Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing

history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon Music, included with Prime.

When you get right down to it, the human body is basically a bag of water with a bunch of chemicals

mixed in. That's an oversimplification, of course, but it is a reasonable description of the

squishy bits that make

us up. It's also true that every once in a while, something, or maybe a lot of things, go a little

wonky with these squishy bits. And yeah, we often hear of some guy up in the Euro Mountains who's

117 years old who credits his longevity to bacon and unfiltered cigarettes, but, you know, that's the

exception. The rest of us have to be constantly unfiltered cigarettes, but, you know, that's the exception.

The rest of us have to be constantly vigilant about our health, eating right, sleeping enough,

reducing stress, all that sort of stuff. But not everything is preventable. Bad genes, disease,

accidents. These same rules apply to the musicians we follow. I mean, they're human just like us.

And every once in a while, we hear about their health challenges.

And quite often, they're very open about their issues.

They want to be honest with their fans.

And maybe by bringing attention to their situations,

they can encourage awareness of the problem.

Maybe get people with similar health problems to seek treatment.

In other cases, we only find out that there was a problem after the fact, and that knowledge helps us understand what happened.

So, without betraying any confidences or digging into private health care records, here

are some musicians who have battled their bodies and their brains, just like us

regular folk. This is the ongoing history of new music podcast with Alan Cross.

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