We are the CADHeads! Musicians of everything…
It’s the way we’ve always done it, right?
Take your absolute favorite song in the whole world.
Got it?
Okay, now hum it.
Hum it a little louder.
Now, throw some lyrics in.
And yep…
dance.
It’s your favorite song, you know its ebb and flow, its chorus and bridge, and you sing it with your chest wondering why you chose dispatch over Hollywood almost every ride into work. Over here like, “Simon, did you hear that?”
It’s effortless as well. There are no surprises, and the anticipation of the song, how it will make you feel, and when you’ll need to hit repeat again, is straightforward—you just do it. It’s muscle memory, and we all love some muscle memory. At times, we may not even love the song, but it’s tolerable because it demands no change. It’s like “Friday” by Rebecca Black. Hate to love it! Ugh, I digress.
You don’t have to dig through your music to find something new and different and you don’t have to worry about how your current emotions will align with the emotions of the new song either. Will it make me sad? Happy? Am I angry enough for metal (not that metal makes me angry, promise I like it too)? But like, you already know that Lady Antebellum’s “Need you now” is going to have you in your feels at the exact moment you need it to.
But wouldn’t it be awesome if we had a better album collection…like, diversified our music taste, like allowed ourselves to try some new stuff?
“New songs (ideas) with different lyrics (passions)?”
Yea! Imagine being able to dance to different rhythms and beats without being afraid to go as hard as you want regardless of how good you think you are right now. Imagine finding a song that made you feel even more than those Antebellum’s do.
But naw, I know.
“This is easier.”
And besides, it’s the way you’ve always done it anyway. I knew you were going to say that.
You know, change is so good. It’s something our center had to learn, and we really had to learn it. The thing about change though is this negative connotation about the heavy feeling of starting over when we try something new. Like, “Oh my gosh, but I already know how to do this.” It’s the whole…
“Whose idea was this anyway?”
You took the words right out of my mouth.
It’s only after we chance it and try it, that we come out a little better, if not for a new process or procedure; but rather for everything else. You learn what people are passionate about, what keeps people, you learn about their ideas and what motivates them, you learn about the value of being heard, and that every song matters. We learned that while the way we’ve always done it got us far, the way we want to do it and the way we needed to do it, needed to go further.
So, we started writing our own music and it started with changing the key.
Now before I get into this, none of us write music. I can throw out a quick poem,
“Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Sick Call. Overtime.
Looks like it’s you.”
That’s about it.
But we had a whole team of seasoned artists who could help, and they all brought something to the studio. Some brought old music they wrote a while ago that they were afraid to share because it was new and different and not intended for the way this place was seemingly written originally. Some brought a voice. The same voices that would hum quietly in their pod or the break room but never dare sing out loud. Very self-conscious of how good their song and lyrics were and afraid that others wouldn’t take a chance at learning it. They thought, “Why bother?” And some brought heart. Some brought the feeling behind the music, the passion that drove us to this point, and the reason to continue past it.
We started writing for our culture and singing that song over and over again until it became our favorite. A couple of changes here and a couple of changes there. We had to tweak the chorus a bit and ensure that we could always add to our song if needed but we kept singing. Sang it until we memorized every lyric to every piece of the culture we wanted. We started humming it into existence in our recruitment process, training, and current staff. We started dancing when we wrote parts of the song that really hit too. Ya know, the small wins that would inevitably take us up the charts. Those types of dances.
We started hiring people who added value to our song too. We didn’t just take the people that were like “Yeah, I can do music.” Because we didn’t need just any ol’ musician at the mic anymore. We weren’t looking for SoundCloud artists, we were looking for the Adele’s and Chris Stapleton’s of our generation. I said what I said.
We sought out people who could hit those Mariah Carey high notes, the incredible rasp in Janice Joplin’s voice, and the voices that make you feel at ease, matching and comforting the emotions of our callers and the heartbeat in our center. It was the people who could play instruments that maybe we hadn’t heard of before. The bouzouki or the hurdy-gurdy. Those People. People that could adapt to the fast-changing environment of 911 and bring instruments that could be taught with time as we continued to hire these band members and create this new sound.
It was the willingness and commitment to write a new song and sing it.
See, the reason we got here wasn’t because we kept singing the old song, hoping one day it would hit the way it used to, no.
It was simply the key…
… change for us.
