The arts, in all forms, have a longer history as a source for healing, mourning, celebrating and marking life’s passages than both psychology or medicine. Yet current western medical models for assessing art’s impact on ‘better’ or ‘worse’ health do not account for a sense of well-being and ‘flourishing’ in wellness/illness situations as music therapist’s have expressed. This paper revisits an exchange between popular music studies scholar Simon Frith and music therapist’s Gary Ansdell and Bent Jensen to ‘put the nerve’ into their discussion of ‘music’s powers’ with an embodied account of how music can charge people emotionally. It attends to the unfinished processes of music-making from the perspective of playing Taylor Swift covers to explore the connections between musical embodiment, emotions, and self-concept. The physical, emotional, cognitive and social outcomes of music-making are explored from a somatic perspective to propose that playing covers can be a means of ‘feeling yourself’, and can contribute to what Ansdell and fellow music therapist Tia DeNora call ‘flourishing’ in the everyday. The attention to embodiment situates this essay amongst scholarship, within and beyond music, concerned with the role of the moving body, and the arts, in re-imagining systems of care.

与心理学或医学相比，所有形式的艺术作为治愈、哀悼、庆祝和标记生命历程的源泉具有更长的历史。然而，目前用于评估艺术对“更好”或“更差”健康影响的西方医学模型并没有像音乐治疗师所表达的那样考虑健康/疾病情况下的幸福感和“蓬勃发展”。本文重新审视了流行音乐研究学者西蒙·弗里斯 (Simon Frith) 与音乐治疗师的加里·安斯德尔和本特·詹森 (Gary Ansdell) 和本特·詹森 (Bent Jensen) 之间的交流，通过具体说明音乐如何在情感上激发人们的情绪，“将神经”投入到他们对“音乐的力量”的讨论中。它从演奏泰勒斯威夫特翻唱的角度关注音乐创作的未完成过程，探索音乐体现、情感和自我概念之间的联系。身体、情感、从躯体的角度探讨音乐制作的认知和社会结果，以提出播放封面可以成为“感受自己”的一种方式，并且可以为安斯德尔和其他音乐治疗师蒂亚·德诺拉所说的日常生活中的“蓬勃发展”做出贡献。对具体化的关注将这篇论文置于音乐之内和之外的学术之中，关注运动的身体和艺术在重新想象护理系统中的作用。