Palliative Care Unit (PCU) nurse manager Paul Raymond, left, and care partner Anna Henderson, center, collaborated with singer-songwriter and PCU nurse Megan Palmer in her new songwriting project, “Take Good Care.” The five-song EP will be released, one song per week, starting on National Nurses Day on May 6. Photo by Susan Urmy
I’m wide awake at 5 a.m.
I was hoping today to finally sleep in
But something won’t let me be still
If not when will it will
Those are the first words of the first song off Nashville singer-songwriter Megan Palmer’s five-song EP, “Take Good Care,” which features well-known Nashville musicians who’ve played on songs from The Raconteurs and Jason Isbell, and big-name producer Andrija Tokic.
But Palmer, who previously recorded six albums over more than two decades, is more than a musical artist. She is a nurse on the Palliative Care Unit (PCU) at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and she and several of her fellow nurses and caregivers collaborated to write the songs beginning just weeks after the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020. The sentiments in those lyrics reflect the anxieties and uncertainties of facing each day, caring for patients with a deadly virus before vaccines existed to prevent it and more advanced therapies existed to treat it.
“There was so much unknown, so many questions,” said Palmer, BSN, RN. “Like you go to work and you’re thinking, is today going to be the day that I catch COVID-19? People around me were catching it and we were taking care of COVID patients and there was so much stress about it. To think back about it and know that I was writing songs about it even though I was in it, it’s an interesting thing. Because usually you’ll write a song about something that you went through already, but these songs we wrote while we were in battle.”
“It was created by a lot of just great, hardworking, dedicated, health care workers and nurses, primarily who are doing their best in a really, really hard circumstance.”
Now the world will hear “Take Good Care.” Palmer will release one song per week, starting on National Nurses Day on May 6, and ending on National Cancer Survivor Day on June 3 (Palmer is a breast cancer survivor). The songs will be available on meganpalmer.com and streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music.
The album is Palmer’s time capsule of the year 2020, when her second career as a performing artist was indefinitely halted. While her gigs were cancelled, she realized perhaps the safest environment for her to collaborate musically was with the people she worked with in her primary career as a nurse. And the all-consuming pandemic was also the strong source of her inspiration.
So, Palmer asked her fellow nurses and caregivers to be co-writers, all but one of whom had never written a song. The one who had, PCU manager Paul Raymond, MSN, RN, said he just writes and home-records songs for his own pleasure. He had never co-written a song, which he said is a hallmark of the Nashville music scene.
“This project is just so different,” Raymond said. “It was created by a lot of just great, hardworking, dedicated, health care workers and nurses, primarily who are doing their best in a really, really hard circumstance. It’s just kind of a sweet reminder of all the things we’ve done together in this nice, beautiful album of great music that we had a little bit of a part in to help Megan pull off.”
In addition to writing and bankrolling the album, Palmer handles the vocals and plays keyboard, violin and guitar.
The EP’s first song, “Wide Awake, 5 A.M.,” was a collaboration with Rebecca Hixson, RN, who has since departed VUMC. Hixson, who lived in East Nashville, had her life displaced by the March 3, 2020 tornado, less than two weeks before Nashville locked down for the pandemic. The apprehension dripping from the song that resulted is no accident.
“She had just narrowly escaped the tornado,” Palmer said. “Her apartment was affected by the tornado. She got up that morning, went to work on our unit and was like, wow, all the roads are closed. She didn’t really even know what happened.
“Working on this project just solidified why I love working in palliative care. Whether COVID-related or natural causes, we, the palliative care team are there for patients and their families. They lean on us. They trust us. From the first call light to the moment we turn the key in our doors at home, it truly is a love story come full circle.”
“We explored those ideas and talked about how things were always changing and how we’d wake up in the morning and we’d think how is this day going to go and how are we going to face the day?”
The foreboding of the first song gives way to “a love song with a twist,” Palmer said. “Stop For A Minute,” which Palmer wrote with care partner Anna Henderson, is dedicated to the husbands that they return to at the end of the day and look to for loving care, after a day of caring for their patients. Henderson also provides vocals on the song.
“We come home, we fall apart because we’re just completely depleted,” Palmer said. “We have someone that’s there for us who’s like, hey, we got you. It’s pretty meaningful.”
Henderson added, “Working on this project just solidified why I love working in palliative care. Whether COVID-related or natural causes, we, the palliative care team are there for patients and their families. They lean on us. They trust us. From the first call light to the moment we turn the key in our doors at home, it truly is a love story come full circle.”
The third song, “Dance Of Caring Souls” is a full-on dance anthem. It reflects the enthusiasm of her co-writer, Dara Downs, APRN, who wanted to write a song she could dance to. She succeeded.
“That one, it’s really about how we grow as people, when we are called to become caregivers,” Palmer said. “Because it is a calling, and it’s really and truly something deeper and deeper as you go on in your health care journey, you learn from patients and you learn from your co-workers and you learn from yourself.”
“At the end of the day, I think we all have a lot of respect and love for one another and it’s just nice to have this kind of time capsule of this monumental year that we all had a little piece in.”
The next song, “New Way To Be,” is Palmer’s most personal one. It recalls her breast cancer journey, from getting “the call” with her diagnosis as she was about to begin night shift one day in 2016. She is now cancer-free.
“Even though my cancer journey is a lot different than being a nurse in the pandemic, I think there’s these weird parallels that I can see when I look back,” she said. “It deepened my level of compassion as a nurse for patients because I had to become a patient during that time and that was very hard for me.”
The final song, “Take Good Care,” is the first “single,” which will be released on May 6. It’s taken from an expression that Raymond’s sister signs her emails with.
The phrase was rattling around Raymond’s head when he and Palmer sat down in true socially-distanced pandemic fashion to write “Take Good Care.”
“So we just expounded on that and talked about what that really means and just how we get through things and how literally taking care of each other is the way that we do that,” Palmer said.
Raymond recalled, “It was a nice spring day as I remember and we stayed outside, awkwardly distant from each other because we were trying to play our instruments. We were probably 10 feet apart or so and outside to make sure we were safe. In the course of an afternoon, we wrote that tune.”
The collection of songs will always be a sweet memory for Raymond, a silver lining in a very challenging year.
“At the end of the day, I think we all have a lot of respect and love for one another and it’s just nice to have this kind of time capsule of this monumental year that we all had a little piece in.”
Palmer adds, “When someone says, ‘What did you do in 2020?,’ I’d love to have a time stamp of what it was like to be a nurse and a songwriter in the weirdest year of our world that we know. I don’t know what will happen with these songs, but I just feel like I needed to make them and now I feel like I need to share them, so I’m just looking for ways to share them with the world.”
The collection “Take Good Care” contains five songs, and will be released, one song per week, starting on National Nurses Day on May 6, and ending on National Cancer Survivor Day on June 3. The songs will be available on meganpalmer.com and streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple Music.
