Music festival helps artists confront and manage the industry’s mental health impact

William Brangham:

The music industry, full of glamorous stars and thrilling performances, can also be grueling for the musicians themselves, sometimes even with tragic consequences.

A 2024 MusiCares survey revealed that over 8 percent of respondents within that industry had to be serious thoughts of suicide in the past year. That is notably higher than the 5 percent rate among the general population.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports from Park City, Utah, on a side of the music world that is starting to get more attention. It's for our ongoing coverage of the intersection of health and arts, which is part of our Canvas series.

Jeffrey Brown:

The sound of music in the mountains, the band on stage in a gorgeous setting, a happy crowd, in many ways, the quintessential summer music festival. But listen to some of the stories we heard.

LP Giobbi, Electronic Dance Deejay:

It feels like extreme highs and extreme lows. I feel full of gratitude and I feel extremely overwhelmed.

Anders Osborne, Musician:

You need help. Without people helping me back then, especially the first year, I would not be here.

Hilary Gleason, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Backline: The problem that we were seeing was that we were losing music industry folks to addiction and suicide.

Jeffrey Brown:

People you knew.

Hilary Gleason:

People that I knew, yes.

Jeffrey Brown:

The Park City Song Summit in Utah had plenty of music over three days headlined this year by bands such as Goose and Dawes. But here the emphasis was also on mental health and wellness, an array of alcohol-free drinks at night, ivy drips and B12 shots in the afternoon, yoga, meditation and song baths for a positive start to the morning.

Marcus King, Musician:

Good friends one after the other.

Jeffrey Brown:

But things also went deeper, sometimes darker. Grammy nominee Marcus King here was chef and TV host Andrew Zimmern talked openly about the common pressures of their two industries and the toll taken.

Marcus King:

I was really going to check out. That was my plan was, I got an old car, I got a garage. It was like exit stage left. Here we go.

Jeffrey Brown:

King was able to turn things around and help others through his foundation, destigmatizing addiction and mental health struggles.

Marcus King:

Just making that first leap, asking somebody for help doesn't make you look weak. It's quite the contrary.

Jeffrey Brown:

These sessions are called labs, one signal, says Song Summit founder Ben Anderson, that this festival is different.

Ben Anderson, Founder, Park City Song Summit:

Yes.

We're getting the chemistry together in there and we're getting people in the same room in an intimate setting where their personalities and their heart and their spirit can come together, and they can be vulnerable and very transparent about things like mental health, about chemical dependency, about trauma, or maybe about their songwriting process, or why they wrote a particular song, what drives them, what inspires them, what scares them.

Jeffrey Brown:

Things that they don't often get to talk about.

Ben Anderson:

Right.

Jeffrey Brown:

Counselors like Keith Fairman (ph) made themselves available to support groups no matter how small, behind the scenes gatherings of audience members in recovery, even amid the performance stages and for musicians, roadies, and others in the industry, a chance to check in, talk with peers who share, without stigma, the hard knowledge of addiction and life on the road.

Anders Osborne:

I lost everything. I lived in the park, homeless, penniless, careerless, everything, yes.

Jeffrey Brown:

Now 59 and 17 years sober, Swedish-born New Orleans-based blues rocker Anders Osborne says he survived his drug and alcohol addiction and found a way forward as a touring musician through the help of friends. And he's paid it forward, creating an organization called Send Me a Friend, a database that allows working musicians wherever they are to ask someone to simply come sit nearby during a performance, just as his friends first did for him.

Anders Osborne:

So I played and they kept people away, drug dealers, people that brought me shots or whatever, all this stuff. This is within the first year, six months into my sobriety. And I remember looking over and going, I'm working. I felt accountable. I'm not partying. My tribe's here. I'm good. Not just feeling safe, but knowing why I'm there. I'm not there for any other reason than to entertain these people.

Jeffrey Brown:

You found a way to continue as a musician, as a creative person while in recovery.

Anders Osborne:

Yes, it's difficult.

Jeffrey Brown:

Yes, still?

Anders Osborne:

Not that I want to use, but, yes, it's — sometimes, there are conversations I don't want to have with people that are high or intoxicated. That's part of the scene. So you have to find an attitude and be accepting of that as part of my job.

For me, I have to meditate prior to the show. I have to be prepared for what's coming.

Jeffrey Brown:

Pressures old and some new. Today's music industry revolves around new technology and business models, as well as always-on social media.

Hilary Gleason heads a nonprofit called Backline.

Hilary Gleason:

The pressure to be responsive to fans, to be on, to be showing them behind the scenes of your life, I think certainly technology has impacted in that way, but also the rise of streaming platforms and the changing in the revenue models of the music industry have made it so that more and more folks have to go on tour to make a living.

And touring is incredibly challenging.

Jeffrey Brown:

Backline helps musicians and those working with them find a variety of services, including on-the-road wellness and therapy support.

And Gleason is seeing growing awareness of the need for an industry-wide approach.

Chappell Roan, Musician:

Labels, we got you, but do you got us?

Jeffrey Brown:

One notable moment came at this year's Grammys, when pop star Chappell Roan accepted her award for best new artist and called on music labels to offer artists health insurance, including mental health services.

But she's doing that as a star, right?

Hilary Gleason:

Yes. Yes.

Jeffrey Brown:

So if you're starting out, you can't go to your record label and say, give me health insurance.

Hilary Gleason:

You can't, but you may be approached by several record labels. And it's the defining difference for some artists now in choosing where to sign. Just over the past year or two, we have started to see people make this actually a line item in their touring budgets.

Jeffrey Brown:

One artist working into the late hours at Song Summit, electronic dance deejay and producer LP Giobbi, whose go-all-night, globe-trotting life, one night here in Utah, the next in Spain, would leave anyone gasping for breath and a bit of sanity.

LP Giobbi:

My name is LP Giobbi.

Jeffrey Brown:

At Song Summit, she also took the time to offer a master class to young musicians. Like everyone we met here, LP Giobbi spoke of those who didn't survive. In her world, it was the phenomenally successful Swedish deejay Avicii, who took his life in 2018 at age 28.

LP Giobbi:

I thought a lot more would change after Avicii. There was a lot of talk about mental health. But I don't know if much did.

Hilary Gleason:

I believe she played some 300 shows last year.

Jeffrey Brown:

She's had her own struggles, living her dream in a very competitive field, especially, she says, for women, but always feeling on the edge of losing it and more. She now works with Hilary Gleason of Backline.

LP Giobbi:

I have used the resources to find an amazing therapist and psychiatrist and wellness coach and I find different breath work instructors in every city, and that's been a lifeline for me right now, like just breathing.

And if I was going to talk to somebody who's starting out on this journey, protect your peace at all costs.

Jeffrey Brown:

Small personal steps and at one small music festival, but, says Song Summit's Ben Anderson, with outsized impact.

Still, this is a small gathering.

Ben Anderson:

Yes.

Jeffrey Brown:

A few thousand people.

Ben Anderson:

Yes.

Jeffrey Brown:

Doesn't change all that much in the larger music world.

Ben Anderson:

Here's what I would say to that. Do you know how many people have come to me and said either their artist, someone in their camp, or an audience member has gotten the help that they needed? That never impacts just one person. It's dozens of people.

So my mentality is never like, well, it's not big enough. It's, we will have enough impact to where it will be bigger.

Jeffrey Brown:

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Park City, Utah.