A blog from Sam Robbins, who joined us as a songwriter at a 2024 Music Therapy Retreat:
I had an amaaaaazzzinnggg experience at a beautiful retreat center in Andover, MA. I was a part of Music Therapy Retreats – I’ve written about my experiences with this group before, and this was my fourth retreat! These retreats are a weekend getaway for Veterans and their families, where they get to spend a few days at a beautiful serene place and work with music therapists, learn guitar and just get away for a few days. Where I come in is that I, along with a few other songwriters, get to go in and write a song with a veteran. It’s usually five or six songwriters, and we all get paired with a different veteran. We have about four or five hours over two days to meet, chat, and then write a full song, performing them at a final concert for the other writers and veterans, and their families. It’s kind of a tall order! And the other songwriters were Mark Erelli, Buddy Mondlock, Jon Carroll, Danielle Miraglia and Sean Staples, so I KNEW every song would be great… the pressure was on!
But I have found that these are some of the easiest songs I’ve ever written in a lot of ways. These men and women have such amazing stories to tell, and they often haven’t ever been told before!! I kept saying that the song that weekend just wrote itself, and that is really how it felt… like I was just trying to keep up with the story and write down as much as I could. I was just a conduit for the story, and I’m very grateful to have been able to play that role.
This time, I was paired with Rich, a 70 year old veteran from Jersey City, NJ. When we got assigned to each other, he immediately walked over and said “let’s go out on the lake!”, meaning the reservoir lake right next to the retreat center. Honestly, I hadn’t known that this was an option!!
As we were walking down to the little boat launch area and picking out a suitable canoe, Rich made sure we had our personal floatation devices (life jackets) and then told me “we’ll talk on the water”. I was a little nervous because, as I wrote above, we have a pretty limited time to get a song! But it turns out that going out on the water was the best thing to start our writing together.
It’s a reservoir, so there were no motorboats, and actually nobody else on the water at all, except for an older couple fishing in a little dingy. The water was completely clear and it was a PERFECT day. We launched from shore and rowed around for a while, checking out an island, looking to see if we could find any fish, saying hi to the couple fishing, almost capsizing once, and most importantly, talking about Rich’s life and 30+ years in the military. Below is a selfie from the retreat that shows the lake.
In doing these retreats, I’ve found that sooo much of the job is just being an open ear. Rich is a really quiet, solid-feeling guy, (I joked at the concert that I wasn’t worried when he told me he wanted to go out on the lake because I immediately trusted him with my life) and while we had only met maybe 15 minutes earlier, here he was opening up about the amazing stories of his military service.
We spent about an hour out on the water, talking about everything – the good stuff, the hard stuff, the awful stuff, the great stuff, his life growing up, his wife and their marriage (they got married 3 days before he shipped off to training), his struggles with PTSD and so much more. Honestly I couldn’t believe some of the stuff that he had been through. As we were chatting, I was trying to grab the thru line of the stories to see what song we could write together. Like I said, it was all right there. I asked if he’d want to write a song that is a letter to himself before he joined the Marines, from his perspective now, as a man who has struggled and persevered. A letter to his younger self and a love song to his wife, who had been his rock through it all.
As we were almost to shore, I started to hear a melody and lyric idea come up… I started lightly singing “it’s gonna be a long ride, long ride, long, long, long ride, it’s gonna be a high climb, high climb, high, high, high climb”. I cautiously took my phone out (I hadn’t forgotten our near-capsizing moment) and recorded that little part. We made it to shore and headed to a nearby picnic table to get started on our song!!
Once we had the over-arching idea and the little melodic and lyrical idea, we were off the races. We talked about specific images from his childhood… when he was a dishwasher at a Jewish Summer camp in high school, listening to Neil Young and riding his bike everywhere, then moving on to getting married and heading off for training, going through his service and how he feels now looking back on it all.
Rich told me at the beginning that he was “not a creative guy at all”. I was interested to see this put to the test, and believe me, it turned out to be very wrong! I mean y’all… the lyrics that were coming out of him were amazing. I was just there transcribing. He told me that he felt like his life had been saved so many times by “fate’s gentle nudge”, and that part of the reason he loved hiking was that when you’re looking over the top of the mountain it’s like you can see “the whole world fresh and new”.
In writing the chorus (the extension to the part I had written on the canoe) I asked him what specific messages he would have for his younger self, who didn’t know what was coming. He said “keep holding hands with the ones that you love”, and “when they reach out, grab on and don’t let go”, and so many more great little nuggets of wisdom. After I did a quick recording of the first take of our finished chorus, he said “look at me, now I’m crying!”. And he was! And I was about to!
We finished up the song the next day, and we ended it with an uplifting message – he had been a navy doctor, and I was imagining how many people he had saved or had helped along the way. He didn’t mention that kind of stuff much at all, and when I asked him “I mean, I’m sure you saved a lot of lives and helped SO many people, right?” He quietly said “well… yeah, I did.” In his struggles with PTSD he had been focused on the things that he didn’t do, the people that he could’ve helped and the terrible trauma that he had experienced. For the end of the song, I wanted a moment where we focused on the flip side of that. He was just an amazingly humble guy and I was so grateful to have worked with him on this. He hadn’t talked about these experiences in a long time. He kept saying “my wife isn’t going to believe this…”
At the end of the retreat, there’s a concert where we’re both on stage together, and both give a little intro where we talk about the writing of the song. His wife had jokingly said to me “I can’t wait to hear my love song that you two wrote!” and she was SHOCKED when Rich said, right before I started playing, that “most of all, this is a love song to my wife”. It was a great moment!! Lots of tears, hugs, everything. Respect veterans y’all!!
As we were all leaving, Rich’s wife told me that she had snuck around and taken a picture of us on the canoe together, and a few days later, I got an email from Rich that said “I can see now how music can be extremely therapeutic. Writing about something gets it out in the open and helps you deal with it.” The picture was attached, which you can see below. I really love this shot!!
The song ended up being called “You Don’t Know What I Know”. You can click here to listen to the first draft, recorded right after we were done writing it, and you can click here to join my Patreon page, where you can watch the video of us playing it at the concert and hear what Rich and I had to say.
