Welcome to Headroom, where we discuss all things essential to mental health and well being. I'm your host, Jim Owens, a licensed professional counselor at Lansing Community College. I'd like to emphasize that while this podcast does not contain medical advice, it does introduce you to some phenomenal people who have incredible ideas for you and your life. Having said that, let's get into the Headroom and begin today's conversation with Chuck Page. Welcome, Chuck.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, appreciate it. Now, is it Charles or Chuck? How should we do this?

It's Chuck to my friends. Okay. All right.

So that's how we'll roll it. So I appreciate you coming in. And the reason I invited you in is because we both share something in common. We each have two jobs. No kidding. We both work for the college. You're a librarian. I'm a counselor. You're a musician. I'm a musician. I wanted to talk about music with you and the benefits of music and how music is good for us and how it's been good for you personally. And maybe I'll have a chance to share some of that for myself, too. But tell us who you are, where you're from. People are going to hear your voice in a minute, and if they're listening here in Michigan, they're going to say, he probably didn't grow up in Michigan.

Yeah, sure. I moved to the Lansing area about 25 years ago to study music education at Michigan State. Prior to that, I was born and raised in North Carolina. So did you know a little bit of college down there and then had a teacher, music teacher, that kind of recruited me to come up here and did that, taught in the public schools, music for a while and. And then ended up going back and getting my library science degree and ended up here at LCC as a librarian.

Wow. And so your really, your original background was music, correct? I suppose, yeah. And how did you, you know, get turned on to music at what age did this come into your life? Where you thought, part of my identity,

you know, it was maybe a little bit later than. Than a lot of people. I was involved in just a lot of different stuff, you know, as a kid, but. But not really in organized music at all until, you know, when I was quite a bit older probably, I got really interested in pop music, particularly like hard rock, heavy metal, you know, mid-80s when I was in junior high school, really, and decided I wanted to. To try to learn the guitar. Went through that and throughout high school, kind of switched from guitar to vocals to bass, a few different things. Just in bands, but didn't really start taking formal music lessons until my senior year of high school.

So did you do any concert band in middle school, high school?

No. I did sing in the choir for a couple of years, but I didn't do any instrumental music until my last year of high school.

And that's when you started getting trained, correct. In music? Yeah, that is. I don't know if it's late to the game, but most of us get introduced to music in school. I mean, you were at least in a choral ensemble and you learned how to read music and you understood at that point what was going on. But guitar and rock music on the radio is what really drew you in at first.

Absolutely. Yeah.

I have to now I'm already going to make a turn for mental health. Because you being a teenager and you latching on to pop and rock music, was that therapeutic at that moment, at that stage in your life?

You know, it was something that, you know, my friends were doing. So it definitely was kind of a social thing for me. So in that way, yeah, I would think so. You know, it became part of my life and part of my friends lives and kind of what we were doing.

Yeah, it strikes me that's probably the age where most of us start getting into artists from the radio and we start identifying with, you know, I'm into metal. What are you into? Oh, I'm not into that. And we start, you know, getting a little tribal about our music scene. I don't know if you experienced that quite in junior high or high school, but it is a part of social identity, isn't it music?

Oh yeah, for sure, for sure.

And even now maybe you can bring us up to speed. What is your primary instrument and in what capacity do you play that?

So I am a bassist. I play both the double bass and play with the Holland Symphony and also do some freelance gigging. I also play electric bass and have a local band over in East Lansing. So definitely a bassist. But as, as the bass lends itself, I'm able to play in a lot of different kind of venues and different genres, which is great.

Yeah, I mean, so it starts there in pop rock music and then at some point you got a little more serious. Was that guitar and bass lessons that you started taking when you were young?

I did take a few guitar lessons. Really what happened was there was a period of time in high school where the opportunity to join a band came up. But as a bass player, which, you know, I wasn't a bass player but I was convinced to give It a. Give it a shot, give it a try. And it really, I just took to it much more than guitar. And then, you know, at that point, after a few years, then started taking some more, you know, formal lessons.

So kept playing through college and then playing in bands, I'm assuming the college music scene.

Yeah, yeah.

And kept going. And even now.

Right.

As you say, I don't know if it's the college music scene that you play in anymore, outside the symphony that you play in.

Right, right.

But still, music's been a big part of your life.

Absolutely.

I don't know if you have a quote unquote split personality here as academic librarian and musician on the road. I mean, how do you see yourself? How much has music impacted your identity?

