I posted recently about how integral my late husband was to my musical journey. As I've spent the last year and a half working through my grief, I've channeled it into my music. Now, I'm living the dreams we had together for both of us.
On August 8th, I performed at Walk the Beat in Grand Haven, Michigan. This was one of our favorite gigs to play together.
Performing there alone was a big step in both my grief journey and my growth as a musician. When we last played there together two years ago, Adam was just starting to try to convince me to bring the guitar on stage at some of our gigs.
I never felt ready before he died.
So now, two years later, to be playing a full two hour set with nothing but my own guitar backing me?
The growth is impossible to deny, and I know he'd be happy.
I also know I'll never stop being grateful for the gift of music he gave me.
Performing in the same places we performed together always carries its own bittersweetness. Because so much of my music is originals written through grief, and Walk the Beat is so focused on giving a voice to original music, it only made sense to share some of our story.
Music has clearly been a large part of my grief process, but it's also been part of a broader urgency I feel to get my creations out into the world.
When Adam died, he left behind projects that now he can't finish, both his own and ours.
He left behind a phone full of recordings of his music, a couple polished songs he performed regularly, and one song we co-wrote just a month before his death.
Unfortunately, a lot of his older creative work was seemingly lost to the sands of time years ago.
He started performing and recording music in his teens, playing with several bands in his early adulthood. By the time we met, he was storing all of his old recordings (that hadn't been lost along the way) on Amazon Music.
At some point several years before he died, through some shift or change in policies or data structure, all of his files disappeared. None of his old band mates had copies, and the lost copies were his only backup.
He spent hours multiple times across several months talking to Amazon in an attempt to get them back, but ultimately, he gave up.
One month before he died, on our way down to our last cruise together, he logged into his Amazon Music account. It was something he did occasionally when he wished he could access his old files. This time, it was in part because we had just written our first song together, and he knew there were songs from his past that we could rework with better lyrics.
He didn't expect to find anything. He'd checked so many times before that he really had given up hope, but when he opened the app, all 45 songs had reappeared.
That night, we tried to download them, but they were locked in the app.
We listened to every recording while we drove to the port. Some were live. Some were polished pieces. It wasn't everything he had ever recorded, but it was a good sampling.
We made plans for what we could do to bring some of the original songs back to life, but we never could figure out how to get them into a usable format. We spent hours in those last few weeks trying to get the songs downloaded, but it wasn't possible.
Turns out we just needed the right software.
How TuneFab Helped Me Save My Husband's Music
This post is sponsored by TuneFab, and it is the first sponsored post I've shared in years. I'm sharing this sponsored content because TuneFab helped me save these precious files.
TuneFab reached out to me because I'm a musician. They thought I might be able to provide a unique perspective on their Amazon Music Converter which turns Amazon Music to MP3 files for offline listening. They have a whole suite of converters and music tools, but this was the one that caught my attention.
You all know I don't really do a lot of sponsored content here on the blog, but this was a huge deal to me! I immediately realized I could use TuneFab's Amazon Music Converter to download Adam's old files.
The actual process was easy. I installed TuneFab, logged into his old Amazon Music account, and added each song to the conversion queue by hitting "add to convert". Then, I converted them all at once and downloaded them to my computer as mp3s!
They are now safely downloaded forever on my computer!
Plus, I can finally stop paying for his Amazon Music premium subscription ($10.99/month). I kept it active for a year and a half for the sole purpose of maintaining access to these files.
Being able to cancel a subscription was definitely an added bonus, but the main benefit of using TuneFab was obviously getting access to these precious files.
Now that they are downloaded, I can back them up better, share them with his old bandmates and fans, and generally release them more widely if it ever makes sense.
I'm not sure exactly what I'll do with these files and all the recordings he left me on his phone. I'm not sure if I'll ever release the song we wrote together just a little more than a month before he died.
I do know that no matter what I create in the future, his music shaped mine. I cherish these files and preserve them for the abundance of inspiration they provide and to honor his musical legacy which lives on in me and so many others who he taught to play.
And maybe, someday, I'll find a way to bring some of his unfinished work to completion.
If you’d like to learn more about the TuneFab Amazon Music Converter I used to preserve these recordings, you can find it here: https://tunefab.sjv.io/QY2ROo
