“Forget I Was Ever Here,” sung by Rachelle Garniez, released today

I wrote this song for a patient who had Alzheimer’s disease. It emerged from a series of music therapy sessions documented in this article for Vox. The story deals with the psychoanalytical concept of transference — typically understood as unresolved feelings that a patient projects onto the therapist — and how this musical transference played out in weekly improvisations with a patient I call Marian.

In her plaintive singing, Marian gave voice to painful memories from her childhood as the daughter of sharecroppers in the Jim Crow south. Her daughter told me about the multiple times Marian fled from abusive men.

“She’s a runner,” her daughter said.

There’s more to the story. The part that I did not write about was what came next. Marian affected me so much that in my personal practice time, I kept coming back to the musical themes in our sessions, especially our improbable mashup of the Underground Railroad spiritual “Wade in the Water” and the opera aria “When I Am Laid in Earth” by Henry Purcell.

This was my countertransference — the feelings for the client that arise in the therapist. Eventually, my private working-out of these emotions took the form of this original song, “Forget I Was Ever Here',” which I wrote for Marian.

A part of me asked: How dare I? What right did I have, as a white male, to presume to find common ground with Marian’s emotional world?

But Marian accepted my invitation to make music together. What I had going for me is that I love and had learned the musical tradition she came from. And I knew what it was like to share a home with someone who was violent, and the need to flee for safety. Unlike Marian, who had the courage to run, I enacted this need for self-protection only in my musical imagination.

I wrote this song with no expectation that the public would hear it. When I sang it to Marian on our last day of therapy together, she looked startled and said only, “Oh my God!”

“Forget I was Ever Here,” sung by Rachelle Garniez, is available today on Bandcamp.