"Wired for Music" Author Pieces Together Her Past Note by Note
Vancouver journalist Adriana Barton finds full-circle healing while writing her first book: "Wired for Music," a science memoir
By midlife, most people have accumulated a lot of former selves—different versions of who we are transformed anew by life-changing events. Sometimes we don’t realize how much we’ve changed until we look back on who we used to be; other times we intentionally abandon the past when we decide on a different trajectory for our futures. But midlife feels like a time to pull them back together, to reintegrate the pieces of your past into who you are today.
Journalist and author Adriana Barton’s science memoir, Wired For Music, embodies her own midlife re-integration process. What started as a deep dive into the anthropology, neurology, and health benefits of music turned into an equal part memoir by the time her book was finished. Adriana’s publisher—Greystone Books—kept asking for “more of her” in the book, knowing she had a story to tell.
Born in rural Ontario to a Ukrainian-immigrant engineer father and Canadian visual artist mother, Adriana previously wrote about the early days of her free-flowing, artsy childhood in “Growing Up Hippie”—later published in American Voices: Culture and Community (McGraw-Hill) alongside writings by Margaret Atwood and Anna Quinlan.
That in and of itself is a story. But there’s more: Adriana lost her father to cancer, spent time in a traditional Mayan village, and settled back in Quebec with her mom, sister, and new stepdad, where she was selected for entry to a prestigious state-run music conservatory. (All this happened by the age of five.)
Adriana grew up with the cello, learning through perfectionistic, painstaking daily practice. At 16, she was accepted into the Cleveland Institute of Music alongside Juilliard grads. Her cello performances ranged from weddings all the way to Carnegie Hall. Then, at 22, after earning a Bachelor’s degree from McGill University in cello performance, Adriana set the cello down and walked away—bringing with her a kind of “musical PTSD” she carried for years.
Adriana quickly shifted her focus to journalism for a chance to see life, ask questions, and meet new people. After earning a graduate degree in Journalism at Concordia University, she spent fourteen years reporting, writing, and copy-editing for Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, primarily covering health and science beats. Her bylines can also be found in Utne, Azure, The Boston Globe, among others. Adriana’s work has taken her to Syria, Jordan, India, Zimbabwe, and Brazil. She now lives in Vancouver with her husband and son.
Wired for Music garnered great blurbs before hitting shelves a year ago. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps Score, said Adriana’s book is “a riveting account of how melodies and rhythms connect us, and help us deal with alienation and anxiety.”
While Adriana’s story is fascinating and unique, the feeling of a life in pieces is part of the universal experience of growing older. A past filled with eclectic experiences, abrupt endings, and brand-new starts does make a great story. But when it’s your past you’re trying to make sense of, it can feel like solving a Rubik’s Cube that doesn’t have removable stickers.
I originally reached out to Adriana as an expert interview source for a music school parenting blog. I’m grateful that she agreed to be interviewed here as well to discuss midlife healing and book writing. I zoomed with Adriana last month and am so excited to share our conversation.
Thank you Adriana for connecting. I love your book for many reasons. Your overall story arc and themes were very relatable. Can you describe where you’re at now in the healing process? And how has writing this book been a part of your journey?
Well, I honestly didn’t intend to embark on a healing journey. It wasn’t my objective. It was something that happened. The book sort of started out as a geeky science endeavor, I didn't have an intention of exploring my own relationship to music and mining my past. Despite myself, it turned out to be an incredible gift. It made the book process take a lot longer, but I've gotten so much more out of it.
I had this “before cello” and “after cello” division of my life. And it's more dramatic than in my own thoughts, because I live in Vancouver and everything that happened in my cello years happened on the eastern side of Canada. People in my life— including my husband of nearly 20 years—didn't know me as a cellist, or see me as a cellist. Many haven't even heard me play the cello.
I think I had an unconscious desire to go back into my past. Like some part of me wanted to look at music again, but at arm's length and through an intellectual lens.
In your book you described the break with the cello as almost like losing a twin.
It was a dramatic break, not only in identity, but geography, self concept, and how other people see me. There were colleagues at The Globe and Mail—where I worked for 14 years—who had no idea that I had this backstory. It wasn't something I hid, but it was more something that I had detached from entirely within myself.
To be honest, I think I had an unconscious desire to go back into my past. Like some part of me wanted to look at music again, but at arm's length and through an intellectual lens. So I sort of threw the publisher a bone and said I would use my backstory to show I’m speaking from a position of experience.
But as time went on, I had increasing pressure from early readers, the publisher and editors saying, you know, this material is so much a fabric of your life, the good and the bad, and it’s so much who you are, how could you not tell us more. Even after I handed in the manuscript, the feedback was to “put more of you” in every chapter.
As difficult as it is to sit with the past, I’ve found it to be the best way to eventually move ahead. How did you manage dealing with the hard parts?