That's an interesting question. Because one of the things I end up, I guess running into is when people ask me what I do, they think, oh, you're a librarian and you've got this hobby, which is not the way that I look at myself at all. I see those as two sides of the coin, so to say. Or so to speak, you know, I am a librarian and that's what I do most of the time during your normal workday. But I'm also a musician and I'm also a music educator. I do have a studio based students at a local high school. So all of those things I really see as equals. So even though they're not maybe within that kind of same realm, I do see them all as equally important.

Here I'm going to share a little bit about how I feel similar in that I was a drummer before, long before, and I played drum set and have played and we can talk about our histories in music a little bit. People might find that interesting. I've played all over the country and you probably have too. But I was a drummer long before my family could afford to buy me a drum set. Probably when I was 14 years old, older sister's boyfriend was a drummer and he happened to give me a set of drumsticks because he could see me tapping on things all the time. So my first drum kit was a wing backed leather chair and I had the bass and the snare and the high hat. I didn't even know the terms at the time, but it had different sounds at different places on the chair. So that's what I first started playing. And then my first job when I graduated from high school, I worked on a farm picking fruit and vegetables. And the first two paychecks I got together, I went immediately to the music store and Bought the drum set that was the garbage kit stacked up in the corner, just. And I didn't know it, it looked like a Porsche to me. You know, it looked like the creme de la creme, but it was a piece of junk. But it was my first drum set, brought that home, and I could play it right away. So my identity as musician came long before my identity as counselor. Even now, of course, you and I share this. We have sort of an identity as husbands and parents, and we have kids and we're married and stuff. So all those things. But for me, music was the very first one. I don't know if that sort of tracks for you too.

Yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, being a librarian, that's kind of a unique profession in the fact that you can't even get an undergraduate degree in librarianship. It's so. So almost all of us started in something else. But definitely, you know, I was really involved in visual art as well as. As music. So I think that was really kind of the first things that I latched onto, for sure, would be both that music and visual art, and went through quite a few years of training, both pre college and college in music.

So one thing I want to talk about with you as musicians and people who love music is a little bit about the difference between the therapeutic benefit of listening to music. And here we're not going to get into the research on it, but just personally the therapeutic benefit of experiencing music. And then I think it's something quite different to play music and the kind of catharsis or the therapy that sometimes comes out as the form of playing an instrument. So I don't know if you've thought about those two, you know, the dichotomy I'm setting up there a little bit. But I was saying earlier, when you're a teenager, a lot of us, we glom onto music because they're saying this lead singer is saying something that we feel, or the band is expressing themselves in a way that we wish we could in a certain sense. So I don't know. Do you have any connection to that for yourself? Like music as a felt experience has been therapeutic to you over your life?

Sure. I mean, I think it kind of goes back to maybe especially when you're young, to your identity, you know, it becomes part of who you are. And it. And it. We kind of talked a little bit about, you know, this like maybe friend group or groups that, you know, identify because of those things. So I definitely think, and I do think kind of like, you Were saying that the experience of listening to music and playing music can in some ways be very similar and in some ways be very different, for sure. So yeah, I definitely have connections you can experience.

Yeah, you can feel that playing music and playing in different genres of music, they call on us to do different things. And maybe I'll just say a little bit about my experience and you can share yours because I've played music in situations where I had charts and like, for example, I was in the music pit for a play, let's say, or I had charts given to me by an artist, a recording artist, and I needed to perform their music live for them. And so that tended to be a bit more of a skill based, mechanical, intellectual experience as opposed to my punk rock bands that I was playing in the early 90s, which were kind of emo, emo core and just like, you know, grungy and just, you know, some screaming and getting your, you know, bashing away and things and getting my attention and frustration out that way. So sitting at the drum set for me has taken on many different forms. It's been very different experience for me in terms of what it's been like to play that instrument. It's a weird instrument. It's got a lot of weird stuff on it usually. So what about yourself? I mean, playing in different situations, I mean, do you approach things differently? I can only imagine it's similar to mine, but here I have to ask.

