Hi, I'm Michael Laris, and this is Post Reports weekend. It's Saturday, September 6th.

I'm a local enterprise reporter, and what you're going to hear in a moment is a story I wrote

about a musician who had brain surgery for a condition that affects more people than you think.

I'll be narrating it. You'll hear audio from my phone calls with Mike Frazier's doctors,

and when I talked with

Mike, his guitar in hand, at a picnic table in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.

This reporting is part of a Washington Post series called Deep Reads. It's part of our commitment

to narrative journalism. This story is about a songwriter born in Virginia who faced an

agonizing medical mystery.

A note to listeners, this story includes descriptions of medical procedures that can be a little graphic.

Okay, here's a story.

The story. The songwriter was unconscious, but its voice filled the operating room. Spent their summers together.

Mike Fraser's dirty blonde locks had been partially shaved and his head sanitized.

The surgeon standing over him slid his blade in a crescent over his right ear and tugged his scalp into position,

holding it in place with a dozen sky-blue clips.

Then he began opening a window into the musician's brain.

So she moved to the northern country.

The surgeon, Lee Selznick, had chosen a Spotify playlist of Fraser's music for the delicate procedure.

He would take three hours, and he would later marvel at that moment over the phone.

You know, we were deep in his head.

And listening to the words right out of his, the very part of him that was producing that beautiful music.

Music The task that day was to reach and remove the cause of the grievous pain that had besieged and mystified Mike for years.

...