Transcription of Daniel Connor for the show Musical Healing #303
Lisa Belisle: It is my pleasure to have in the studio with me Dan Connor, who has been an integral part of Maine’s music community over the last two decades. Prior to focusing on his solo career, Dan was a singer and songwriter for the band Gypsy Tailwind. In June 2012 he suffered a seizure, and doctors found a brain tumor the size of a peach. After a year of recovery, Dan was again able to drive a car, and took a job as a taxi driver. He has since begun playing his instruments and songwriting and recording again, and he released a new single in April. Thanks for coming in.
Dan Connor: Thanks for having me.
Lisa Belisle: I think I would have to correct this bio, “Maine’s music community over the last two decades.” I have known you as a musician since we were both in high school, at Yarmouth High School. That’s a few more than two decades ago.
Dan Connor: Yeah, that might be three or more, three and a half.
Lisa Belisle: Four, yeah. Who’s counting really? You’ve been doing this a long time.
Dan Connor: I have. Yes, I have. It’s kept me alive though, I think, somehow.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah? I was very shocked to hear about this brain tumor. That’s crazy, because I had known you in high school and then more recently, and then you went through this big, big thing. I guess I want to learn more about that.
Dan Connor: It was a shock to me as well. Jeez. I was at Old Port Fest. It was the day of Old Port Festival. I was out with my dog, beautiful day. Had just recently started dating this girl, and that night we hung out and I decided to stay at her place. What’s crazy is we had talked about seizures. She had talked about she had had a seizure, and I had said, “My mom’s epileptic, and I have epilepsy in my family.”
About 2:00 in the morning I had a seizure at her house. Of course at first she thought I was kidding and making it up or faking it, but then she realized that that wasn’t the case. She’s a blessing in that she’s a trauma nurse at Maine Medical Center. She knew right away and she woke me up and I came out of it and she said, “You just had a seizure.” Of course I thought she was joking, because we had talked about it, which I’d found odd that of all things we had been talking about seizures. Then I knew what had happened, and she put me in her car and brought me to Mercy. I had a CAT scan. They found something on that scan. They then brought me to Maine Med and put me in an MRI.
I came to the following morning, opened my eyes in a hospital room at Maine Med, and there’s this tall, lanky guy sitting at the end of my bed, and I looked around and saw all my family members, and I thought to myself, “What’s going on?” He said, “You have a brain tumor.” I thought, “Oh. This can’t be true. I must be dreaming.” The following morning I was in emergency surgery to have it removed.
Thank god I had that seizure. Had I not, the tumor was advancing, and could’ve been fatal. I was saved, really. It’s ongoing. It’s called an oligodendroglioma. Say that one 10 times fast. Wow, it’s something that I’ll have to deal with for the rest of my life. It’s not thought to be curable, but it’s manageable, like chronic illness is, the way they like to put it. Although it’s cancer, they just look at it like any chronic illness. I have to have MRIs every six months. That’s always nerve-wracking. I can have treatment, more surgery. I think they can manage it for a long time, which I’m lucky. If you’re gonna have a brain tumor, you’ll want to have an oligo, because it’s slower growing and more manageable.
It’s not a great thing to deal with, but it’s in some ways a blessing to me in that it put a lot of things in perspective, what’s important. Here I am, alive, doing well, and feeling pretty darn good, aside from the seizure medication, which is yucky, but that’s okay, I’ll deal with it.
Lisa Belisle: Before you had the seizure, there was no indication that anything was going on for you?
Dan Connor: Looking back, my behavior had changed pretty significantly over the prior three or four years. I was provocative, risk-taking, bursts of anger, just things that were out of character for me. Of course for me at the time, I didn’t notice it, but a lot of other people did. I can’t blame it all on that. A lot of behavioral changes, lack of follow-up, follow-through. A lot of things went haywire. I got fired by my own band. Then that happened, and they had it removed and the recovery was long and tough, but I think ultimately I’m better. I feel better. My brain’s working a lot better without that big tumor pressing on all the adjacent areas.
Lisa Belisle: That’s a good size for a tumor to be.
Dan Connor: It was. Yeah, it was. My doc said it was maybe the biggest one he had ever removed. He does a lot of those. The way I look at it is I’m strong to have a tumor that large and not have it be found earlier. Ultimately it’s a blessing. It’s hard to look at it that way all the time, but I’m here. I think it’s really inspired me to work harder at music, knowing that life can be very short, and at any moment you can lose your life. That goes for anybody.
About a year and a half to two years maybe after, I started to recover, get my thoughts back, be able to use my words, and I started writing and playing and recording on my own. Here I am, five years later. Coming right up will be my anniversary. They don’t call it remission with primary brain tumors. They call it stable. The tumor’s stable, and I’m really happy about that actually.
