In the early days of the pandemic, when the world had gone quiet and hospital rooms were closing to visitors, Emily Cavanagh started asking a simple question: “Is there any chance anyone needs a song?”
At the time, Emily was like a lot of musicians in New York, suddenly without work, without venues, without a clear sense of what came next. But unlike most people, her instinct wasn’t to look inward. It was to look outward.
She started calling hospitals and hospices. At first, they didn’t know what to do with her. They needed doctors. They needed masks. They didn’t need a song.
But within a few months, everything changed. Emily explained:
“Every chaplain, every nurse practitioner, every volunteer coordinator… we have a nurse in isolation, we have a kiddo that’s not gonna go home, we have this couple in hospice and they’re so confused. Could you send a song?”
What began as a handful of recordings turned into something much bigger. “We ended up sending close to like 175 songs in 18 months time, and about a hundred of those were written from scratch based on the stories of the patients in the room,” said Emily.
It became an organization called Song For You, a nonprofit network of artists.
But the story of how Emily got there doesn’t start in a hospital. It starts in Chicago, in a big Irish Catholic family. She boasts of having 57 first cousins, Christmas dinners in pizza parlors because there wasn’t a house big enough to hold everyone.
“Back home we were actually a smaller family. There’d be families with 75, a hundred,” Emily remembered.
Her grandmother sang American standards so beautifully that Emily thought she was Judy Garland. Emily loved being on stage. But for a long time, she lived just off to the side of the spotlight.
We became friends when I produced her first album, Keep It With Mine. Somewhere along the way, she had a realization: if she was going to stay in New York, really stay, music couldn’t be the thing she did on the side. It had to be the center.
Emily still doesn’t fit the mold of the person you expect to build something like this. She’s disarming, a little chaotic, self-effacing.
And yet she’s the one who organized dozens of musicians, partnered with hospitals around the country, and created a system that delivers deeply personal songs to people at the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
When we spoke recently for The Third Story podcast, she told me about becoming famous in Ireland, relearning how to walk after losing the use of her legs, and spending her life at what she called the intersection of songs and service.
And along the way, she reminded me that yes, everyone could use a song.
You can hear my full conversation with Emily Cavanagh on The Third Story.