Yeah, for sure. And I think similar to percussion, I kind of already mentioned a little bit about with the bass. It gives me the opportunity to play in a lot of different genres. It's one of the few instruments, if maybe one of the only instruments that almost any ensemble is going to have some sort of bass. So I do think that, you know, if you go from playing say in a symphony orchestra where, you know, your job is first and foremost to play all the notes and all the rhythms perfectly correct. And it's. And it's much more than that. There obviously is musicality involved in it when you get to, you know, a higher level. But you know, I did, I did also perform in punk bands growing up. And so that it can be a lot more loose. But then, you know, I'm always thinking about how there are connections between those things because like one of my favorite symphonic or classical composers is, is Beethoven. And I feel like Beethoven likes to take a motive and just kind of bang it over and over. And I'm like, this is like hard rock or punk as composed to Brahms, which is, you know, Long flowing, developmental type stuff. So I think there are a lot of connections as well that maybe some people wouldn't, on the surface see how

many people would associate Beethoven with punk rock? Yeah, right, right, yeah, but I know, I agree. I mean, I do. You and I probably have another similarity here. When we listen to music, as you're describing here, I'm ruined. I can't just listen to music like I once did. I listen to the percussion of it and the rhythm of it first. And I zero in on what is the drummer doing? Is he supporting the music? Is he sitting on top of it? Is he sitting behind it? Or she, or to the left or the right. And those metaphors I'm using are kind of real to me. Like, really, you can sit in front of the beat, you can sit behind the beat, you can sit on top of the music and be more pronounced instrument in the ensemble, or you can sit behind it much more subtly. And I'm always listening to, like, what was, you know, the dynamics of where that instrument sits and bass. It's something interesting. You point out. It's in almost every ensemble, but boy, does it take on a different life in each. Like, compared to classical, where it feels a bit more embedded in the music, where jazz, it can be embedded or up front. Well, jazz can be anything, I suppose it kind of goes anywhere. I don't know. How do you approach it when you're going into different ensembles? You're kind of paying attention to what does the song need? Or what do I feel like saying?

Or. Sure. And definitely you're going to have more freedom to do that in some genres than others, for sure.

So.

But again, you know, I've got this. The band that I play with in. In East Lansing is a little hard to, I guess, pigeonhole, but if I had to, I would say that it's kind of folk rock. But I feel like so often when I'm in the band, myself and the drummer both obviously are playing together. But I just feel like a lot of times I'm the aggressive, pushing force and it's. And it's like, it's because I came from punk rock. This is what I like. You know, it's like even if we're playing Bill Withers, you know, I want to push it and be aggressive, so. So, yeah, you can. You can have a lot of, I think, freedom in certain genres. When you get into, say, the symphony orchestra, you're really thinking not so much about what your ideas are, maybe as much. It's more what does the style Call for. Because even something as closely related as far as time periods as, say, Mozart and Beethoven, for. For the double bass part, they're played very, very differently. If you play one like the other, it's not going to be right.

Yeah, so.

So I think you are kind of falling more into a predetermined style in certain genres. And I guess that could really be true of a lot of. A lot of genres. I mean, some people might listen to the way that I play certain things and be like, that's not right. Why is he doing that? Yeah.

Certainly heard those criticisms of my playing before.

Yeah.

Yeah. So take me back again now to many of the people who listen to this are college students. So you're in college. Let's put you back in undergrad. And how often would you say, like, I'm in a certain kind of mood and I'm going to go find music that matches that mood or to lift me out of that mood? I mean, did you ever lean toward, man, I just kind of need to put on some X or Y or Z music? Was that part of your.

Oh, yeah, for sure. And it is interesting thinking about that idea of listening and playing being different. I know quite a few classically trained musicians who are performing within, you know, that particular genre that don't almost never listen to classical music, and there are plenty that do as well. But. But you do kind of find that where people might. What they're performing and what they're listening to might not be the same thing. So. Yeah, I mean, I think, for sure. I guess a really simplistic way to answer that question would be that I don't hardly ever listen to orchestral music when I'm driving for a couple of reasons. I mean, I guess one practical reason is there's so many dynamics that the road noise just, you know, kind of it's listening to. But also it's like that. That's. That's a style of music that commands your attention. It demands your attention, I guess, where if I, you know, if I'm listening to just like 80s heavy metal, I can kind of just listen to it in the background a little more. So I think that that kind of drives maybe what I listen to as well, but also the situation, you know, if I go into the gym and I'm going to lift weights, you know, I'm probably not going to listen to Mariah Carey, you know, maybe I'm listening to Slayer. Y.

Right, right, right. So.

So, yeah, I mean, and maybe that's a kind of a simplistic way to answer the question.

But.

But maybe that's kind of the way that I'm choosing things.

I think people are very careful about. This is my workout playlist.

Yeah.

And this is my study playlist. And maybe this is my driving playlist. I think I've never been that organized with my music. In fact, I enjoy. I have such an eclectic. Probably like you and probably like a lot of people, an eclectic playlist. If you were listening to my itunes gyms station, it'd be wild. It would go from Mike and the mechanics to Kamasi Washington to Bach and back around again. It would be wild. I enjoy that. I enjoy how music just takes me and it brings a lot of memories back too, when I hear music. Probably for yourself, too. So was college tough? Was it tough for you going through college?

