Now this is a story about Kyleen King, a Portland composer, session player, back-up singer, and multi-instrumentalist who’s on a mission to bring to light and help address the mental health challenges of her fellow performers. Along the way, you’ll meet a couple other artists who are also working in the emerging field of social service through the arts.
But first, in order to fully appreciate why the mental health of musicians is important, let’s remind ourselves of the benefits music provides. Because they are considerable, and it’s the performing artists who supply them.
A sacred thing to protect
Archaeologists have found evidence of musical instruments in the earliest civilizations. According to one version of a Zapotec legend, music was so precious it had to be stolen from the Sun God by a lesser deity who took pity on the people who were suffering without it. In many societies, music accompanies story-telling and dance, offers solace, and often accompanies joy. It also has a few more practical benefits.
Listening to music, studies have shown, can help lower blood pressure, ease pain, and evoke happy memories. Learning to play an instrument improves cognitive skills, memory, attention, and problem-solving abilities. And playing or singing in a group promotes social skills and teamwork.
As the Zapotecs understood, a world without music would be sad indeed.
But rarely do we consider the well-being of the professionals who perform or teach the music. And when we do, it’s usually when a drug overdose or another form of self-harm brings down a famous entertainer, or when it’s cited as the cause of a canceled show or tour.
And there’s a reason for that, as Ms. King, who has more than 20 years experience on stage, explains.
“When you listen to music or look at a piece of art, you don’t want to think about the suffering of the artist,” she says. “You’re there for your experience, for your catharsis. If you have to think about how the person on stage is struggling to pay the rent or has depression, it ruins your experience. We’re letting all of that go so we can have catharsis together.”
That’s “a sacred thing to protect,” she understands. So her mission is to find ways to “preserve what music is for listeners and also care for the people who make that music so their work is sustainable.”
In terms of temperament and professional experience, she considers herself well-suited for the job. And that’s why she’s currently pursuing a Masters in Social Work from Boise State University with the goal of becoming a Licensed Clinical Social Worker — the final piece she needs in order to best support the mental health of her fellow performers.
It’s a need she’s seen first-hand.
ON THE ROAD
King, 44, grew up in Missouri but discovered her true home when she arrived in Olympia in 2006.
“It was Spring,” she remembers, “and when we got out of the car, I felt instantly that I was home.” Two years later, she “reluctantly” relocated to Portland but now says she wouldn’t live anywhere else. “The music community is a big part of it,” she explains, “and I’m a person who has a lot of anxiety and depression, so nature is very calming. There’s forests everywhere here, and green is very calming.”
But after several years of piecing together a living doing solo performances, session work, and writing string arrangements, in 2011 she began a career as a touring artist, including 18 months playing keys and singing lead with roots rockers Heartless Bastards, and most recently, five years as a back-up singer and viola player with Brandi Carlile.
“Touring is the closest I’ve come to finding income that lasts for a year, or that is enough to quit other jobs,” she says. “But nothing is stable, nothing is predictable, nothing is long-term. I do love it. I love being nomadic. And I like coming home. I’d be happy being gone for six months and being home for six months.” Besides, she found she was suited for the road — even-tempered and willing to “swing with whatever comes your way.”
Plus she smiles readily and laughs easily — useful qualities when you’re traveling and performing in close quarters.
Being on the road is hard on the body, though. Vans, planes, tour buses with sleeping quarters like coffins — standard for all but superstars. And hard emotionally, too.
“Like no time in the schedule for your food, or when you show up to a hotel and they don’t have your name and you can’t reach the manager because it’s the middle of the night … Things like that make you feel you’re out there on your own and vulnerable,” she says.
Many things can go wrong, and that creates a lot of stress. “Day after day of that, everybody loses it and things start to crumble,” she’s observed. “Bands break up, people get sick, bad choices are made.”
So one thing that’s needed, she believes, are mental health services on the road for performers and crew. “Especially on the road,” she says, “because there’s nobody out there for you. You need a space where you can talk.”
I LOVE TO SERVE
Life as a side person has also suited King. “I can’t stand the spotlight. I don’t want that visibility and I don’t want that pressure,” she says. “I just love service. I call myself a blue-collar musician because I just show up like a soldier or something.”
That mind-set fits most of the work she does in Portland, including sessions with groups as diverse as the Decembrists, Blue Cranes, and her co-op trio, Bizarre Star Strings (which includes her sister, Patty King). She’s also a founding member of the art/pop trio Swansea.
King does maintain a SoundCloud channel that features her own compositions — “weird music,” she calls it, “that doesn’t have to meet anyone’s expectations.” But to monetize or seek a larger audience for it would ruin the beautiful and fulfilling process of creating it. As a professional, she prefers to work for others.
“I love serving,” she says. “When I write a string arrangement or choral stuff, background vocals or lead vocals for someone, I’m trying to fit their song and do the best job I can so I can keep getting work and pay the bills. So even though I’m scared that it’s not going to be right, I still love that I get to do it. I just want to be in service to other artists and make magic happen with music. And that feels like the form of service I’m ultimately leading to with mental health work.”
TURNING POINT AND COMMUNITY SUPPORT
She’d always thought of herself as a musician and never seriously considered another path until the pandemic gave her time to face her feelings.
