319: Emily Cavanagh's Song For You

When the pandemic shut down venues and isolated patients from their families, singer-songwriter Emily Cavanagh responded with a simple question: “Does anyone need a song?”

That impulse became Song For You, the nonprofit organization she founded to bring personalized songs to patients, loved ones, and frontline workers during times of crisis. Since then, the project has grown into a community of artists using music to comfort, connect, and preserve memory.

With Emil Cavanagh in Manhattan, 2021

Here she describes the path that led her there: growing up in a large Irish Catholic family in Chicago, balancing music with social work, her unexpected popularity in Ireland, surviving a serious illness that left her unable to walk, and discovering that helping others through song also helped her find her own voice.