fall Out Boy guitarist Joe Trohman about depression and addiction to promote his excellent memoir None Of This Rocks or, more recently, speaking to Cage The Elephant frontman Matt Shultz about how his bout of medication-induced psychosis inspired his band’s latest album Neon Pill.

In 2022, I spoke to Scott’s brother/drummer Grant Hutchison and the band’s graphic designer Dave Thomas for Flood Magazine to celebrate the release of The Work, a hardcover bound collection of Scott’s lyrics and sketches. In the foreword for the book, Grant writes, “These words will always bring us into Scott’s world, often with brutal honesty.”

This is true. One of Scott’s most famous posthumous lyrics to quote has been the song “Head Rolls Off.” The chorus goes:

When it’s all gone, something carries on
And it’s not morbid at all, just when nature’s had enough of you
When my blood stops, someone else’s will not
When my head rolls off, someone else’s will turn
You can mark my words, I’ll make changes to Earth
While I’m alive, I’ll make tiny changes to Earth

Scott continues to make changes, even after he has left us. Shortly after his passing, his family established the non-profit Tiny Changes, Scotland’s first national youth mental health charity. “You could tell his writing became more sophisticated as the years went on,” Grant told me during the interview. “Like it says in the foreword, hopefully people can jump in and out of Scott’s world. The way [each album was written] is a timestamp on his life essentially because he wrote about himself. They’re all biographical to an extent. On top of just seeing the progress as an artist, it was also like, ‘OK, that song might be particularly difficult for me to listen to because I know the origins of it’ — the last record [2016’s Painting Of A Panic Attack] being probably the heaviest. It was the last one he wrote, so obviously regardless of whether you’re looking at it from the outside or the inside, it’s fairly obvious he wasn’t in a good place.

“But overall I can approach it from the same point as a lot of fans can because we were never involved in the lyrics,” Grant continued. “This book has nothing to do with me, so I can look at it and appreciate it in maybe the same way you do, which feels quite unique from being in the band myself. So alongside everything I mentioned about how difficult it was, it’s also amazing for me to see and celebrate how fucking brilliant Scott was, as the letter says.”

It’s all true: Scott wasn’t in a good place, Scott was fucking brilliant, and those facts aren’t mutually exclusive. As a therapist, it is my plan to eventually work specifically with artists, bands and musicians on the issues that Scott struggled with because they are so endemic to those of us who dedicate our lives to creative endeavors. These jobs may seem glamorous on the outside, but are often thankless and gut-wrenching once the crowd dissipates.

In recent years there has been more awareness around the toll that touring and sleeping on floors takes on musicians’ mental health, but we aren’t there yet. I spent many years sleeping in a bench of a 15-passenger van in order to make sure no one stole our band’s gear, and there wasn’t even a conversation around the mental or physical health repercussions of subjecting my body and mind to such heightened and uncomfortable states on a nightly basis. The reality is that it doesn’t necessarily change once you “make it.” Jason Isbell, another musician that I interviewed for a podcast with the ulterior motive of wanting to befriend, put it perfectly in his song “Anxiety,” where he sings:

Anxiety
How do you always get the best of me?
I’m out here living in a fantasy
I can’t enjoy a goddamn thing

My goal is to help my clients develop coping skills to deal with that anxiety in order to enjoy the fleeting fantasy of life, which seems to slip further into the past at increasing speed each passing year. We can’t change the external forces seemingly conspiring against us: Health, old age, insecurity, loss. But we can work on shifting the way we act and react to these situations and try to do it in a way that’s guided by grace and gratitude. I still find music — and musicians — to be a positive force in my life, but these days I’m more focused on what I give back instead of taking away from them. Simple Plan, if you’re struggling, please get in touch. I owe you an apology.