“Any musician will tell you,” she says, “you’re suffering being self-employed and not having the services to make sure your basic needs are met. I’d been experiencing that, and my peers were experiencing that, and it didn’t seem to be addressed by anybody.”
As 3-Leg Torso violinist Bela Balogh recently said in a farewell to his life’s work: “Playing music for a living can really crush your soul after awhile. I’m sick of it..” A sentiment echoed by fellow Portland performer Stephanie Strange in a Facebook post: “The resiliency it takes to be a working musician is killing me. I’m dying. I’ll never survive this.”
Beyond such outbursts, King has observed, musicians rarely talk about it.
“We do sometimes,” King says. “But most of the time you’re trying to be a good hang, and you don’t want to be talking about how hard it is.”
Then, during the pandemic, she started listening to therapy podcasts and thinking about her own family issues. “And one day I sat up in bed and said, ‘My personality is aligned with being a mental health professional.’”
That epiphany sent her to Portland State to finish a bachelor’s degree; now, she’s nearly halfway through a non-residential Masters program in Social Work at Boise State.
Remarkably, she funded her graduate tuition and living expenses with a GoFundMe campaign that raised $40,000 in just three weeks, the bulk of it in small donations. “About half the people who contributed were fans of Brandi Carlile,” she points out. “A lot of those fans befriended me on social media and saw what kind of person I am through the way I represent myself online. I’m a publicly vulnerable person. I’m very revealing. I don’t think I would have had as much support had they not seen me that way.”
And if you ask for help, she found, “the people that care about you are going to do whatever they can.” Now, in addition to her inner passion for the career, she feels “a sacred obligation” to give back to the community that has supported her.
PART OF THE COMMUNITY
Once she has completed her training, King doesn’t plan to stop playing professionally; she understands that being part of the community she serves gives her credibility and an advantage in understanding the problems that musicians face.
Willa Schneberg, a Portland LCSW whose practice includes a focus on the special concerns of the artist, is herself a ceramic sculptor, curator, and award-winning poet. “I get real pleasure out of this work,” she explains, “because working with artists is something I understand deeply and I can be empathetic for their challenges and successes.”
Unlike King, who plans to work primarily with professional musicians, Schneberg also sees clients whose mental health challenges have gotten in the way of making or sharing their work. But they both recognize that it’s often social-political issues that hinder the artist — issues that can’t be resolved by therapy alone.
“Some women feel they’re not getting the attention they deserve because they’re women,” says Schneberg. ”Some people of color feel they aren’t getting attention they deserve because of their skin color. Some white people are concerned they won’t get a grant because they aren’t members of a racial or ethnic minority or queer groups.”
And of course most artists, whether practicing or aspiring, suffer from an increasing shortage of opportunities. That’s where King’s focus on providing material support in addition to counseling comes in. At present, she heads Musicians Local 99’s Mental Health Committee. But she has plans for more.
“Artists need a great deal of time to create, which requires the luxury of having your basic needs met so that you have time to do your work,” she says. “I want to find a way to get live/work sites where rent is paid or reduced. I want to find a way to get self-employed people health insurance that they can afford.”
King uses environmental destruction as a metaphor for our treatment of performing artists. “We exploit and extract from artists, and they burn out and stop doing it. We take what we can from them when we can, and then we don’t care what happens.” She hopes to contribute to a better system.
“This can be far more sustainable if we just recognize that resources can be provided and we can find income sources. I have a pretty grand idea that Taylor Swift should start a foundation for touring artists and crew that’s funded by her and that provides mental health support for people on the road.”
And Swift did sort of take a step in that direction by reportedly giving six-figure bonuses to her Eras Tour crew and supporting cast members. But individual largess pales in comparison to what institutions can provide.
MEANWHILE, IN L.A. COUNTY
Another approach in the field of social service through the arts has taken shape in Los Angeles County, where the Department of Arts and Culture, through its Youth Development through the Arts and Creative Wellbeing initiatives, is disbursing over $10 million a year in contracts to arts organizations who provide non-traditional mental health support to at-promise youth and other marginalized populations.
“I always wanted to help other artists make money,” says L.A. County Program Specialist Elizabeth Nails, a theater and performance artist whose MSW degree allowed her to help build infrastructure to bring artists into new career pathways. “Now they’re able to work as teaching artists and serve the community and get paid a living wage,” she says.
Her Department contracts with non-profit organizations such as The Arts for Healing and Justice Network that represents 27 arts organizations, and with school districts and Foster Family Agencies. It involves a great deal of coordination and networking, but the result is support for artists, some of whom end up working in the field full-time.
And though her job in a large bureaucracy is different from Schneberg’s private practice, they both understand that artists have a role to play in promoting the general well-being, and that they often need help to fulfill that role. And they both bring their experience as practicing artists to the job.
Some artists serve through society through public performances, some by supporting those who are in the spotlight, and others by designing the means to give artists a bigger role in civic life. The clinical work of Schneberg, the policy and program-building of Nails, and the aspirations of King are just different sides of an emerging vision of the place of artists in the community.
It’s an important one that deserves more support than it’s received. After all, in the case of musicians anyway, they possess a resource so precious it had to be stolen from the gods.