There is a woman in one of our homes who cannot reliably tell you what year it is, or find the word for the thing you drink coffee out of, and who will sing you every single syllable of a song she first heard when she was nineteen years old.
Not the chorus. All of it: the verses nobody remembers, the little turn in the bridge, the breath taken in the right place before the last line.
I have watched this happen often enough now that it has stopped being a surprise and started being something closer to a fact of the job. The disease takes the vocabulary and the calendar and eventually the names, and it walks straight past the music as though the music were filed somewhere it does not have the key to.
And that turns out to be almost exactly what is going on.
There is a paper I keep coming back to, published in the journal Brain in 2015 by Jacobsen and his colleagues, which set out to find where long-known music actually lives in the head. They scanned thirty-two healthy young adults listening to music that was unfamiliar, recently learned, or long familiar, and located the two regions doing the encoding, the caudal anterior cingulate and the ventral pre-supplementary motor area, and then they went and looked at those same regions in the brains of twenty people living with Alzheimer's.
Those particular regions showed minimal atrophy. The disease had largely left them alone.
So the songs are not surviving because music is magic. They survive because of an accident of geography: a small piece of territory that the thing tearing through the rest of the house happens never to walk through. I find that more moving than the magic version, not less.
Three Chords
My cousin Myla taught me to play the guitar.
She started me where everyone starts, on D and A and G, and she was entirely unbothered by the fact that I couldn't play them. That is the part I think about now, all these years later, because she never once acted as though not being able to play yet were information about me.
And the first song I ever learned all the way through was "Line to Heaven," by a Filipino band called Introvoys.
If you grew up Filipino in the nineties you already know it, the way you know the smell of a particular kitchen. And if you didn't? It is a slow one, easy on the hands and forgiving of a beginner, which is exactly why it gets handed to beginners in the first place.
I learned it the way a kid learns anything he is not ready for, which is completely and without understanding a word of it.
What I Was Actually Singing
Introvoys formed in Manila in 1986, and put out their third album, Line to Heaven, in 1993. I could have told you that much. What I did not know, for most of my life, was where the title song came from.
Paco Arespacochaga was the band's drummer, and he lost his mother to pancreatic cancer, and then a year later, before he had finished with the first grief, he lost his father to a stroke. He wrote the song out of that.
And there is a detail in the story I can't get out of my head. His father had asked him to sing it. Paco did not want to, and the two of them argued about it. Then the year passed and his father died too, and it was the rest of the band who finally talked him into standing up and singing the thing in memory of both of them.
So what is the song actually about? It is about wishing you could telephone the dead. That is the whole of it. A man asking for a line to heaven because there is something he did not get to say.
And I learned it at an age where it was just a nice tune with three easy chords in it.
Mama passed in 2022, in the Philippines, and I was not there. Papa passed in May of 2025, and I was not there for that one either. Both of them an ocean away, both times with reasons that were perfectly good and not one of them good enough at two in the morning.
I have picked up a guitar and played that song since. Same three chords, same easy shape under the fingers, and it is not the same song at all. It never was, really. I just was not old enough to hear it.
Isn't that how the important songs work? They sit in you for twenty years being pleasant, and then one day life hands you the thing they were about and the song comes back with the meaning it was carrying the whole time.
The Album I Would Take With Me
I should tell you about the other end of my taste, because it is not all Filipino rock and it is not all sad.
If you made me choose one album to keep, it would be the Essentials collection from David Gates and Bread, and I would not have to think about it for very long. How do you explain that to people who find it too soft? I have never managed it.
The best I can do is this: the melodies are plain in the way that hard things are plain, and the songs do not oversell. There is no shouting in them. A man says a straightforward thing about love or leaving, sets it on top of a melody that behaves itself, and then gets out of the way, and the whole effect lands harder than any amount of production ever has on me.
I will also admit, without much embarrassment at this point in my life, that I am a Taylor Swift fan. A man in his forties who runs care homes and reads forty books a year is allowed a few unguarded pleasures, and anyway she is very good at exactly the thing Bread was good at, which is putting one specific true detail in a line and letting it do all the work.
The Playlist Is the Care Plan
Here is where the two halves of this come together, and it is the reason I wanted to write any of it down.
When somebody moves into one of our homes, we ask the family a set of practical questions: the medications, the routines, the foods, the things that frighten them, the times of day that go badly. And we ask what music they listened to when they were young.
That last question is not a nicety at all. It is closer to clinical.
Because a resident who cannot follow a sentence can still be handed back a piece of their own life through a speaker, and I have watched a bad afternoon turn completely on four bars of something recorded before I was born. The agitation goes out of the shoulders, the face reorganizes itself, and somebody who has not said a word in an hour starts mouthing along.
They are not remembering the song, exactly. They are remembering being the person who loved the song, which is a different and much larger thing to get back.
And what does that ask of us? Mostly that we pay attention to the right decade. A person's music is not general. It is specific to a handful of years when they were becoming who they turned out to be, and if you play the wrong era at them you get nothing, politely.
Get it right and you can watch someone come back into the room.
What the Chords Are For
I never became a good guitar player. I want to be clear about that, because this is not a piece about a hidden musical life. I know a handful of chords, I lose calluses faster than I ever build them, and anybody who has seriously studied the instrument would be unimpressed inside of about a minute.
But the three chords Myla gave me have outlasted almost everything else I was handed at that age. I still have them in my hands. They still make the song.
And there is a symmetry in all this I did not go looking for and cannot quite shake. A young man learns a song about wanting to phone his dead parents, understanding none of it. He grows up, loses both of his own without being in the room either time, and finds himself running houses where the whole job is holding on to people while their memories go, using music as the rope.
And the rope works. That is the part I would want you to take away, if you happen to be reading this with somebody in decline beside you and feeling as though there were nothing left in your hands to offer them.
There is something left. Is it a cure? No. But it is a long way from nothing. Find out what they listened to at nineteen, and play it, and sit down next to them while it goes.
Three chords. D, A and G. My hands still know where to go, and the song still does what it did the first time, which is put me in a room with two people who are not there.
