Wearing a purple sweater, purple skirt, black leggings and purple nail polish to match, Mindy Rowland bounded onto the stage on the first night of Folk Fest.
“Everybody having fun?” she asked the crowd, which whooped and clapped its response.
Like many Folk Fest performers, Rowland and her band (called Mindy Rowland and Her Fishermen) had been preparing for months for their 20-minute set on the stage at Centennial Hall.
For Rowland, this was more than just a few months in the making. This performance came four years almost exactly after she suffered an injury that altered the course of her life and nearly took away her ability to speak.
More than a concussion
In April 2014, Rowland and her husband Stew were skiing at Eaglecrest when Mindy fell. She was wearing a helmet, but hit her head hard when she fell over backwards.
She got up, skied over to Stew and told him she didn’t feel well and wanted to go down. By the time she skied to the bottom of the hill, though, she had forgotten all about it. Ski area employees conducted concussion tests on her, asking her questions like who the president was.
Mindy kept asking why they were doing this test, and said she wanted to go back on the mountain. When they drove to the hospital next, Stew recalled, Mindy asked why they were going to the hospital and asked Stew if he was hurt.
Doctors determined Mindy had a concussion, and told her to take a few days off work. At the time, she was working in the Legislature and that year’s session was approaching an end. She only took a couple days off before she headed back to work, knowing this was a vitally important time of year.
Despite her attempt to return to normal, Mindy just wasn’t getting better. Then one day, she took an abrupt turn.
“Then one day overnight, I thought she had a stroke, because all of a sudden, she couldn’t get three words out in the right order,” Stew said.
They went to see doctors in Seattle, who told them Mindy was suffering from aphasia, which is the partial or total loss of the ability to communicate. It became incredibly difficult for her to form sentences, doctors told her, because the pathways in her brain weren’t functioning normally.
Mindy, currently 52, and Stew explained it by saying she basically has to search her head for the right word, so stringing together words or phrases takes much longer for her than a person without brain damage. As a consequence, conversations are exhausting for her.
She had to leave her job, and spent much of her time at home, seeing doctors or going to speech therapy. One of the biggest breakthroughs for Mindy came by accident, brought about by Elton John.
Singing her way to ‘normal’
Mindy and Stew have always been very musical people. Stew has played drums since he was a high schooler in Juneau, jamming with friends for decades. He and his friends would clear out the seating in the living room and play in the middle of the house.
Mindy would join in, singing as the group played through folk songs. They even played shows downtown sometimes.
That stopped when Mindy suffered her brain injury.
She deals with something called sensory overload, where loud sounds, or bright lights overstimulate her senses. Going to the grocery store is a huge stress on Mindy, Stew said, because the lights are bright and the multitude of options on the shelves can be overwhelming.
Suffice to say, a jam session in the living room was not something Mindy was going to deal with very well.
One day shortly after Mindy’s speech began failing, Stew was playing music on his stereo system and walked out of the house for a few minutes. When he came back in, he found Mindy singing along to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” At this point, Mindy could hardly string words together, but for some reason she could sing.
“In my head, when I’m talking, I sound funny ever since (the injury),” Mindy said. “It just sounds funny to me, but when I’m singing, it’s normal.”
They jumped at this breakthrough. Mindy’s speech therapist assigned Mindy “homework” that included singing more often and even trying to learn songs by heart. One of the songs she learned all the words to was Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.”
Music therapy has been used to treat people with traumatic brain injuries in many cases, for people who suffer strokes or car crashes or other situations that cause trauma to the brain. Former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head during a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson and made large strides in recovery through singing, with her doctors crediting music for helping rewire the pathways in her brain.
Once Mindy started singing, she saw similar strides. Stew said her speaking is 10 times better now than it was before she started singing.
Back at the microphone
Joe Emerson, a friend of the Rowlands and the guitarist when they would play together, began bringing his guitar over to the house again once Mindy began her music therapy. He would accompany her, working through a few songs.
Eventually, Emerson convinced Mindy to sing at open mic night at the Alaskan Bar. To avoid sensory overload, she wore earplugs or even noise-canceling headphones. The couple of performances went well, but they would absolutely wipe her out. She’d be in bed until 2 or 3 p.m. the next day, exhausted from the exertion.
“Nobody ever sees that part,” Mindy said.
Emerson finally asked Mindy a more serious question.
Was she ready for Folk Fest?
As it turned out, Stew was actually harder to convince than Mindy was. He wasn’t looking to lug his drum set around, he said, but because Mindy was so adamant, Stew agreed to play. They got the band back together: Emerson, Keith Heller, Chris Frary and John Hartle all signed on “in a heartbeat,” Stew said, when they heard Mindy was going to sing.
The rehearsals were energetic and spirited, many taking place in Frary’s garage. Mindy said she’s always been impressed with their playing, and has joked to friends that she could croak like a frog and still sound good with them behind her.
Her confidence was building, but she prepared for the worst.
“I told them, ‘You guys are going to have to learn some songs on your own, just in case,’” Mindy said. “’Maybe it could happen, is my head going to really hurt? Maybe I’m going to be too busy to stand up straight.’”
They were scheduled for 8:45 p.m. Monday night, prime time on the first night of the 44th annual Folk Festival.
Dancing on stage
Prior to their set, the band members went through a quick run-through backstage. It didn’t go well.
“I started making all kind of mistakes in the back room,” Mindy said. “Oh no. They told me, ‘It’s OK, you make the mistake now and we’ll be fine.’”
The Fishermen ended up being right. From the moment Mindy asked the crowd how they were doing to the closing line of John Prine and Iris DeMent’s “In Spite of Ourselves,” she commanded the stage with a joyous fervor.
She sang the songs seamlessly, never needing to pause to remember a line. She encouraged the crowd to sing during “Jolene” and danced during instrumental breaks. They started with Iris DeMent’s “Let the Mystery Be” before “Jolene,” then Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ version of “Let Your Loss Be Your Lesson” before closing with “In Spite of Ourselves.” The finale was a duet, which Emerson sang with her.
Mindy was pleasantly surprised with how many of her friends were in the audience that night. She saw a few at the time, but is still hearing from friends who mention they saw her on stage that night.
The performance took more out of her than the open mic nights, and Stew said it took a few weeks to get her energy back to normal. She’ll have plenty of time to rest up before next Folk Fest, but hasn’t thought about whether she’ll do it again.
She’s still singing, though, as it’s taken a new importance to her.
“There are some good things about my new life,” Mindy said. “I liked to sing before, but it means more now. I don’t know how to explain it.”
• Contact reporter Alex McCarthy at 523-2271 or amccarthy@juneauempire.com. Follow him on Twitter at @akmccarthy.