Lisa Belisle: You have a daughter who’s starting high school next year.
Dan Connor: Yes, Grace.
Lisa Belisle: This must’ve been really difficult for her.
Dan Connor: It was. We didn’t let her know, because she was eight-and-a half. I don’t know how her mom and my mother put it to her, because I don’t have a lot of memory of the whole time period, but just over this last year or so we’ve clued her in as to what’s going on and let her know that, “Your dad has an illness, and he goes for MRIs, and it’s brain cancer, and he’s gonna be okay.” It’s important to understand it and to know, so that if something goes wrong quickly, it won’t be a total shock to her. She’s been clued in, and she’s strong. She’s a tough kid. She’s a hell of a musician, by the way, multi-instrumentalist, records her own songs, plays guitar, horn, piano. I’m not so sure if there’s enough room for both of us in this town. It makes me really happy. I must have done something right.
Lisa Belisle: I would think that as someone whose primary interest in life is being creative, to have something like a tumor in the brain must’ve been really deeply unsettling.
Dan Connor: It was. Thankfully, I’ve learned a lot about the brain, the science of the brain. The tumor was located in the left frontal lobe, which is where you get your executive functioning, your ability to plan, your ability to organize. Your right frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex is where you get your creativity. I still have that part of me, and maybe more, without the left frontal lobe dragging it down into trying to overthink or over-plan. I feel like it’s allowed me to just flow creatively.
Planning is still tough. I have help from a very important person in my life, Gretchen, who helps me plan and record and takes care of the web things and the Facebook and all the social media platforms, and is also a pretty darn talented engineer. She holds it together on that side. She plays left frontal lobe in my band, I suppose.
Lisa Belisle: It sounds like even absent a tumor, it’s good to have somebody who can complement you well, regardless.
Dan Connor: It is. It’s good to have someone who understands and knows the limitations, memory, things like that, the ability to remember and schedule and things like that are difficult. The iPhone isn’t always the best way to do that. Sometimes I enter appointments and things and I think to myself, “Why didn’t it pop?” Using a calendar, things like that. I was kidding with someone here at the office, Chris, about, I know he had had a stroke, and I was asking him, is that why all the ink is all over his palms. It’s really important to have that support. It’s critical. Without it, things don’t go very well.
Lisa Belisle: Given that, as you said, you were fired by your own band, did you have the opportunity to go back and talk to people from Gypsy Tailwind and other parts of your life to say, “Hey, this is what happened to me.”
Dan Connor: Yeah. I was half-joking when I said “fired.” They just decided that I was just too crazy, and that’s the truth. I still feel badly about that. You can’t always blame that on a head injury or a brain injury. I have been able to go back and talk that through with them.
I can remember when I was being wheeled on a gurney, I guess, from my room, my hospital room, towards the surgery room, and I was half out of it, but all of them came running through the hall and escorted me to the surgery room. That says a lot about those guys. They’re incredible people. They made the band. Although I was the primary songwriter, none of that would’ve happened without all of them. I understand it. I’ve made peace with it and I’ve made peace with them. That feels good for everyone, I think.
It’s really important to heal. There were a lot of wounds that I created. I look back and I feel badly about it. Some of it was me maybe. Some of it was having a tumor, but that’s been healed, and it feels good.
Lisa Belisle: After you had recovered for a year and we were able to drive again, you were working as a taxi driver. That’s interesting, and probably not something that you expected would happen at that stage in your life.
Dan Connor: No, I hadn’t. I had never thought I would be a taxi driver. I had a friend that did taxi driving and said, “Hey, maybe you ought to check it out. I can get you can interview or a job maybe driving for a local taxi company.” I thought, “I don’t know.” Then I thought, “Maybe. Why not? It’s something different.” I got in a cab, and I was early on in my recovery, so my memory wasn’t great, and my ability to remember directions was not healed completely, but they knew, they were aware of my condition, and that I had had surgery.
The funniest thing is the first day they put me on the road in a cab, it was St. Patrick’s Day, the busiest day of the year. I had had minimal training. You’re working on a radio with rough and tough dispatchers. They put me in a cab, and I needed to go fill it with gas, drove it up the road to the Big Apple, pulled it up to the pump, had to lock the cab, because you never leave your cab open. I locked the cab, put the nozzle in to fill it up, went in and paid, came out, “Uh-oh, I’ve locked the keys in my cab.” First day on the road.
Went in, had the store call. The store had to call because my cellphone was in the cab. Now I’m absolutely, my heart’s racing a million miles an hour. They call down and they say, “One of your cab drivers locked his keys in his cab at our pump,” and they had to send another guy up with a backup set of keys, open it, and now you got two cabs off the road on the busiest day of the year. I finally get back in my cab, I book in, just, “Hey, I’m back on the road, this is cab whatever number,” and the dispatcher said, “Oh great, a rookie cab driver locking his keys in his cab on his first day, on the busiest day of the year,” and every cab driver hears this. That started that.
