As Swan Songs rounded the corner on its second decade, founder Christine Albert experienced her nonprofit’s work from a different perspective. When her husband, beloved local musician Chris Gage, suffered a heart attack last October and was diagnosed with terminal cancer shortly thereafter, musician friends from all across Austin asked to come perform for him.
“I was sitting on his bed with him and realizing: ‘Oh, this is a Swan Songs concert,’” Albert says. “I’m the recipient’s wife, and listening to the music, and it means so much to us.”
Like Gage, Albert is a lifelong musician. It was a Nineties residency at the Waterloo Ice House that first connected her to the idea of performing for people at the end of their lives. A couple, two of her regular listeners, asked the French bilingual songwriter to perform at their home after the husband suffered a sudden brain aneurysm, leaving him immobile, nonverbal, and with a terminal diagnosis. Albert graciously accepted the invitation to bring the songs he loved from the bar to his bedside. At the couple’s home, she found her performance doubled as a normalizing, comforting experience for the ill UT professor and as a positive, relieving reason to gather family and friends.
“They had stopped coming over because it was a little uncomfortable,” Albert explains. “They didn’t know what to say. But music gives something for everyone to focus on and to share with that person.”
Walking away from the performance, Albert knew she had stumbled onto a powerful idea. It took her 13 years to turn that experience into a registered nonprofit, but the concept wouldn’t let the singer go. She had seen firsthand the power that music, especially music known and loved by the recipient, had to temporarily ease the pain of a person in the process of dying and bring them into needed community with friends and family.
“In 2005, the calling felt stronger than the doubt,” Albert says. “Then, of course, once you take that step, people start lining up.” Twenty years later, the team receives 35 to 40 concert requests per month. “Which is a lot, considering 2006 was three requests,” she says.
Over the years, Swan Songs’ team grew, as did their database of working musicians to call on, increasing the organization’s ability to respond to requests for specific genres, styles, or Austin artists.
“What’s unique about Swan Songs, to me, is the aspect of requesting your favorite style of music,” says Albert. “There’s something very powerful about that, because it connects that person with their essence of when they first heard that music: It was part of their childhood, or their whole adulthood, they were a music professor, or when you first fell in love – it just connects you to a part of you that is whole and healthy. And that [is what] you really need to be in touch with when you’re getting close to the end of your life.”
With every passing year, Albert has become more aware and better equipped to offer families and their passing loved ones a lasting happy memory in difficult times. Reflecting on the 20th anniversary of Swan Songs, her passion for this project is as vibrant as ever.
Chris Gage
Credit: Todd Wolfson
“There’s such a value in this mission, and there’s a need for it in our culture,” she says. “It’s been very affirming to see [that] over and over again.”
When she played that very first Swan Songs-style show, Albert wasn’t necessarily thinking about how the performance impacted the wife of the couple, who’d been thrust into taking care of her partner. So many years later, attending a Swan Songs concert from the other side of the bed as a caretaker herself, she felt her appreciation for the nonprofit’s efforts deepen further.
“You get to bring something else into the environment besides the pain medication and the appointments,” Albert realized. “There’s just so much care and management with an illness on that level, [this] is [a] nice break and nice moment of lightness and music.”
As their friends sang along to songs they’d all loved, shared, and sang together, she watched them convey their own difficult goodbyes to her husband.
“Family members can be in the room and say things they want to say to their loved one but have had a hard time articulating, [because] suddenly the lyrics are saying that. It can be a simple country song, but you can hear it in a different way,” Albert explains. “The way that they were singing to him, and the joy and the connection, was like they didn’t need to come back later and tell him again how much he meant to them, the music said it.”
It wasn’t just Albert who felt the sincerity and significance of their song. Gage could feel it too. A smile creeps into her voice as she remembers her late husband, barely verbal, straining to sing harmonies in a song he’d performed countless times and turning over in bed to direct his musician friends.
“He rallied on that day. After that, he really did start to decline. It was another week before he died, but that was the last real, super engaged moment,” she says. “A lot of [the performers] were Swan Songs musicians. The symbolism of them being there, doing this for us, adds another layer.”
Swan Songs celebrates its anniversary at the 2025 Swan Songs Serenade at Four Seasons Hotel Austin on Nov. 2.
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