The Power of Music
For the past eighteen years, from 2005 to 2023, I’ve spent most of my time working at what has always mattered to me: helping families keep their loved ones safe and independent. I founded and owned a home healthcare company in North San Diego County. But my biggest passion has always been music – listening, playing, singing, and performing. Even though I never had as much time as I wanted to spend on it, I somehow always found a way to make it a significant part of my life and even integrate it into my work.
In the early days of my home health company, I would provide musical entertainment at the annual national conference of our franchising company and occasionally put together sound recordings or perform in skits that aligned with the theme of each meeting. One year, the conference theme was Back To The Future. To open the event, I dutifully dressed up like Marty McFly from the movie, stood behind a wall of cardboard boxes onstage with my guitar and a headset mic, and burst forward after a short clip from the film to perform the Huey Lewis and The News songThe Power of Love, to a cheering, clapping audience of fellow home health care agency owners.
It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed the power of music to evoke deep emotion, positive excitement, and joy in a relatively diverse group of people. Music is something we all grow up with and grow old with. It truly is the soundtrack of our lives, and mainly, the songs that were popular as we grew up are touchstones that mark essential periods in our lives. They never fail to evoke vivid memories of what we were doing or what was happening when we heard a particular song playing.
So it was no surprise that years before the groundbreaking 2014 Glen Campbell documentary I’ll Be Me, our company began to understand the value of music in connecting with older adults and clients suffering from dementia. The Company started a music therapy singalong program provided to senior communities and one-to-one with clients in their homes. I soon found myself leading these singalongs for seniors throughout North County. On occasion, I’d visit a client on their birthday to play them their favorite song on the guitar. Besides helping someone stay independent in their own home, music was my favorite part of running my agency.
It’s well documented that listening to or making music increases blood flow to the brain’s regions that generate and control emotions. As you enjoy a particular song for the first time or hear it again, your body may release dopamine, a neurotransmitter that triggers sensations of pleasure and well-being. Just as we can often quickly identify the emotion conveyed by a particular song, music can easily affect our emotions.
There are also extraordinary benefits to learning and/or playing an instrument as we age or simply singing along to favorite songs. From personal experience, I can say that I always feel uplifted after these activities, and I love to teach the ukulele, an easy-to-learn, easy-to-play instrument, to older adults.
The Glen Campbell documentary underscores the positive effects of music from a performer’s perspective. Despite his advancing struggles with Alzheimer’s, he was generally able to recall the words and instrumentation of each song in his performances. According to an article in the Journal of Biology, decoding music is a big task for the brain, requiring the integration of “sequentially ordered sounds into a coherent musical perception.”
These days, I’m retired from home health care, and keeping my mind fit and active is hugely important. Since my retirement, I have focused on my other lifelong profession and passion: performing music. When I perform for any audience, it’s a mutually beneficial proposition. They get joy from the performance, and I get joy from it. We both get the related positive benefits to our health.
Nowhere are these benefits more evident than when I play and sing for an audience in a memory care unit. It’s difficult to describe the positive feeling that washes over me when I see a dementia patient suddenly change expression from a blank stare to a pleasant smile, then close their eyes and begin mouthing the words to the song I am singing to them. At one of my recent performances, I played Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter, an old Herman’s Hermits song, and was surprised to see how many in the Memory Care audience remembered every word.
Music is a powerful connector with people and an incredibly positive memory trigger…it’s my sincere belief that everyone should have some music in their life, even more so as we age.
Scott Samuels is a singer, songwriter, and performing musician. He is an 18-year veteran of the home healthcare industry in North County, San Diego. He performs at theaters, clubs, and senior communities around San Diego with Solitary Diamonds, a tribute to Neil Diamond, as well as several other musical projects. www.scottsamuels.com