Remembering the Air India disaster was especially hard. The bombing of the plane killed hundreds of Canadians, including Rupa and Aruna, two girls in my orchestra. I had never grieved their deaths properly. I was 15 years old, going a million miles an hour as a teenager, getting through life. I didn't talk to my parents, friends, or anybody about it.
Then, while writing about it during the pandemic, I spent two weeks bawling and grieving as if it had just happened. It's hard to explain how I could have had that suspended somewhere in my consciousness for several decades. And there were other moments in my life like this that I processed for the first time while writing this book.
Part of me thinks it may not be possible to fully process anything in the moment, but I also know the culture doesn’t always support real-time processing. And back then, I don’t remember any adults thinking about any impacts on kids that didn’t pose an immediate danger.
Trauma wasn't understood in the same way as it is now. Writing the book allowed me to revisit key times in my life and see them through my adult 50-year-old eyes. I felt a lot of sadness for different events that occurred, but I also started seeing missed opportunities in terms of more joy that could have been had or more support that could have been given in different areas.
Midlife can be a really powerful time, because it's a reset. Through retelling our stories for ourselves, we can transform our understanding of the past and see what our unconscious assumptions may have missed. And then you realize that the story isn’t as simple as we thought.
Seeing other perspectives brought elements of forgiveness, too. For example, when I researched the long tradition of classical music, starting with the roots of Christianity and the traditions that existed long before my teachers who were exposed to these traditions, I started to feel compassion for some of the teachers who treated me quite rigidly and harshly. I understood that they came from that the same way.
Forgiveness is a process. I found I first had to let myself feel my hurt feelings for some time. And then, after a while, I could start seeing other points of view that would’ve never been possible to do as a child. Did you reach out to people from your past while writing the book? Or have others reached out to you since your book came out?
What really surprised me was that the journey of self transformation and healing continued after the book came out. I started receiving communications from people from my early life, many of whom I hadn't seen in decades.
I'll be honest, even as an adult, even after writing the book, I had this internal shame around my abrupt end to the cellist period of my life, thinking some people might perceive me as having been a loser, or “not making it” and that kind of thing. But I learned how mistaken I was and those relationships were also transformed. I feel the parts of me are more integrated.
Midlife can be a really powerful time. Through retelling stories you realize that the story isn’t as simple as you thought.
I know exactly what you mean. I started thinking of starting my own integration process after reading Sally Field's memoir, In Pieces. I never would’ve imagined then I could end up feeling the way I feel now. There’s a full-circle feeling to the process that surprised me. How has writing your story affected people in your current life?
A lot of people, including my husband, learned a lot of things about me in the book. Some he'd heard as anecdotes or stories, but to hear them processed in words the way a memoir does is different. Some were also surprised how much I shared, even though I left a lot out of the book. There is something wonderful about showing up as you are in midlife and not pretending so much.
What about your mom if you don’t mind me asking? I think it’s a really difficult decision knowing what to share and what to hold back, either in private or public, especially as a parent gets older.
For one, my mom’s really tough. She can handle a lot. And she's very concerned with the truth of situations and the truth of people. So while I was working on the book, I didn't struggle to decide. I kind of let it rip. I felt more okay about being open with my mom because she's not a sugar-coater. She wasn’t the type of parent you’d feel afraid to tell things. And I've told my mom quite personal things for many years.
But when I talked with my mom about the different choices she'd made in respect to me, I think it was a sharing and she did receive my feelings and validate them in lots of ways. We were always very close, like open books to each other. We're less intimate now due to her cognitive decline.
I think it’s important to share stories with younger generations. Most stories end up lost. Though your son might not be interested in your earlier life now, he might one day. Our parents tend to become more interesting as individuals as we get older, but then they might not be around or available to share. I wanted to ask you about the closing keynote presentation you gave last spring at the International Trauma Conference.
Dr. van der Kolk invited me to do the closing keynote and Dr. Gabor Maté (author of The Myth of Normal) was doing the opening keynote. I was so honored, but the idea of presenting for 600 trauma specialists was pretty intimidating at first. I’ve had very little public speaking experience prior to the book coming out.
Working with their format, I created a slideshow with images that represented key topics in the book, and I also subcontracted a guitarist and music therapy student from Berklee College of Music in Boston. I wanted someone there to do live music to illustrate key ideas, so I could show how 60 or 120 beats per minute feels in your body.
I did a group body drumming exercise and got everyone to stand up. I found that people really responded to the visuals. Seeing a 40,000 year old ice age flute made from vulture bone is different from my describing it. I have a visual companion on my website with many of the images that correspond with each chapter in the book.
I’m curious about your thoughts on the relevance of health and science journalism as members of the scientific community now have their own individual social media mouthpieces?
I have found it a very exciting time. On the one hand, the media outlets that do strong health journalism are shrinking by the day almost. But on the other hand, early Twitter (before recent changes) was such a dynamic place for health journalists. You could see breaking research being posted online and picked apart and discussed among scientists from different disciplines.
