When a Happy Day Turned Harrowing, Dustbowl Revival Songwriter Found Solace in a Song

On Jan. 27, 2022, my daughter, July, was born and my wife, Taylor, nearly lost her life.

I darkly joked to my wife for months as her belly grew: Look, the odds are (and the math SAYS!) nothing crazy will happen to you when the time comes. Most people? They go into the hospital and they come out a day or two later with a shining new life strapped into a car seat in the back. If you’re a songwriter, like me, you start writing late-night lullabies and post on social media how lucky you are. You bring the baby on stage at a festival and everyone cheers. Of course they tell you anything can happen when you go in on that fateful day. In our case, boy, were they right.

I don’t usually write things like this. When I was asked to try and explain why we chose to release this deeply personal piano ballad, “Be (For July),” over the more bombastic, “fun,” brassy Dustbowl Revival material we have become known for over the last decade, the only thing I can say is it’s because this song means that much to me. We’ve never put out anything quite this intimate. No horns, no drums: We had to strip it back to tell the story about some of the darkest and most beautiful days I’ve experienced as a new father. A dad dedicating a tune to his newborn daughter? Normally I would find such a thing cheesy. But this song feels like it’s a part of me somehow. Let’s go back a bit to give it some context.

After a relatively smooth pregnancy (in that it was damn hard but everything baby-wise was looking great), my wife went from having a routine C-section at around 1 a.m. to nearly bleeding out on the way to the OR for emergency surgery. One minute I was tearfully texting the grandparents across the country “IT’S A GIRL!” … and the next our lives became a horror film wrapped up in an episode of House inside an outtake of The Twilight Zone.

Taylor and July getting to know each other (photo by Z. Lupetin)

At first, they had no idea what was happening to my wife: In the process, Taylor’s kidneys completely shut down and her blood began clotting everywhere. They couldn’t transfuse her fast enough. Even in Cedars-Sinai, one of the best hospitals on earth, I saw the fear and confusion on the doctors’ faces. The OB surgeon finally found me as I wandered the empty halls at 3 a.m. hoping for any news. Moments before, this doctor had been smiling in her scrubs, lifting the baby out of my wife’s belly. We were all singing along to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” which was blasting out of the operating room speakers. What a fun night, right? Now the doctor was in the empty waiting room standing before me and she was nearly shaking. I knew it was serious. Very serious.

My wife would end up in the ICU and on a ventilator three different times over the next five weeks. At one point, her feet were twitching and they thought she was having a brain hemorrhage. In fact, she was just trying to communicate — she was locked inside her own body, unable to move or speak. The terror and pain my wife experienced in these first few weeks after the birth I would never wish upon my worst enemy. The sight of her completely catatonic with a ventilator tube stuck down her throat haunts me still.

It is hard to try to recount these trying weeks. Each day was a new disaster. Taylor developed a pneumonia-like infection. She fell trying to go to the bathroom. They put her on the most dire pain meds available — the meds that killed Prince and Tom Petty and countless other heroes. One night her lungs seemed to be filling up with a dangerous fluid, and after she began losing her ability to think or speak clearly, her lead doctor called me. “Look,” he said, “you may need to wrap your head around the idea that your wife might not be coming home after all.” His voice cut like a knife. She is so strong. But she may not make it out of this battle. When I sing “Didn’t I bury your body, and write your epitaph,” it’s hard for me not to picture that exact moment.

But Taylor did win the battle. On March 1, we wheeled my weakened but spirited wife out of the hospital to a cheering section of her closest friends. She was cracking jokes to all the nurses from her wheelchair. If you saw my wife now, as you will in the video for “Be (For July),” hiking up a mountain with July on her back, you’ll see she’s even stronger and more beautiful than before somehow.

But it hasn’t been an easy recovery. As I write this, she is across town having her blood cleansed at her weekly dialysis treatment. We can’t travel far or plan for the future. Her kidneys may never fully recover. Her life expectancy changes by the month. But slowly she’s getting stronger. And our daughter grows and is the cutest, feistiest creature I’ve ever seen.

Dustbowl Revival + July (photo courtesy of Z. Lupetin)

Why am I sharing all this? Because this song is important to me, and in some way tries to tell the story of how we got here. I would go home after spending the grueling days at the hospital in those dark days in February and play this song over and over on the family heirloom 1918 Steinway piano. My neighbors probably hated hearing these chords over and over through the walls. But the sound comforted me.

The verses unfurled over days, weeks. I dreamed of my daughter being a piano whiz, singing along to Billie Holiday. I thought about the place that is most special for my wife and I — Yosemite National Park — and the last time we went, when we were still trying to bring the baby into being. We went back with our little one in early summer to shoot footage for this video. For many hopeful parents who start a bit later in life, no baby ever arrives. We won the lottery. I’m not a piano player, but I adore writing on this magical warm beast of an instrument. I had to write this song and tell this story.

We found out later, because of the quick work and amazing analysis from the Cedars-Sinai hospital team, that Taylor has an extremely rare syndrome called atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome, or aHUS. What are the chances birth can trigger something like this out of the damn blue? One in a million or more. Only four hundred or so people have it in the United States, and most of them communicate with each other on one Facebook group. There is no cure.

Z, July, and Taylor (photo courtesy of Z. Lupetin)

As we learned weeks later, the fact that our little July came out howling and punching into the world and was totally fine even as this sinister sickness took hold is a major miracle. The placenta and the umbilical cord that protected and nourished her in the womb were covered with blood clots. It was like the placenta was a shield that protected her from a relentless enemy. There’s no way she should have made it. But she did. If a life-saving (and insanely expensive) breakthrough medication hadn’t been found 10 years ago, my wife also would not have made it. Can one be lucky and unlucky at once? Maybe. The outpouring of support and donations in the months when we couldn’t work have also been truly life-saving.

I’ve seen myself as a writer most of my life now. Whether in plays, movie scripts, sci-fi-adjacent short fiction, or my main obsession, songwriting, I’ve enjoyed diving as far away from my own life as possible. Why? I never found myself that interesting or my experiences that dramatic. Most of my days I spend trying to figure out how to be an adult, a bandleader, small-business owner, a husband, a dog caretaker, and now a dad. I’m incredibly lucky that Dustbowl Revival is my job. But it’s also up to me to use my small platform to really say something.

I’ll admit, writing with brevity has never been my main skill. But if you’ve made it this far, know that I’m grateful you’ve been a little part of our story. When it comes down to it, each musician and songwriter has a choice: to put out songs that maybe will sell a ton of records but not mean anything, or to put out honest, personal material that comes right from the heart and let the universe decide. I write this last bit with my little miracle daughter bouncing on my knee, howling for my attention. I think you know which one this song is. Thanks for reading and most of all, thanks for listening.