“We were driving home from a show in Myrtle Beach, and I was talking to my tour manager, and I realized I couldn’t hear out of my right ear,” country musician Phillip Michael Parsons recalls in a recent interview of the moment he first recognized his hearing loss back in July of 2021. “I was kind of weirded out, but then I woke up the next day and it was fine.”
As the weeks went on, though, the in-and-out of his hearing turned into severe sinus pain and, eventually, a complete inability to walk–let alone tell up from down.
“I couldn’t think, and I couldn’t function,” Parsons remembers, further explaining that even doctors couldn’t quite identify what was happening.
“The first time I picked up my guitar after all this, I just bawled my eyes out because I couldn’t sing and play the guitar at the same time because the sounds sounded so crazy in my head,” he explains. “It didn’t sound like music to me.”
Now, for the first time in two months, Parsons has returned to his life’s passion with a new approach to performing that requires an earplug in one ear and an earpiece in the other, refusing to give up what he loves most: making music.
“I know it sounds cliché,” he says of this life-altering experience. “But to me, I feel like it’s another one of those things that just becomes part of my story.”
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