How Music Became A Healing Tool: Mike Shimshack and his Inspiring Journey Through Illness and Sound Therapy

Music Saved Me Podcast

Mike Shimshack, a multi-platinum songwriter and producer known for work with artists like Britney Spears and Laura Bell Bundy, shares his transformative journey

Key takeaways

• Music served as a lifelong emotional anchor during childhood instability and constant relocation.

Main topics

• Music as emotional and psychological safety net
• CIRS (chronic inflammatory response syndrome) and its impact on health

Notable quotes

"Music was my constant in a world of chaos. It was my safety blanket."

Conclusion

Mike Shimshack's journey exemplifies how adversity can catalyze innovation and

Transcript preview

Speaker 6 (0:00) Music Saved Me. Speaker 3 (0:01) Welcome back to Music Saved Me. I'm your host, Lynn Hoffman, and today on the show, we get to talk to an uber-talented artist who has lived two extremely extraordinary lives all in one. My guest today is a multi-platinum songwriter and producer with more than 25 million records sold worldwide, writing and producing for artists like, oh, Britney Spears and... Laura Belle Bundy, the country star. But here is where the story kind of takes a turn. After decades in the music business, Mike was diagnosed with CIRS, which is a chronic inflammatory response syndrome. Say that three times fast. It's actually a debilitating illness that caused him severe neurological complications. And ultimately, it led to the amputation of his right index and middle fingers. But instead of walking away from music, Mike Shimshak went deeper into it. He co-founded Nine Arc Labs, which is a neuroacoustics wellness technology company, where he now leads the creative vision behind technologies like full-spectrum entertainment, frequency-following response, brainwave entertainment, and precise geometric tuning. I think I got all that correct. And this is all designed to help people sleep better, manage stress, and think more clearly. It's incredible. This is a conversation about how music didn't just launch the career for Mike. It became the science, or should I say the neuroscience, of healing. Mike Shimshak, the incredible, talented producer, is next on Music Saved Me. This is Speaker 5 (1:41) an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (2:17) Did you hear the new episode of the Hey Jonas podcast? We are Speaker 3 (2:20) at D23, so we'll see who stops Speaker 4 (2:22) by. Speaker 1 (2:23) The cast of Frozen stopped by. Kristen Bell, Josh Gad, and Idina Menzel. I Speaker 4 (2:27) auditioned for Frozen. What? For Kristoff. They said, okay, what are you going to be singing today? I said, I don't know. Speaker 1 (2:32) That must have been why you didn't get in. Oh, you probably Speaker 4 (2:34) won. Speaker 1 (2:35) Plus, John Stamos, Hayden Christensen from Star Wars, and more. Speaker 6 (2:38) And I guess I can share that, uh... No Speaker 1 (2:41) way. Listen to the latest episode of Hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (2:50) Hey, this is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Each week we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicist for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stiller, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (3:18) On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Pinheiro and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (3:56) Music saved me. Mike, welcome to Music Saved Me. It took a bit to get you here with technology, but yay, you're here. Speaker 4 (4:02) No, thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here. And this is a very apt podcast for me. Speaker 3 (4:10) I mean... Speaker 4 (4:10) It's very true. Everything about that title of your podcast, I can very much attest to that for myself. Speaker 3 (4:16) Well, you're not only a platinum-selling songwriter and producer, but you're also a pioneer in what we talked about, frequency-based healing music. And it blends custom-tuned frequencies with these immersive soundscapes, which are incredible. I hear a lot about frequencies and how much they have healing power. And I've actually been using something similar when I manage my stock account, which is very stressful. So I have it on at my desk. A friend of mine, Keith, created something like that. And I was like, this actually works. I'm okay. I'm not breaking out into a full sweat. Speaker 3 (4:53) It's pretty incredible stuff. So first, before we even get into what you created when when life handed you a bowl of lemons and you turned it into lemonade, I need to know, Mike, what's the first moment you remember that music just grabbed hold of you and when you realized the immense power that it had? Speaker 2 (5:12) Oh, gosh, that's a good question. It had to have been my folks, my folks record collection, you know. They weren't like music nuts or anything, but just some stuff that really, to this day, I still love. Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton and, gosh, John Denver and that stuff of the time. But I moved around a lot as a kid. I'm originally from upstate New York. I'm from Rochester, New York, western New York. And Rochester's claim to fame was that it... Kodak, the film company, was headquartered in Rochester. And so my dad kind of was a guy that would go to different territories and help them out when they were struggling. And so we moved around a lot as a family. And I really grew up in Puerto Rico. But, you know, just kind of always being the new kid in a new school kind of thing. Music was the thing that was my constant. in a kind of world of chaos of constantly moving. That's the thing that when I think about music, it was, that was my, was and still is to this day, my safety blanket, so to speak. Speaker 3 (6:26) Your binky. Yeah. Speaker 4 (6:29) How Speaker 3 (6:30) did you break into songwriting? I mean, at the production level you're at, you're talking about working with some of the biggest, hottest stars in the world. How does that happen? Speaker 4 (6:40) One of your prior guests. uh dr dr ron hershberg was my next Speaker 2 (6:45) door neighbor growing up and um I would say Ron, I credit Ron as being the catalyst for really, truly, wow, we could write songs. And Ron was, Ron's a year younger than I am, but he was way ahead of me. And so he had the four track recorder and had been writing songs when I moved in next door to him. And we went, you know, went to jingle houses to record music and just, it just, I got the bug. And then I went to a college in upstate New York, a place called, Oswego State. And, you know, it Speaker 4 (7:20) wasn't the greatest school in the world. And like people were out every night partying. And so I just was playing like six nights a week and I just kind of got the bug. And what I started to notice Speaker 2 (7:30) is that we would sneak in a couple original songs and people liked them. Nobody kind of checked out. I was like, hey, this is kind of cool. And then eventually we just kind of would expand our set into... almost all originals. And that was kind of the beginning of it. And I got a group of amazing guys together and we went and toured for almost a decade. Speaker 3 (7:50) Wow. What are the chances that you would be next door neighbors with Ron? I mean, everything happens for a reason for sure. It Speaker 4 (7:58) sure does. A hundred percent. I believe that to my core. What Speaker 3 (8:03) does the session actually look like when you're writing for somebody like a Britney or a Laura Belbundy versus creating something more experimental, which is what you're doing now with your nine-arc labs, which we're definitely going to get into as well? Speaker 2 (8:16) At my core, I'm still kind of an old-school songwriter. The song has to work on acoustic guitar, piano, and vocal to me. And to be honest, I don't do it as much anymore as I used to. the nine arc labs really takes up all my time. There's a lot going Speaker 3 (8:34) on there. I'm not surprised. I wouldn't. There is. Speaker 2 (8:37) Yeah. How you know, and it's, it's, um, you know, we'll get, we'll get into that. Uh, but that, um, you know, it would be, um, I'm trying to think like the Britney was brought to me as a song that was kind of incomplete. So I would say it was probably more like a song doctor to go help it out and kind of whip it into shape. Laura Bell was, I had, I had lived in Brooklyn. And that's kind of where I really got going with my. Speaker 2 (9:10) writer-producer career, not the band career. And from there, you know, and that just kind of cut my teeth in New York. And it was still my favorite place I've ever lived and probably the most important place I've ever lived for me. But there was an exodus out of New York, which you probably know. You know, it just got really expensive and people couldn't afford to stay there anymore. And I was like a straggler that hung on at the end. Speaker 2 (9:37) I was one of the last, I think, probably pure songwriters left in New York. And as a result, I would just get calls for everything. So I did like- You're like the unicorn Speaker 4 (9:49) writer. Yeah, kind of what it was. Yeah, Speaker 2 (9:52) kind of what it was. And I had worked for two producers named Shep and Kenny. And they kind of had a pretty good run in the early 2000s, late 90s, early 2000s. Speaker 2 (10:05) they had done Mandy Moore and O-Town and LFO, kind of a lot of that pop type stuff. And I completely BS'd my way into the role, told them I knew what Speaker 4 (10:17) I Speaker 2 (10:17) was doing. I didn't. But they were kind enough to kind of teach me. And I just kind of showed up every day. That's kind of what I did. And then that was an amazing