Track 4, Side 1: Old Time Rock n' Roll by Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band

The kind of music that soothes the soul...with pops and scratches

My dad taught me every epic journey deserves a great soundtrack. My PalliMed Mixtape is the story of my Palliative Medicine Fellowship year, told in 15 songs.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Old Time Rock & Roll on Apple Music

There’s something special about vinyl records.  (This is not a hot take. Just look at this photo I took of all these folks at the Austin Record Convention this past weekend!) It seems despite all our technological advances, we humans crave the vintage, the analog, the tactile.

I started collecting records back in med school. I would take my spare change to the Half Price Books near my house and stock up on records to use as study music before each big round of tests.  It was a little wellness indulgence before I even knew what wellness was.

What was it about records—was it nostalgia?  Was it the pops and scratches? Was it the multisensory stimulation—the look of the album art, the smell of the cardboard sleeve, the weight of the needle arm balancing just so as you lift it and set it down gently on a spinning record? 

Was it the commitment that records require, the sense of being along for the ride with the artist with no ability to shuffle the songs? Or did vinyl records really sound better?

Whatever it was, I’m pretty sure studying to the back side of this three-dollar gem got me through first-year neuroanatomy:

I’m not certain I could have handled the stress of learning the Krebs cycle in biochemistry without the calming second movement of this ninety-cent treasure:

Would I have ever gone jogging through the pre-dawn streets of San Antonio if not for the adrenaline surge I got by playing a little early morning Mr. Blue Skies from this garage sale find?

Back in those med school days, before streaming existed, buying old vinyl was really just the cheapest way to expand my music collection.  My nascent vinyl collecting was a financial practicality, not some affected audiophile snobbery.  I have since come to think, however (and the conventioneers I saw this weekend certainly agree) that there really is something unique about the vinyl experience. People seem to know it intuitively.

When it came time to develop a Quality Improvement project for our hospital as part of my fellowship year, I thought about my patient, Mikey, and how music just seemed to make him feel so much better.  I hit up our med school library and learned from the prodigious existing research out there how music provides real benefits to patients with serious illness—lowering pain, anxiety, and depression, and improving emotional function and quality of life. I wondered if delivering music using a record player might even enhance the positive effects! Like the sage, Bob Seger, sings in Old Time Rock n’ Roll:

Just take those old records off the shelf / I’ll sit and listen to ‘em by myself / Today’s music ain’t got the same soul / I like that old time rock n’ roll / …that kind of music just soothes the soul. 

I brainstormed with some faculty mentors how it might look if we could provide a record player on a cart and a library of records for some of our hospitalized patients.  The idea seemed a little crazy, but my faculty and our nursing team lent me tremendous support. I am so grateful for their backing of this (silly?) idea.  Our nurse case manager donated an old vintage looking record player, we bought a rolling record player cart online, and we have been able to build a pretty sweet little record collection through purchases and donations.

We’re still working out the kinks, but the record player has really resonated with a lot of our patients and their families.  Unlike a smartphone music app, the record player is a real conversation starter, a memory maker, a time machine.  People gather around it, it draws them close like a campfire.

We always wonder which records our patients and families will pick.  My wife knows my top vinyl picks if I am nearing the end of my life due to illness: Gregory Alan Isakov’s That Sea, the Gambler, U2’s The Joshua Tree, and Willie Nelson’s Family Bible. To hear Willie sing the lines “Softly and tenderly / Jesus is calling / calling for you and for me…Come home / Come home / Ye who are weary come home” is to understand grace anew. I’ll take that as a sendoff.

Many of our patients seem drawn to Al Green or Frank Sinatra. Others to gospel hymns, old Hank Williams, or Julio Iglesias. A recent ICU patient celebrated surviving a long, treacherous hospitalization with his family by listening to John Denver’s Greatest Hits. As the record spun, and Rocky Mountain High and other classics filled the room, they said things finally felt human again in this sterile hospital environment. They felt a joy in the room that had been missing.

We were all quite moved when a lovely first generation Palestinian American family played Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours for their dying father, huddled around his bed, looking back lovingly on the life that had been. They remembered listening to these songs with their dad when they were younger and shared their fond memories as the songs played. I imagined them thinking about the brave and hard decisions that their father and mother had made to uproot and create a new life for the family. I wondered if they heard an echo of their father in the triumphant chorus from Don’t Stop:

Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow / Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here / It’ll be better than before / yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone

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I sincerely hope it’s decades away for each of you, but tell me Crash Cart Campfire friends:

• If you were nearing the end of your run, what album(s) would you want to be your final vinyl?

• What’s on your mixtape?