Backbeat Songs with Purpose

One Health story that snatched my attention last week was about Jalen Huckabay. The report read that the 16-year-old Jalen is “about to slip into another world, away from the wearying regimen of pokes, prods, and pinches she’d endured since being diagnosed with lymphoma in November.”

Down the hall from the chemo infusion rooms of Texas Children’s Hospital, the curly-haired teenager marched to the studio hoping that in the next few hours she would record her song MYD, the name of her Yorkshire terrier, which means “My Yippin’ Dog”.

Through the Purple Songs Can Fly, a one-of-a-kind program at one of the US’ largest pediatric cancer care facilities, Jalen got the chance to record her own songs in a fully equipped recording studio at the hospital where over 116 songs have been recorded since Purple Songs began in March 2006 as part of the cancer center’s Arts in Medicine program.

Some of these recordings have already been featured on audio tracks aboard Continental Airlines flights, and even flown into space aboard the recent launch of a space shuttle to inspire all the more the astronauts working on a station out there.

In March of 2008, Jalen’s doctor told her parents she would die within two months without a lung transplant. Her own lungs, weakened by cystic fibrosis, could no longer sustain her. It would be the second transplant for Jalen, who received a new liver four years ago.

A few months after that, an infection sent Jalen back to the hospital where she needed to undergo 17 operations over 11 weeks. In November, doctors detected a type of lymphoma that can occur in transplant recipients. They found post-transplant lymphoma in her tonsils and put Jalen on six-month course of chemotherapy.

The Arts in Medicine program is expected to at least prolong Jalen’s life, along with many others who wage their own war against the Big C.

    Such is possible because if we are to understand the mechanisms behind music therapy, we would realize that in humans, music has this soothing and healing effect against the myriad stimuli that bombard the body daily.

So many people – not only cancer patients - want to express gratitude and thanks to their friends or family for being there for them, to that element of whatever is comforting during their time of agony and despair. And this is best expressed in a song. No wonder, we love to sing along/do the videoke!

This is also what I have emphasized in my past articles that artists should be very responsible in coming up with songs because such could make one “live for more” or “die again”.

Processed through the brain, music has the potential to positively affect our systems and, as such, improve our sense of wellbeing and facilitate the healing process.

Depending on the choice of music and the theme of the song, such can affect the body in a variety of ways from having a more arousing effect to one that calms.As a lyricist myself, it is discouraging to find some songwriters not realizing how much they influence their listeners and society as a whole. It seems that as soon as they have a song on radio, they are living glamorously. This is far from the truth. There are many people out there that we are supposed to touch with our songs so they would get a real treat on how to have a “sound lifestyle”.

(Back Beat is a new, twice-monthly column on music. The author has worked with DJ Ram Dizon of 93.1 Smash FM to push Bisdak bands and their music. She is also into contemporary Gospel music, nu wave and slow rock. She has also been tapped to write lyrics of Bisrock songs with themes on environmentalism and ecumenism. —Ed.)