Inside a medium-security prison in the Nevada high desert, fifteen men wrote songs about the lives they lost, the people they hurt, and the ones they hope will still be waiting. Fourteen men sang those songs.

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Written by Martha Russell and Rod Page, Tahoe Music Alive

 

The gatehouse at Northern Nevada Correctional Center has two locked chambers before you even reach the waiting room, where a body scanner hums. Outside, guard towers rise over a one-story campus of buildings the color of the dirt. Scrub and parched earth stretch toward blue mountains in the distance.

 

It could be a movie set, if the razor wire coiled along the fence tops weren't real, and if the silence weren't so complete.

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We were seven, waiting to be let in: Music for the Future program manager Dana Martin, three classically trained musicians carrying a cello, a viola, a flute, a foldable piano, and a cajón; the prison's head of academic instruction; and us. The cellist Ian Maloney and the violist James Perucil were two of the Dolphins String Quartet, which had just played a standing room only concert for Tahoe Music Alive.

 

We surrendered our driver's licenses through a small window and passed through one security, and another security. Then an armed guard led us back out through the chambers, onto a sidewalk that ran past workshops marked, in block letters painted directly onto the brick, AUTOMOTIVE WORKSHOP and LAUNDRY WORKSHOP.

 

Someone had planted flowers in the parched dirt along the walkway by the empty internal street.

 

For the length of that walk, it was the seven of us and a single, very well-armed guard, alone in a fenced-off little city of 1,500 people whom we could not see.

 

Sing Something True

Northern Nevada Correctional Center sits at the southern edge of Carson City, housing more than 1,500 men, including patients in the state's primary inpatient medical and mental-health units and people receiving hospice care while in custody.

 

Nevada law requires the prison system to offer education and vocational training. Inmates who complete coursework can earn credits toward earlier release. The fifteen men we had come to meet had just completed a five-day songwriting workshop.

 

The workshop was part of a program offered by the non-profit organization Project: Music Heals Us in partnership with Nevada Prison Education Project. Some of the men in the room had taken the class once before and arrived with drafts of lyrics already in hand. Most were new to it, drawn in, they said, by other inmates who'd told them it was worth the risk of standing up in front of strangers and singing something true.

 

Tuning Up

The room where we met was large and institutional: fluorescent lighting, plexiglass windows, vending machines, and tables built for supervised visits: two chairs faced two chairs, a laminated card reading INMATE taped to one side and VISITOR to the other.

 

The musicians pushed the tables away and lined the chairs into rows, preparing the room for rehearsal. We found the closest thing to a back row and sat down, at a table still marked VISITOR, trying to look like a piece of furniture.

 

The guard brought the men in. Fourteen of them, clean-shaven, dressed in blue jeans and shirts of assorted blue, notebooks in hand. Tattoos covered some arms, hands, and necks.

 

They sat without being told where. Martin, the facilitator, welcomed them, introduced us as guests, and led a round of breathing and tension release. Then Ian Maloney, the cellist, walked to the front and sang a single open note. Fourteen men answered.

 

"This is level one," he said, holding his palms low, near his knees. He raised them. "Here's level two."

 

The room found level one, then level two, then followed him up and down a small ladder of pitches: one, two, three, two, one. Fourteen male voices tuning to each other before anyone had said much about the day ahead.

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This was the last of five daily three-hour sessions. It was performance day.

 

The men had spent the week building songs, line by line, out of guided relaxation exercises, imagined scenes, and whatever surfaced on the page when the guided part of the exercise fell away.

 

It’s SHOW TIME

Rehearsal ran in small cohorts; four or five men at a time working the front of the room with the musicians, the rest scattered into adjoining conference rooms normally used for parole hearings and chapel services. One by one, each man stepped up and worked through parts of the pieces that would trip him up: the entrance, the modulation, the ending. A couple of songs were duets. One song required a second man to hold the microphone while the singer played an instrument. One was more rap than song.

 

There was, that Friday, an actual guitar in the room - the instrument the prison keeps for chapel services, brought over and tuned by one of the musicians for the man who asked to use it.