I don't, you know, I don't think so. I think, you know, college, when I look back. Well. And I guess I'm still in college technically.

Yeah, we both are. Yeah. Yeah.

I just decided to stick around till. Until they'd pay me. But no, I think for me, college was almost liberating because I got to choose what I wanted to study. I got to immerse myself in music and take these classes that weren't offered in high school and really kind of live that life as this studying, aspiring musician and kind of pour everything into. Into it. So. So I guess, you know, if we're talking about from a mental health standpoint, that was probably one of the first times where I really felt like I was in control and it was. I was working on something that was very fulfilling and it meant a lot to me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The. The guardrails are off.

Yeah.

You're an adult. Off to college. I don't know if you went off to college. Did you go away to university? Yeah, yeah. In a dorm and all that stuff. So, yeah, it's total. It's freedom.

Sure.

Social freedom. But. But kind of what you're pointing to here, too, is intellectual freedom, the freedom to pursue what you're interested in.

Absolutely.

Even though universities, colleges, they give you a curriculum to follow, you get to choose the major and you didn't shy away from music or music ed. Because we often hear. And I don't know how often we hear it anymore, but I certainly heard it growing up. You'll never make a living as an artist.

Right, right. And, you know, and that's not to go off on a different path here, but that's one of the things that I kind of, I guess a pet peeve of mine is that I feel like too often in music school, we've got two different paths. You're either going to be a performance major and you're going to win a job in a major symphony, or you're going to be a band director, and that's it. But there are so many other options, and I'm living one of those other options right now, and I'm very happy doing it. I think that we kind of do our students and our young people a disservice by saying, like, if you're going to go into music or art or whatever, that, you know, you're just throwing your life away and you'll never make money, you know, So I don't think that that has to be true.

Yeah, I think sometimes we hitch up the idea of getting an education and into. It's a way of making an income. Because to me as an artist, and I probably identify as artist more than anything else, even though I'm a mental health counselor, I'm a musician. But it's all done very artfully. My master's degree is a master of arts in counseling. It's an art to do it, but being an artist is a great way to live, to create a living for yourself. Is it the best way to make an income? I don't know. I don't really. I mean, it sort of comes after the fact. It's not unimportant. But if you want to make a living, really, if I'm pushing that image, that metaphor a little bit, yeah. Why wouldn't you want to create something? And really what you've done with your own life is created a new way of being a professional musician. Not necessarily a new way, but your own way that works for you where you're. You're in higher ed, you work in higher ed, you're helping students every day figure out how to research ideas and get things accomplished and put ideas together. But as a musician, then you're entertaining. So there are many ways.

Yeah, absolutely.

So what's it like being in a large. Playing in a large orchestra? I have a friend who does this, and I asked him about it once, and he told me, so you have to say what you think here. I joked with him about practicing, and he goes, I don't practice anymore. Does that do people. I mean, when you get to your level and you're at the highest level here, so do people practice anymore or you just rehearse before a show?

I practiced this morning.

Okay.

So yes, I do practice. It depends on what you want And I think that's true of anything. I think that could be true of sports, it can be true of music. It can be true of. If you, if you get to a level and you're happy there and you think you've got to at least have some kind of maintenance, for sure. But if you want to move past that level and improve, then you do have to put the work in. I think so, yeah, I definitely do. Practice and what is practice and what is rehearsal? Rehearsal kind of is practice. So I guess there are different ways that you could look at it. I mean, I think most people would think practice is on your own, in rehearsal, in the group, which is true, but they are definitely related. Honestly, it depends. If I'm in the middle of the summer doing a pops concert with music that I've played five times already, I'm not going to spend hours and hours and hours poring over it. I mean, it would feel like a waste of time. So, yeah, I think it's different in any situation.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think you're right about pushing yourself. If you want to push yourself as a musician. There is quite a difference. And here I can get into the research a little bit. In my field and in others, there's quite a big difference between doing the thing that you're trained to do and practicing getting better at doing the thing that you're trained to do. And people make this mistake in my field as therapists, they think doing therapy is sharpening their skills in doing therapy. And it is not. It is you doing the thing that you skilled up to do. If you want to improve your skills, you got to get outside that environment, get coaching, tutoring, and work at the edge of your competency to be able to improve. And you need people on the outside to be able to point some of that stuff out to you, as you well know.

