Concussion was composer’s own valley of darkness

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This article was published 26/04/2023 (1253 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Late one night in 2016, Christian composer and pianist Mike Janzen got up out of bed to get a drink of water.

His life hasn’t been the same since.

While getting the drink, he suddenly passed out and hit his head hard. After regaining consciousness, “I stumbled back to bed and went back to sleep,” said Janzen, 51, who lives in Toronto but grew up near Steinbach.

But in the morning, things felt off.

“When I opened my eyes, everything was blurry, the light was odd, things felt strange,” he says.

After seeking medical attention, he was diagnosed with a concussion and told it could take a few weeks or a couple months to feel better.

It took four years. He still doesn’t feel 100 per cent recovered.

“I just kept feeling worse and worse,” says Janzen, who is married and the father of two girls. “I sat in my dark basement for a month, feeling nauseous.”

Unable to write music or perform, Janzen turned to the Psalms for comfort — especially to the Psalms of lament, the 65 or so chapters in that book where the writer expresses hurt, disappointment, anger and loss.

“I saw myself in those Psalms,” he said. “The words of these ancient prayers were full of cries to God in times of great distress. They gave voice to my despair when I couldn’t gather up the strength to call out for myself.”

As he was able, Janzen also worked on some song ideas, recording them on his phone.

“I ended up with about a thousand short voice memos,” he says.

Later, when he began to feel a bit better, he started going through the memos to write some material that became the Psalms Project, bibically inspired songs about dealing with disappointment and finding hope.

“Some songs came very fast, others took longer,” says Janzen, who graduated with a degree in music from Brandon University. “I put my own story into them.”

Although he wrote the works while recovering from the concussion, Janzen sees a connection between what the Psalms meant to him then and what people experienced during the pandemic.

“I think people are still feeling the pandemic’s effects,” said Janzen. “We all felt that same loneliness, anxiety and isolation.”

Some people look fine on the outside, “but are crumbling inside,” he says. “The pandemic took a big chunk of our lives. It was really tough on many people.”

The Psalms, he says, can help us express those thoughts. “They don’t mince words. But they also offer hope.”

Janzen will be performing the Psalms Project in Winnipeg on Friday at the Burton Cummings Theatre. It will be his first major concert outside of Toronto since the concussion and the pandemic.

He will be joined by his friend Steve Bell, the renowned local Christian musician, and jazz-folk vocalist Erin Propp, along with the Horizon Choir and 13 members of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra string section.

Janzen hopes audiences will find solace and communion in the concert. “(People can) spend time together to express those feelings and find that hope, and be reminded we are heard in our times of darkness.”

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