The Backstory: An Endless Earworm Turns an Oscar Winner Into a Songwriter

It was supposed to be minor, routine surgery. But the anesthesia had a strange effect on this Academy Award winning actress. Afterward, every thought, every conversation, and even things she saw . . literally turned into music in her head. This is what she did with the endless earworm.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, you ever had an earworm? You know what those are, right,
A part of a song that kind of gets stuck
in your head and you can't get rid of it. Well,
imagine an endless earworm, only it's not a song you've
ever heard before. It keeps changing and it never ever
goes away. I'm Patty Steele, the earworm that changed an

(00:20):
Academy Award winner's life. That's next on the backstory. The
backstory is back. Music is a funny thing. Songs get
stuck in your head even when you don't want them to.
They fill you with emotion, love, sadness, longing, even anger
and jealousy. But imagine music running through your head constantly,

(00:44):
music you don't recognize or know what to do with,
and you can't make it go away. It sounds like
a setup for somebody slowly being driven insane. Right. Well,
this actually happened to Academy Award winning actress Mary Steinbergen
in two thousand and seven. She had some minor surgery
on her arm, but she had to undergo general anesthesia

(01:04):
to get it done. When she woke up, her brain
had changed. Her brain function felt bizarre. It had become
something she didn't recognize she felt odd. The moment she
started to emerge from the fog of the anesthesia, she says,
her brain was filled with music, every thought, every sound,
things people said to her, even thing she saw became musical.

(01:27):
It sounds nice, right, but not so much. She said.
She'd even look at a street sign and it would
become music in her head. Her brain was only music
at first. The whole experience was suffocating, she said, an upsetting, constant,
involuntary sort of musicality. And it wasn't pleasant. It was
annoying and scary. Her husband, actor Ted Danson, was scared too.

(01:51):
She says, I couldn't act at first because I couldn't
learn lines. It went on for months, and then she
did something that's a great lesson and for all of us.
She figured out what to do with this new reality.
Instead of trying to change it. Mary called a close
friend near her home in Martha's Vineyard, who also happens
to be a super talented songwriter. She said. She told him,

(02:15):
if I come over every day and sing these tunes
in my head, can you help me write them down
and make them into songs? And that's what they did.
In the meantime, Mary, who had never even played an instrument,
learned how to play, and she wrote hundreds of songs.
She then took the twelve best of them and sent
them to a lawyer in the music industry. But she

(02:37):
says she didn't want people to get weirded out by
Mary Steenbergen actress turning into Mary Steinbergen songwriter, so she
used her mother's maiden name, Nellie Wall to submit the songs.
The lawyer said he loved to meet her, and that's
when she told him who she was. He still wanted
to sign her. Mary says she went to Nashville and

(02:58):
the first few recording sessions were disastrous, like people wondered
why a fifty four year old actress was suddenly changing careers,
but she finally got the hang of it. For ten years,
she wrote and worked with other artists, and then in
twenty eighteen, she co wrote a song that a film
director heard and loved. Tom Harper was making an independent

(03:19):
musical drama called wild Rose. It was about a young
Scottish woman who dreamed of becoming a country singer. He
needed a song for the movie's emotional climax, the moment
when the main character finally understands that home isn't something
you run from, but something you carry with you. Tom
Harper listened to what Mary and her co writers had created.

(03:42):
He said the song called Glasgow No Place Like Home,
grabbed him by the heart the moment he heard it.
The song is about roots, belonging and the pull of
the place you call home. It's performed by the film star,
Irish actress and singer Jesse Buckley. Everybody fell in love
with it. The song won the Critics' Choice Movie Award

(04:03):
for Best Song. It was also shortlisted and seriously considered
for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. All this
from an actress who'd never been involved with music until
anesthesia left her with endless music in her head. The
brain is a puzzling thing, and Mary's doctors still having
come up with an explanation. Her path from acting to

(04:26):
songwriting is a reminder that creativity can show up in
unexpected ways. Rather than allowing yourself to feel victimized by
an unexpected event in your life, you can use that
change to forge a new path and a new way
to share your passion. Mary says she didn't fall out
of love with acting. She just discovered a two part

(04:47):
conversation within herself that showed her that her brain was
capable of far more than she'd ever dreamed. Mary Steinbergen says,
even at seventy three, her life is proof that we're
never finished becoming who we are, that the most extraordinary
chapter of your life might be the one you never
even planned for. I hope you're enjoying The Backstory with

(05:10):
Patty Steele. Please leave a review and follow or subscribe
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free to dm me if you have a story you'd
like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and
on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstories

(05:35):
a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durand Group
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our
writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Feel free to reach out to me with comments and
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on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the

(05:57):
Backstory with Patty Steele. The pieces of history you didn't
know you needed to know