 

"I've been here for 35 years," he said, turning it over in his hands, "and haven't had access to a guitar. I'm rusty."

 

He had ten minutes with it before his rehearsal and used all of them, picking out a few notes, before handing it back.

 

Some men came to the front eagerly, reaching for the microphone, making eye contact with the musicians, breathing in before they started and exhaling, smiling, when they were done. Others waited to be called, walked up with their eyes down, took the microphone only when it was handed to them, and needed a cue — a nod, a raised hand — to begin. When they finished, some of them sighed audibly and sat back down without looking up. The more confident men called out encouragement to the less confident ones.

 

You can do it.

 

One of the fifteen men could not be there. He was in surgery that day. Two of his friends learned and sang his song in his place, so it wouldn't go unsung.

 

Messages of Personal Truths

By evening the room rearranged itself again, chairs facing forward, an audience where a rehearsal space had been. The men filed back in with a different bearing than they'd had earlier; they stood straighter. Some of them had a little swagger, while others took visible deep breaths. Fist bumps and finger flutters thrown across a few feet of air passed between them.

 

Martin started the recording. The performance would be taped, with the hope of eventually streaming it for the men's families. Then the songs began.

 

Ian led the entire group of inmates, visitors, and the three musicians in three verses of “Take Me Home Country Roads.” Then, a tenor stepped to the front, took the microphone, and in a clear and unwavering voice opened with praise for his savior and drew the night's first applause. Then another man. And another. Each man introduced himself, named his song, said in a sentence or two what it meant to him, then sang, backed by three Juilliard-trained musicians who had known these men for five days.

 

Their introductions carried pieces of their criminal records that had brought them here: addiction, apologies, a single terrible night, sentences measured in years and decades.

 

Some voices cracked on apologies aimed at people who weren't in the room: a mother, a daughter, an ex-girlfriend, a version of themselves they hadn't liked. Some named the people they hoped were listening. A few thanked Jesus.

 

Every single one of them, in some form, said the same thing: that the workshop had given them language for something they had not known how to say, and that they hoped the songs would carry to the outside.

 

The lyrics were poetic; reflecting vulnerability, self-forgiveness, and repentance.

 

When the fifteenth song came up, the absent man's song, his two friends sang it as a duet, and the room gave it the same applause as all the rest.

 

Holding On to Hope

Afterward, Martin thanked the men for the courage it had taken to confront their own feelings in front of each other, let alone perform them. She told them she and the musicians hoped to come back.

 

The administrator of the education program, who had seen some of the men in prison classes, congratulated them and spoke about the work they had done and the opportunities still ahead.

 

A few men spoke up on their own, unprompted: to say the week had been the best thing to happen to them since they'd come to prison, that they wouldn't forget it.

 

Then the musicians handed out certificates, one name at a time, and the men came up to shake hands with Martin, the musicians, and, for some of them, us.

 

All eyes were wet. Shoulders were back.

 

"Never stop growing," we told one of them, not sure what else there was to say. "Keep singing. Your voice can be heard."

 

"The men thanked us for being there to witness their work.

 

At eight o'clock, the guard called time. Nobody argued. Nobody dragged their feet, either.

 

Fourteen men filed out through the same two locked chambers we'd all come through, back toward housing units we never saw, and the seven of us packed up a cello, a viola, a flute, a piano and a drum, and were walked back out past the automotive workshop and the laundry workshop and the flowers in the dirt, to the gatehouse, where our licenses were returned and our cars were waiting.

 

We drove home along Highway 50 as the sky over the mountains west of Lake Tahoe went orange, then purple, then dark enough for the lights of houses to start showing on the far shore. Neither of us talked much.

 

Somewhere behind us, fifteen men were back in a building, in cells we'd never seen, holding a certificate from Project: Music Heals Us and, maybe, something else: a little more time before parole, a little more practice at saying a true thing out loud.

 

We hoped so, anyway. It was the only thing we could do from the outside.