Megan Palmer and the Healing Power of Music

Megan Palmer at the 2019 Brooklyn Americana Music Fest / Photo by Quincie Hydock

Megan Palmer, one of the standout performers at the 2019 Brooklyn Americana Music Festival, grew up with a musical grandfather who played jazz piano and ragtime banjo in a variety of groups. “My parents didn’t play a lot of instruments themselves but we had a large vinyl collection and my three sisters and I usually gravitated toward spinning the Beatles, Harry Nilsson, Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, and Crosby Stills Nash & Young over and over,” she tells Brooklyn Roads. The influence of her grandpa’s playing and her parents records “shaped me as an ‘improvisational songwriter,’” she adds.

In her hometown of Columbus, Ohio, Palmer started her first band in the sixth grade, and by eight grade, “We had business cards and steady paying gigs. We stayed together through college. By then I had started to experiment with putting a pickup on the violin and playing in folk and rock bands,” she says. Along the way, “I started gravitating toward playing with songwriters and occasionally jam bands. I learned the ropes of playing in a live rock and roll band and found it to be very rewarding.”

Megan Palmer / photo by Stacie Huckeba

However, Palmer, who tells us she was “pretty empathic as a child,” began to hear a different tune in her ears, which led her to nursing, although playing music for a living was “something that I had to keep doing and I tried to stay on the path it had me on,” she tells us.

While touring with the Canadian band, Luther Wright & the Wrongs in 2002, she visited Brooklyn for the first time and “fell in love with the music scene there and started to play guitar and return to the city as often as possible.” After several trips to New York City, and Brooklyn in particular, Palmer landed a weekly residency at Googie’s Lounge (above The Living Room), a travel nurse contract and an apartment in Crown Heights in 2008.

“Living in New York provided a great backdrop for newness and creativity. Every day I could hear different languages being spoken, see and hear art from all over the world,. Even being a nurse in a new place provided inspiration I never could have expected,” Palmer tells Brooklyn Roads.

Megan Palmer /photo by Stacie Huckeba

“I made many friends during that time who were great musicians, including Jan Bell,” she says. “I started playing a monthly residency in Dumbo at 68 Jay Street Bar. I recorded an album at Seaside Lounge called Waycross that I’m still very proud of, with a batch of songs I’d written during those first three years living in Brooklyn.”

A bout with breast cancer in 2016 “only enhanced my zest for living” and led her to “appreciate everything around me in a deeper and more beautiful way,” she tells Brooklyn Roads. “Coming back to Brooklyn [for the Americana fest] was a great demonstration of how much I’ve deepened in terms of gratitude for this life I get to have.”  Her health scare also inspired her to write a cathartic, personal-yet-universal anthem, “Stetson,” a video of which Megan Palmer made with storied photographer Stacie Huckeba, who also documented her breast cancer journey.