By Steve Ehrlich
Like many people reading this, I have chronic Lyme disease. My battle with Lyme and its equally malicious co-infections, Babesia and Bartonella, began 15 years ago.
Similar to the experiences of fellow Lymies, it took a year to get a diagnosis. Since then, dozens of doctors and hundreds of medications and supplements have done little to quell the 30 symptoms that rollercoaster through my life every hour.
Eight years ago, I had to end my 30-year career. When you can’t remember the names of people you work with every day, dread the inevitable pain of sitting in an office chair, and the effort to be cordial with colleagues and customers is almost as bad as the pain itself, you realize that full-time work is not for you.
But my story doesn’t start or end here.
In the first week of not being at work, I realized two things: First, that a sofa with heated blankets on my back and legs was the place I needed to be, and second, that one can only look at the TV screen and ceiling for so long.
No more doomscrolling
The idea of doomscrolling on the Internet was not that appealing either. I was in an in-between state of a job being more than I could handle and doing nothing being less than desirable.
In addition, the last thing I wanted was for pain to be front and center of my mind all the time. Our brains only allow us to think about one thing at a time, so I needed a distraction that would keep my mind focused not on where it hurts the most, but on something (actually anything) else.
For some people that distraction might take the form of painting, sewing, cooking or some other activity. My primary distraction is writing music.
I learned the piano and guitar at an early age and became proficient enough to earn a teaching certificate. What interested me most though was writing music. My piano teacher’s (justifiably) pained expression when confronted with my first composition told me everything I needed to know.
To be fair, I was only about 10 years old at the time. Undeterred, I have continued to write music sporadically throughout my life, even as I pursued a career in a different field. It’s a somewhat cosmic joke that I had to become sofa-bound before I could focus on music while at the same time not being able to play an instrument anymore.
Musical software to the rescue
To overcome this obstacle, I found software that allows me to enter the music notes on my laptop and play back what I’ve written. In fact the software was better than I hoped for, in that it could play the sound of any instruments, not just the guitar and piano.
I am blessed to have musical ideas running through my head every day and I now had the tools to formalize them.
I can focus on writing music for only an hour or two each day and so progress is slow – it takes around four weeks to write each song. That said, it’s not like I have somewhere else to be, apart from a doctor’s office.
I’ve written about one song per month for the last eight years and now have nearly 90 filed away.
I started writing music as the ideas came to me with the only self-imposed requirements being that it was melodic and easy on the ear. I soon realized though that I needed to answer this question: What type of music should I write?
Conventional wisdom is that authors should write from their own experiences. Artists often put out albums containing gut-wrenching songs reflecting their sorrows after a breakup or tragic event, and it would have been easy for me to go down this route.
But then I thought: who would want to listen to sad songs about my sorry state or head-banging music that reflects my frustration and anger about my condition? So I went in a different direction.
My brain spits out happy songs
I am regularly confounded that my brain spits out songs that are predominantly happy, but I figure that if they make someone else feel just a little better or provide a distraction for them, then mission accomplished.
As you might expect, regardless of whether a song was good or bad, family and friends were bound to say: “you should create an album.” It was easy to not indulge in that fantasy. After all, who was actually going to play on this album?
I then remembered that wonderful things exist on the Internet, and that includes websites where professional musicians from around the world tout their skills. Perhaps it was possible after all?
I decided to give it a go. I put my songwriting pen aside and dedicated my two functional hours per day to releasing an album. It became a nine-month process that started with selecting a dozen of my songs that were simpatico with each other.
I cleaned them up so that each musician could play from the sheet music for their instrument, chose the musicians and worked with them to record their parts (in their own studios), identified sound engineers to mix and master the songs, and selected a distributor to get the music onto popular streaming services.
“Jazz and All That”
It helped to have a daughter with fantastic design skills to apply the finishing touch… artwork for the album cover.
The result is “Jazz and All That,” a smooth jazz instrumental album performed by my virtual band, “The Inter Section.” It would make a perfect companion to your next IV infusion, a quiet dinner, or reading, painting or whatever your distraction happens to be.
You can listen to it on all the popular streaming services like Spotify and Apple. I hope you feel the joy, passion and soul I embedded in the music and enjoy it enough to purchase the album because all proceeds go to LymeDisease.org and Bay Area Lyme Foundation.
I say this (still) with some measure of disbelief, but I wrote and produced an entire album from my sofa. The only question now is: what are you going to do from yours?
Steve Ehrlich emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1989 from South Africa. Chronic Lyme disease cut his career in the software industry short. He turned to writing music and with his virtual band, The Inter Section, released his debut album, Jazz and All That, in November 2024.
