KALAMAZOO, MI (WKZO AM/FM) — The world is good and bad to all of us in different ways and on many different levels. That might be the most confusing thing in life that has stuck with me since I was a young child. The various ways people work through heavy personal challenges in life is something I always am amazed by and it lets me know that we can always dig deeper and do a little better in our own struggles.
That’s exactly what I experienced when I was given this story that is inspiring, at the very least. And the music? An interactive experience awaits you at the end of this incredible story with the album “The Senary” which has now been released and a link has been provided for you to listen to it.
42-year-old Paulie Cohen of Kalamazoo is married and has two children, an 8-year-old son, and a 5-year-old daughter. He works as a Creative Director for Western Michigan University’s Advancement Office. He has collected and restored Kalamazoo-made Gibson and Heritage guitars over the years and has been a musician most of his life. And it’s music that very likely is saving his life, following a cancer diagnosis in 2020, only a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic.
My description of Paulie is much different than his own…
“A boring middle-aged dad got a cancer diagnosis in the middle of a pandemic, and he wrote, performed, recorded, and produced a one-man-band concept album to distract himself from the news.”
The Idea
But before that happened, the idea was already within him. But he had no idea of the sequence of events that would bring it to fruition. This story begins in 2015.
“I realized that in the absence of being able to write a good hook or a great song, I could enlist the help of a gimmick instead. Inspiration finally struck, when I thought, ‘I should write a song from the perspective of a character in a movie!'”
The idea was there, but progress was slow for a variety of reasons. A guitar lick here, a lyric there. A couple of years later, one of his musician friends wanted to start working on a project with him. So he revived this concept album idea and added a focus on movies from the 1980s. He was able to produce his first song and most of another for the album, but not much else was accomplished. He says “to no one’s surprise, we took all that momentum and promptly did a lot more nothing. Once again, the project was totally dead.” So, it sat, again.
2020 Happened
Enter the ‘memorable for all the wrong reasons’ year 2020. As the world was being shut down, and he began working remotely from home, he started to get inspired.
“Like me, I assume you heard about the great historical things people have done with their idle time, and you want to be one of them, right? In previous pandemics, people have gotten in awesome shape, discovered the theory of gravity, or wrote their novel.”
He was looking at his recording studio in his basement and realized how much he desperately missed playing music with my friends. So he decided if he couldn’t play with them, why not use this extra quarantine time and dust off the idea, yet again, and make more progress. But in June, a personal crisis of the ultimate magnitude emerged.
“It started with some persistent abdominal pain that seemed a little different than what I’d felt before. It was a pandemic, and we weren’t supposed to go anywhere, so I tried to ignore it. I didn’t feel comfortable going to my doctor, but I soon realized it was time to go in.”
For a few months, he didn’t know exactly what was wrong and anxiously awaited a diagnosis. In September, on his wedding anniversary no less, Cohen ended up hospitalized and a cancer diagnosis, described as an aggressive B-cell lymphoma, was given. Chemo followed, and tests, and then more tests, all while he and his wife knew that difficult decisions would have to start being made.
What would we tell the kids? Should we tell them anything about this? They are already living in the strange, scary new world of this pandemic, especially from a child’s perspective. Would it even be right to add this to it?
You would think that the concept album, already shelved under much fewer inconveniences, would take a back seat again. But the opposite happened. It was time to finish it once and for all.
Cohen describes the production of the album as a parallel to his own experience with this new fight. Some of it was raw, peaks and valleys, imperfections (some of which he ultimately decided to leave in the album). But at this point, he still thought the project would ultimately just be for him. But deeper thinking started to get him motivated to share it, at first, likely just with family and friends.
What if? What if I lose this fight? With the unknowns, this might be something I can leave behind. Give something to my family and friends to remember me by, heaven forbid I don’t see the outcome I am fighting for in this.
Paulie Cohen – Courtesy Justin Baker
That quickly blossomed into wanting to share it with anyone who cared to experience it.
“I wanted everyone to know that in the face of the hardest challenge of my life, I was determined to make something beautiful.”
And as he got further into the project, those “what ifs?” started to get quieter as the volume in his basement recording studio got louder. Despite some long, lonely nights and amidst the quiet of those 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning hours where thoughts get noisy, the music took the journey with him and was often his companion, like a loyal dog.
By the time he was mixing down the final performances, he says he was saturated and overwhelmed. At this point, he wasn’t even worried about his next test results.
That brings us to today. The album is being released, but Cohen’s fight continues. He was able to come off chemo in January of this year. Cohen says his condition is currently still in unknown territory.
The Album
Calling it a concept album is really an understatement. It seamlessly moves from one turn to the next, like a typical concept album. But there’s an interactive element to it that is nothing like I have ever heard before. And it would be a perfect listen for someone and their significant other to do together.
From here, I will let Paulie finish the story and explain how it all works before you dive into the album, while I dive into it again for the third time in 24 hours. That’s how good this is. Cohen is giving the album to people for free, but there is a pay-what-you-want option available to help cover his medical expenses for those who wish to help. The album officially was released on Friday, May 7, 2021.
“Musically, “The Senary” is quite ambitious (it’s a continuous piece of music that explores most genres), the run time is just over an hour, and it’s only me on the album, recorded in my basement studio with my chemo-infused body and brain. I’m not great at putting myself out there, but I’m really proud of it, and it turned out better than I expected.”
I wrote out several non-negotiable rules for myself:
- Enlist one arbitrary fact that unites 10 unique characters from ten various 80s movies. (“The Senary” title may or may not be an Easter egg for you)
- Write each song from a character’s perspective. (10 track album)
- Make the lyrics of each chorus a direct quote from the selected character from the movie.
- Pick the movies first and discover the characters later (no changing the movie if I didn’t like the outcome).
- Assign the track order of the album to the release year of the movie.
- Keep it lyrically abstract enough to make the songs stand alone, not easily guessable, but add some easter eggs to make it fun once people realize whose perspective I’m singing from.
- Make it a seamless piece of music, where each previous song fuses with the next.
On my draft mix, the full run time is one hour and thirty-three seconds of nothing but Paulie and his chemo-infused creativity in a basement recording studio. I’m proud of it. I almost deleted it about 80 times, but I’m proud now. I’m especially lucky that I get to blame all the bad parts on the chemo while taking credit for the parts you like.
Why are you so busy now, anyway? Take an hour for yourself. Take an hour for us. Get lost in the synthesizers, and if you find yourself caught in the lyrics, you can rest assured that there’s an official quiz that you can take to guess both the movie that inspired the song and the character that’s quoted from the movie.
CLICK HERE to visit Paulie Cohen’s website and to follow links to listen to “The Senary”
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