Developments were happening in real time. And so as a journalist, it was far easier to see the big picture of evolving developments than I could ever do by calling individual researchers. Scientists have continued that conversation on Bluesky and Mastodon (to a lesser extent) while lamenting the recent Twitter changes, but the new platforms haven’t grown as quickly.
My oldest son liked following paleontologists on Twitter. For a high school kid, it was great to have that exposure.
Social media has been a wonderful tool for scientists too because they're often working in obscurity. And I think interacting with lots of real people helped them become better communicators, because they're seeing where people are missing the mark, or just not getting it.
How did you manage to blend the science and memoir content so well? Did you start with a fixed outline or figure it out as you went along?
It was very much a painstaking trial and error process. I desperately wanted to have an outline. I think I had ten outlines for the book, and none of them worked. I wrote a whole guest post for Jane Friedman on this: “How to Write a Hybrid Memoir.”
I joke that my husband actually gave me the solution early on from his perspective as an engineer. He said, “Why don't you write your whole backstory, start to finish?” But I didn’t see the point because I didn’t want a chronological structure. He told me that it doesn’t matter, just figure out first what you've got and then stitch it together with all the science elements.
But I didn’t listen. I was still wrapping my head around having my material in there at all. Then when the manuscript was handed in, my editor said good things, but also said the chronology was confusing. And she gave me some excellent advice. She said that it's fine if you jump around, but you need to bookend each chapter with a story—some element has to be chronological. So I ended each chapter with a personal anecdote or scene to give the reader some touchstones so they know where they are in the story.
I had like eight weeks to restructure my manuscript. In the end, what I've enjoyed about the outline not working is that it led to a more creative process. Thoughts and ideas came together while I went about my day. The writing became more of a juicy, organic, growing organism. The process had magic to it, because it was a being unto itself, rather than something I was simply writing.
The gift of midlife is the realization that no one's watching you, gauging how you're doing, or measuring your performance—no one cares. So the stakes feel lower
You say you have “control-freak tendencies” that you’re working on changing. I’m on a similar path. As you let go more, what benefits are you noticing?
When I was young and playing cello, everything I did was scrutinized and tracked and measured. And the gift of midlife is the realization that no one cares. No one's watching you. No one's gauging how you're doing. No one's measuring your performance as a midlife adult—no one cares.
So really, the stakes feel lower now. Granted, I’m fortunate to have a place to live and a partner, and that’s not easy to do, especially now. But if you have that privilege to have basic shelter and food and and love, then after that, who cares? It's all gravy after that. And you realize that as a midlife person, it's a privilege to be in the world doing just about anything. I’m learning that 70% sometimes is enough.
Yeah, I feel like the why’s matter more than the what’s? My brother died last year at 52 and my dad at 60, so I think more about how I want to spend my time. Making peace with the unknown is what I try to do, but it’s not always easy.
And there's a blessing in making peace with the unknowns. Realizing that many things don't matter allows you to shift towards pleasure and being of service.
I’m curious what it was like for you to transition from writing articles to working on a book project?
My writing coach, Marial Shea, told me that to write a book, you need to learn to tolerate chaos. She said, you need to get used to ‘the unknown’, because you're gonna have a lot of times when you come up against a brick wall. It creates anxiety because the perfectionist wants to get it right.
And that's the difference between a 1500-word article where you might have that discomfort for a short time, and then it’s wrapped up and you move on. But writing this book took several years. It’s been a gift developing an increased tolerance for chaos, along with accepting a leap of faith element. And those things are good antidotes to perfectionism.
As a pharmacist I have to remind myself to save my exacting nature for times it matters at work, but let go of it in other areas of life. It’s too exhausting.
In journalism too, getting the facts straight matters, but you can't apply that perfectionism everywhere. Now I focus on selective perfectionism. My facts and sources and quotes need to be accurate. But with some other writing, the ideas can be looser and put together more organically. People in my life often think every area is going to be perfect because I’m prone to perfectionism. But if you see my desk, you’ll know that’s not the case. I'm very surgical about the parts that I need to have at a high level.
I’m shifting to that too. And it’s ironic, in trying to please others, you can just end up annoying them. Or at least that’s what my older kids tell me. They prefer mellow mom. Thank you SO much Adriana. This was so fun!
For more, check out Adriana Barton’s website and subscribe. You can also follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Check out the Musical Pathways interview—Author Adriana Barton Says We’re All Wired for Music: Vancouver author of Wired for Music says everyone is musical. She explains why we need more safe outlets to express, develop, and share our innate musicality.
Also loved the great conversation here in this TELUS Talks with Tamara Taggart interview!
Great interview! And I love that Polaroid. Could be a painting.
Your story is a gift to those grappling with their own pasts and seeking inspiration for their own journeys of self-discovery and integration.