experience. So that taught me a lot about being in the room with a celebrity. Speaker 2 (10:31) How to handle yourself. Speaker 3 (10:32) Yeah, Speaker 2 (10:33) exactly. You know, and they were, they were very, they were very cool and very generous in teaching me a lot. Yeah. Speaker 3 (10:40) That's amazing. You called yourself the song doctor. I mean, you're talking about in the beginning of your career and now you actually are a song doctor. That's funny. Yeah. I hadn't thought of Speaker 4 (10:54) that, but yeah, you're right. You really Speaker 3 (10:57) haven't changed what you're doing. It's just the medium has changed just a little bit. But I want to talk about your diagnosis, though. Is it called CIRS or Sears? Yeah, Speaker 2 (11:07) chronic inflammatory response syndrome. Speaker 3 (11:09) Can you explain some of the early symptoms? How long before you understood what was happening to you? Speaker 2 (11:15) Well, originally they called it idiopathic chronic illness, meaning they didn't know the source of what was happening. I got severe numbness in my hands and feet, like, and just progressed. And nobody could figure it out. I was going to the heads of neurology at all these different places, and nobody could figure it out. They thought it was a genetic thing. And I finally went to one doctor who had figured it out, and it was exposure to toxic mold. So on a blood test, it shows up almost exactly the same. It's one deviation away from neurological Lyme disease. Whoa. It attacks your nerves. And yeah, so I got to the point where I was almost in a wheelchair. But you talk Speaker 4 (11:59) about this, like this is the greatest titled podcast for me that I could ever do because I knew that Speaker 2 (12:07) I had maybe six months to a year left to live. That was it. I could just feel my body breaking down. Yeah, I knew that it was over. And I stumbled into this stuff of... I just first discovered ambient music, which I, you know, I'd been doing this forever and I never knew anything about it, to be quite honest with you. And then... Speaker 2 (12:30) Somehow along the way, I don't know. Just one minor correction in Speaker 4 (12:35) the intro I just want to take. It's entrainment, not entertainment. Oh, entrainment. Sorry, I have a little dyslexia. Sometimes words flip around. No, it's fine. I do the same thing. Every time I do voice to text, it always puts Speaker 2 (12:50) entertainment, but it's entrainment, which means that what entrainment is, it's a naturally occurring phenomena where... Speaker 2 (12:58) Your brain wants to, on an autonomic level, synchronize to external rhythmic stimuli that's being fed to it. And so if you take like a carrier tone, Speaker 4 (13:09) this is going to be an awful sound, but it goes, Speaker 2 (13:11) you Speaker 4 (13:11) know, like an oscillator tone. But then you put something Speaker 2 (13:15) like an amplitude modulation on it. Now it goes, and you can speed that up or you can slow it down. That rhythm. The brain will entrain to that. It'll synchronize to it. And once I learned that, I was just like, wait a second. I could take, you know, and I couldn't do, I'll show you. These are the two fingers that I lost here. And so, yeah, so I couldn't do the guitar work. I couldn't do the keyboard work that I used to do. I'm a perpetual optimist, which is probably my biggest superpower if I have one. I Speaker 3 (13:47) don't think I've had a happier guest on talking about these types of things. Speaker 2 (13:51) Because I really, as you were saying earlier, I really, really buy into the idea that everything happens how it's supposed to. And I wouldn't trade this for the world because I'm doing what I feel like is truly my life's purpose. And I feel like all this stuff I did, you know, for the more commercial artists was... In retrospect, now looking back, it was learning my tools. Speaker 3 (14:15) Training. Speaker 2 (14:16) Training, yeah. And because this stuff is very, very, very complex compared to Speaker 4 (14:22) what I used to be doing, but I had the foundation that I could build off of. And that's kind of where it started for me. Speaker 3 (14:29) Wow. Now, at any point, you said you could feel that you had a short, finite time here left. In that moment, did you feel like... the relationship with music was over? Speaker 2 (14:42) No, no. So you never lost that? That's a great question, but I don't, no, I think it's always been the thing to me that was my constant. You know, again, I felt, I could feel in my body that there was peace in the ambient music that I, different than how I'd felt with other music. And, you know, like a lot of music creators, you know, I wind up listening to snare drums and, you know, guitar tones, like, And not just enjoying it as a listener. It's not a great way to listen to music. And I found with ambient music that I was