What was amazing about cab driving is I actually really enjoyed it. It really helped me recover. It helped me with memory, tasks, following instruction, directions, remembering to pick people up when they gave me a job, having conversations with passengers, practicing conversing, if you will, with people that I didn’t really know. It was good in that way and was anonymous and safe for me.
After a couple years I’d become really good at driving a cab. Then I suffered another seizure. My neurologist said, “Yeah, pretty much cab driving’s over for you.” I said, “Oh well. It was a good two-year run.” That was my best form of rehab, to rehab my brain. It was pretty incredible. It wasn’t necessarily by choice.
Looking back, I’ve really improved significantly over that period of time. During that time I became inspired and really started thinking about music, playing my instruments, and taking my recording gear at home out of a box that it had been sitting in. Where I was living had an old woodshed out back that I converted into a makeshift studio and started doing it again and really found the love and really worked my butt off, so to speak, to create songs that are real.
I’m feeling pretty good about it actually at this point, which is nice. I don’t know what I’d do without it. I don’t know that I’d be who I am today without it. I’d be a different person. There was a time I thought I would just give it up and that I couldn’t do it anymore. Giving up music, it’s not something I can do. I’ve tried. Can’t do it, so here I am, back at it again, recording songs and putting them out, and that feels amazing to me.
Lisa Belisle: I think about people in music, and I know that, for example, Spencer Albee, our sound engineer, he is roughly our age or a little bit younger, and he has just released his 20th album. That’s a lot of work over many, many years. What you’re describing is continuing that work and continuing something, that it’s a process. You keep showing up, you keep being creative, you keep doing the work. It seems to me that you’d really have to balance out what the energy is required to do that, with the love that you have for this music and what you can do with it.
Dan Connor: There are times when it’s difficult. I have a lot of days where I don’t feel good. They warned me about that, said, “You won’t feel good all the time.” My brain is constantly changing. It’s healing. Scar tissue is growing from the surgery. There’s a tumor there that’s growing slowly. They can’t actually see it, but they warned me about that, so yeah, there is a balance.
What I really love about it, however, is the process of doing it. That’s what I’ve figured out. It’s not necessarily the end result. It’s the getting there that I’ve really learned to love. It frustrates people, I’m sure, because by the time I’m done with a song and recorded, have done it so much, that I’ve moved on, and my whole thing is, “Yeah, that song is cool, but you gotta hear all this new stuff.” Of course they’re just hearing the things that I recorded and put out for the first time. I don’t want to say I’m necessarily bored with that. It’s more about I want to continue the process of doing it and seeing what happens. That’s where the real love is is doing it. There’s no end for me, I hope.
Lisa Belisle: Dan, we’re going to leave the show with a song that you have written and performed. Tell me about that.
Dan Connor: I really started to think about when I was told of my tumor and of my illness and what that felt like. I sat and thought and wrote and journaled thoughts about it. What came out in terms of the lyrical content and the whole sound was a analogy or comparison of a person who’s a prisoner that’s escaped or that’s trying to escape, and that I really felt as though I was in jail.
It’s the story of a person who hides out in a woodshed, which is where I worked, where my studio was. In the morning they went on the run and they were found in a hotel room hiding out, because they were playing the blues too loud and somebody called the front desk. The cops showed up and the cops arrested me and said, “Son, you better come with me. I’m gonna take you out and set you free.” The police drove me, and this is my surgeon, “I’m gonna set you free,” and they drove me to the desert and set me free and said, “If you survive the desert through the night with no clothes, no water, you deserve to be free.”
In the morning I woke to extreme temperatures, after a long night shivering and being cold, and got out of the desert and started hitchhiking and was picked up by an old man who drove me to the sea. I threw a bottle with a message home and stripped myself of those prison clothes. That’s the analogy of what I’ve been through, from the eyes of a prisoner, and that is set free and makes it and survives.
Lisa Belisle: I’m sure people are going to enjoy this song, and certainly I’m extremely appreciative of the fact that you have made it through all of this and that you have been set free.
Dan Connor: I hope it’s inspiring to people who have everyday struggles and wonder if they can make it through. Whether they have an illness or not, life is hard. If I can help, as an example of just persistence, not giving up. I hope it inspires people.
Lisa Belisle: We’ve been speaking with Dan Connor, who has been an integral part of Maine’s music community for at least the last two decades, probably more. We will continue to look for music from you and really wish you all the best. Thank you for still being here with us.
Dan Connor: Thanks for having me. It’s nice to be here.