For sure. Yeah, yeah, well. And you know, like I said earlier, I teach high school students and, and I think teaching can be part of learning for sure. You know, teaching those students, you know, it helps me become better, not only at teaching, but it can kind of bring up some of those things where I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, this fundamental I'm working on with them, I've been ignoring in my own practice and maybe I need to go back and look at that myself for sure. But, you know, I think there's, there's a lot of truth in, I don't know the exact wording of the saying, but basically that, you know, if you're not moving forward, you're moving backwards. You know, really stagnant is kind of not a real thing.

Yeah, no, I know for myself and my instrument. I don't know about yours, but I got to the point where I was as proficient as I wanted to be, and then I forced myself to become more proficient. And then I couldn't find myself in scenarios where I could use that level of proficiency. So I kind of dialed it back a little bit and started picking up other instruments, one of which is bass. And I commit to myself this for everybody who's listening. I think this is a wise practice if you can get your hands on an instrument of any kind, or singing. I spend 10 minutes a day with my hands either on the piano keys, a bass guitar, or the drum set. Part of this is because it exercises a certain part of your brain that doesn't otherwise get exercised. It is kind of in some ways a sensory deprivation tank from the rest of the world. It kind of focuses my experience into something beautiful. Just I'm just immersed in music, which to me that's just a joyride. And it probably is for you too. And I don't know, I mean, that daily practice of playing music. What would your life be like if you didn't have that, if you didn't touch the instrument?

Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of. You talked a little bit about research and of course, you know, people who talk about the Mozart effect and all this different stuff, and that's fine. And there's obviously some truth in a lot of that, but really, you know, I think that music kind of sharpens you and sharpens your focus and your attentiveness because, you know. Yeah, can I. Can I sit on the couch with my electric bass and have the TV on and somebody talking to me and noodle around? Yeah, sure, I can do that, but that's not really practicing. So if I. If I need to, you know, get into a room by myself, shut the door and really focus. And that's something that I think a lot of people are kind of losing the ability to do in our. In our modern world. And I think that's very helpful.

Yeah, I didn't want to make this conversation all about all the research that's out there on how effective music therapy is for mental and emotional disorders, for neurological disorders, for physical mobility disorders. But it's out there. I'll put it in the show notes. I think people who aren't aware of the power of music biologically and psychologically to improve our well being there's a raft of research out there on it. For me, I'm more interested. And to me, that's just so obvious. I mean, there's music therapy programs. You go to a hospital. There's music therapists that come see you before and after surgery. You want to diagnose your kids with adhd. There's tests for that regarding music at a very young age. Parkinson's, Alzheimer's symptoms are reduced through music therapy. I mean, I could go on and on, but. And that, to me, I kind of know all that because I studied music therapy in school. I had a few classes in that. What I'm more interested in is kind of encouraging people to hear what it's like to be a musician, to interact with music, because it's just for maybe just even for the joy of it, for the love of it. I mean, we're getting close to the end of our time here. But what is it that keeps you engaged in music now? What is it about it that this relationship you have with being a musician, that just keeps you interested?

That's a hard question, because to me, I think it's been such a big part of my life for so long that it really just is part of me. I can't imagine not being involved in music. It would be just. It would be just as weird as me trying to imagine being in a car accident and losing my legs. You know, it's just. It's not something I think about not doing. It really is just part of my life, really.

So.

So I don't really know what the actual answer to that question is.

Yeah, well, no, I appreciate that. I think what you're describing is you found something very young that opened up something in you. That is who you are at this point. It is. And I'm the same. It's inseparable from my identity. In fact, I'm less consider myself musician and more drummer. And I don't know about yourself. Are you musician or a bassist? If you're pressed. If you're pressed, yeah.

Yeah, probably a musician. Because I think if, you know, I couldn't play the bass, I would. There would be some other outlet.

Okay, that's fair. Well, I want to. Thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah, thank you.

And read my outro here and let people know about. They have more questions about these kinds of things. If they questioned about music in general, they could probably come find you in the library and ask your questions. Especially if they wanted information on music careers or research in music, you can go with that. If they want to follow up on any of this music therapy research. We have a librarian here who could help us find that information.

That is right.

So I want to thank Chuck for coming on the show. Also our producers, the entire team at LCC Connect who make the show possible. Anyone listening can access show notes, previous episodes, and explore other podcasts at LCC.edu/Connect. And lastly, I want you to know that if you are experiencing any mental health challenges in your life, please ask for help. LCC students can schedule appointments to see counselors here on campus for free, and anybody in the community can call or text 988 for any mental health assistance. Okay, that's it. Thanks for coming on the show. Hope to see you all next time.

Thank you.