When COVID-19 forced much of the world into a months-long shutdown, Nashville’s music community was gravely impacted. Tours were halted. Recording sessions were scrapped. And initially, writing sessions were canceled. Americana singer/songwriter Suzie Brown was one of countless thousands of artists who watched their artistic plans shift during the pandemic. The difference is Brown, 47, a cardiologist specializing in heart transplants at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, also had to worry about her day job killing her.
“There was profound fear,” she says, explaining that she worried about catching COVID-19 every time she went to the hospital to cover her two weeks on, two weeks off schedule. “I didn’t want to die. I was basically going totally insane. About a month into COVID, I just started writing. It took me a while to even have the emotional energy to feel like I could even share the songs.”
Brown will releaseSome See the FlowersMay 20, which is home to many of the songs she wrote during the pandemic and a few from before March of 2020. “Til I Make It To You,” which PEOPLE is exclusively debuting, is one of those songs. She found inspiration in her growing frustration with Nashville’s heavy traffic as she tried to get home to her family. Now with travel resuming and people reuniting with loved ones, the singer believes “Til I Make It to You” has even more significance.
“It’s a song about longing,” she says. “It’s a song about having a safe place. I am lucky in that my home is my haven. That’s where I have love and acceptance, and it’s a song about longing to get back to your safe place.”
To get to this point of sharing her music, Brown had to be intentional with her time, take control of her emotions and find safe ways to start the recording process before the music industry reopened for business.
“I didn’t know which was harder, being home with my kids or being at the hospital during COVID,” she says. “It was a tough competition. I was in a really deep, dark place just with the stress of having my kids home and the stress of work. I was kind of barely holding onto my sanity, and I felt really far away from my music career.”
Brown made a deal with her husband. Every night after dinner, she went to her producer Billy Harvey’s house to record. The two are friends, and both have children, so they had a mutual understanding of the need to escape into their craft. From 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. each night, they worked. They wore masks and stood on opposite sides of the room while Harvey helped Brown get her music back on track.
“I felt like I was just completely ruining my music career, but I had nothing to share,” she said. “When we started recording these songs, I didn’t really know what I was going do with them. I don’t think I had mailed a mailing list email in nine months. I wasn’t posting on social media. I felt like I was completely shooting myself in the foot.”
Suzie Brown.Alex Berger
At the hospital, there were even more questions. Universal testing wasn’t readily available initially, which sometimes made transplants impossible. She couldn’t consult with surgeons for the lifesaving surgery if she didn’t know the donor’s COVID status. Once the doctors in the transplant program knew they could get testing for both the donor and the recipient, they chose to keep the program operational as long as the hospital still had ICU beds available, which was the bulk of the pandemic.
Brown says COVID-19 impacted her the same way it affected most doctors. Before vaccinations were available, she felt like everyone was getting sick. The hospital was short-staffed, and morale plummeted. In addition to worrying about her health, she was terrified of bringing deadly germs home to her family.
“I would come in the back door, take off my scrubs in the laundry room, and then like run naked to the bathroom,” she says. “And I wouldn’t let anyone touch me until I had showered. There was just so much fear.”
Much of her tension eased when she was able to get the COVID-19 vaccine. She worked more closely with her producer, got in the recording studio with musicians, and most importantly, didn’t worry about dying. It was a whole different level of heartbreak at the hospital to watch their fully vaccinated transplant patients die after an unvaccinated friend or family member gave them the virus.
“The emotional burden of it, I can’t even tell you,” she says.
With her entire family fully vaccinated and her album poised to come out, Brown is doing her best to live in the present.
source: people.com
