Your Dementia Playlist and Mine
Why not make one now?
Maybe you won’t need a dementia playlist. Maybe your final years will go like Lou Reed’s, who practiced tai chi hand exercises even as he drew his last breath, lucid and cool to the end. Or perhaps, like me, you aspire to Lou’s golden years but have trouble sleeping, which increases your risk of dementia in the future.
Have you seen those inspirational videos of music bringing dementia patients back to life? Musical memory can be astonishingly strong in people living with dementia, even when other parts of the brain are devastated. These videos are moving stuff: the bewildered daze replaced by focused listening, the vacancy giving way to remembering, and finally, the reemergence of character and even soul.
Research findings on music’s power to recover memory have been driving entrepreneurs into the dementia playlist game. The Vera app, for example, involves algorithms turning out “the recommended songs for the people who can’t remember what they used to love.” Another company, the UK-based Lottie, went ahead and created two generic playlists, one up-tempo and one down, to benefit people with dementia. Two songs recorded after 1980 make Lottie’s lists, and to their credit, Rick James’ “Super Freak” is one of them.
“Super Freak” often has roused me from my seat, so I like to think it might shake me out of senescence. Yet restoring lucidity with music isn’t as simple as playing hits from a dementia patient’s “That’s my song! Hold my drink!” days. The more profound your connection to the music, the better.
“There has already been some research that shows that if you can find the right piece of music, something that had a very strong meaning, playing that piece of music can be very therapeutic,” University of Amsterdam researcher Ashley Burgoyne told the BBC. “But the challenge is figuring out what is the best piece of music.”
That’s why making a personal dementia playlist should become as standard as drafting an end-of-life plan or creating a last will and testament. Only you know which music has “very strong meaning” for you. Only you can identify the music for which you have rich associations and maybe even a resonating narrative connecting you to the wider world.
I’ll start my playlist here now. Yes, decades before I’ll need it. It’s that important.
Early in a 2008 artist residency in Brazil, our incoming group of artists gathered to drink and play some recorded music for each other. I put on Maria Schneider’s 2007 album Sky Blue, which starts with “The Pretty Road.” It’s a cinematic thirteen-minute orchestral piece evoking Maria’s childhood memories of family car rides outside Windom, Minnesota, specifically her wonder at the nighttime view of the twinkling town from a road’s small hill. I felt it all in the music. My own upbringing in the flat, rural Midwest gave me lived experience in how modest variations in topography could bring on the childhood magic.
“Is this music just one pretty theme?” sneered a fellow residency artist. He wasn’t feeling “The Pretty Road,” and he wanted me to know it. Not a friend, I thought, and pulled up some Jorge Ben tracks to chill him out.
His dismissal of “The Pretty Road” stirred some reflection for me that night. Maria Schneider was a critical darling, rightfully hailed as a preeminent composer for jazz orchestra. “Cerulean Skies,” Sky Blue’s tour de force depiction of bird migration, won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition. On the other hand, Pretty Road’s earnest exposition of bucolic awe gave some of the culturati Little House on The Prairie cringe. It was overripe with sentiment to them.
“The Pretty Road” isn’t pastoral sap, though. Maria evolves the composition’s main themes with sophistication and uses soloists to high aesthetic and emotional effect in the piece. As I contemplated the artist’s scorn for “The Pretty Road,” I realized what courage it took for Maria to make such lovely music about small wonders when she knew that prettiness and enthusiasm can undermine even the most serious woman artist’s authority. I decided to let myself love the piece unconditionally.
Later in that same residency, I planned an upriver sailboat trip to seek out and record proto-samba music in Bahia’s back country. At the last minute a friend couldn’t make the trip, leaving me alone with his rough acquaintance. We sailed across the bay for the river, the rough acquaintance cheering shivers of bay sharks feeding on fish at the river’s mouth. When darkness fell, he hovered in his faded Speedo and made some predictable demands. I refused him and spent a tense night on the boat sleeping with one eye open, a character adrift in a bad adventure movie.
After disembarking the sailboat, I found the samba music that, frankly, a local guide with a car could have shown me with less trouble, given a little money and patience. Mission accomplished, safe on a bus rolling back toward the artist residency, I played Maria Schneider’s Sky Blue on my iPod. As the familiar swells of “The Pretty Road” rose and fell, a thought arrived whole: No more reckless acts to prove to myself that I’m alive.
“The Pretty Road” inspired me to love music without apology, overcoming the critical handicap of coolness. The piece helped me sit with inconvenient truths long enough to accept them. It helped me reconcile the power of reason with the flowers of deep feeling. These meanings qualify “The Pretty Road” as the first track on my dementia playlist.
Of course your sense of musical meaning is not mine. Whether you’re poor or rich, binary or non-, you can and should make your own dementia playlist, a Bring-Me-Back Mixtape, bequeathing your future caregivers the music most likely to uncork your memory and character. I’d go so far as to say that creating an end-of-life playlist is our privilege and responsibility. Too important to leave to an algorithm or to someone else.
Building this playlist will take more than a minute, though, because some reflection is in order. Which tracks or even albums have personal associations meaningful enough to reconnect you with yourself and the world? The music a grandchild, friend, or music therapist could one day call up on the latest smart device, play through its hopefully improved speaker, and make your character shine through your cloudy eyes brightly enough for them to say, “There he is.”
My Dementia Playlist (A Work In Progress)
“The Pretty Road,” Sky Blue, Maria Schneider
“Blackbird,” Solitaire, Uri Caine
Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel, Miles Davis Quinet. (Yes, this is 7 ½ hours of music. What else do I have to do if I’m sitting in the old folks’ home with dementia?)
Native Dancer, Wayne Shorter and Milton Nascimento
“What A Feeling,” Flashdance, Irene Cara
Symphony No. 3, (“Eroica”), Ludwig van Beethoven
And okay, let’s add “Super Freak” just for the fun of it. In my soft-brained decrepitude, maybe I’ll leap from my wheelchair and shout, “I’m Rick James, bitch!”
What a great idea and yes, you have to do your own. And what a lovely piece of writing. Thank you.
Good grace on this endeavor, Michelle! Starting on my list right away. Speak No Evil is on it. Native Dancer, too.