How the Songwriting with Soldiers Program Helps Veterans Heal Through Music: Exclusive

It’s no secret that music can help heal many mental wounds. This is true for listeners as well as the artists and songwriters who create the music. Songwriting with Soldiers is a program that pairs veterans with professional songwriters to foster healing, growth, and creativity.

Jay Clementi, songwriter and Music Director of Songwriting with Soldiers and Retired U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Kyle Welch sat down with American Songwriter to discuss the program and its impact. Clementi has been involved in the program for more than a decade. Welch attended a songwriting retreat in April 2024 and, with Clementi’s help, found closure through the power of songwriting.

The Origins of Songwriting with Soldiers

Before getting into the song he wrote with Retired Staff Sergeant Welch and the impact it had, Clementi discussed the origins of the Songwriting with Soldiers program.

“Songwriting with Soldiers got started in 2011 with a gentleman named Darden Smith and a woman named Mary Judd. Darden was a really great singer/songwriter from Texas and Mary is a wonderful woman who has done a lot of great things. She was an expert in positive psychology. They put this program together, just talking,” Clementi explained. “We tried one for the first time in 2011 it was myself, Radney Foster, and Darden. Then, Mary Judd put programming around it. So, when participants weren’t writing songs, they were doing strength workshops and journaling and meditation. So, that was the catalyst for it,” he recalled.

“We realized that after the very first session, we knew we had to do this a bunch more. It started out slow, we did a couple a year. In 2012, it officially became Songwriting with Soldiers. We’ve done 80 retreats and we write songs with our partner organizations called Boulder Crest and the Wounded Warrior Project,” Clementi added.  “We write songs with over a thousand veterans a year. We have a number of professional songwriters who are specially trained to do this.”

“Back in Baghdad”

When Staff Sergeant Welch came to Songwriting with Soldiers, he was fighting a mental battle. He was home safe with his wife and kids. However, he couldn’t fully enjoy civilian life because part of him wanted to be back in Baghdad, leading troops, and risking his life for the United States. Clementi helped him put those feelings into the song “Back in Baghdad.”

“I had a million things to say but nothing came out right. And Jay asked ‘How do you feel?’ and the first thing my mind clung to was the Army was the best time in my life and they randomly said, ‘Hey, we’re going to medically retire you. You’ve got three months,’” Welch said. “That was a sore spot for me because it was so sudden. There was no lead-up to it. It was just, ‘You got injured eight years ago, you’re gone now.’ I couldn’t get over it and couldn’t express that,” he added.

“I’ve said it, you know, ‘I want to go back in the military, I want to deploy.’ But to actually hear it in a different way than me saying it out loud, it kind of gave me that closure that I’ve been looking for for seven years,” Welch said of the wiring process. “I finally got over that I’m now just a veteran instead of active duty. I never had a purpose or goals and ambitions growing up. The military just clicked. Baghdad was one of those experiences that will either make or break you and it made me,” he explained.

Forging a Song from Raw Emotion

While SSgt Welch provided his emotions and story as raw material and Clementi forged them into a song.

“One of the cool things about these sessions is that we get to use their words. I can’t tell you how many times they’ve said something—the vernacular and verbiage that they use—I love putting stuff in songs that I don’t know what the heck it means. I asked ‘What the heck is that?’” Jay said of the Songwriting with Soldiers sessions. “It was the same thing in this with the Ma Deuce. I didn’t know what a Ma Deuce was. He had to explain to me that it was a .50 caliber gun. He’s talking about the brass bouncing off his Humvee,” he added.

“We started talking about the imagery of the song and he nailed it perfectly. He started talking about the dripping ice cream cone in the middle of a war zone. You could almost smell it. I was just trying to write it down fast enough to get it all and put it to a melody that would convey the emotion,” Clementi said of the song they put together.

“When Kyle was talking, the biggest thing that hit me was the fact that he’s holding his family back home and all he’s doing is thinking about being back in Baghdad. He’s safe and he doesn’t have bullets flying at him all the time,” Clementi reflected. “The fact that he was so powerfully woven into the construct of being a warrior that it’s so tough to set that down. It blew me away. It’s like he’s so torn between the desire for peace at home and the call of the battlefield. I knew we had to dive into that.”

SSgt Kyle Welch on Hearing “Back in Baghdad” for the First Time

“The first time I heard it, I wasn’t over-the-top,” Welch said. “I kind of felt like there was something missing. Like I wanted to say more. But, when we left the retreat and I got home and got the CD and listened to it, that’s when it spoke to me. That’s when I had chills all over my body while I was driving. And I had my daughter with me listening to it and she was into it. It was like ‘This is what I wrote this song for’ so I could sit and listen to it with my kids and they could hear a little piece of my past before they were born. It was enlightening,” he added.

The Result of the Songwriting with Soldiers Session

In the end, Songwriting with Soldiers helped SSgt Welch more than he thought it would. The song he and Clementi wrote combined with regular therapy sessions have allowed him to embrace his civilian life. Now, he’s focusing the leadership skills he honed on the battlefield on raising his children and working a small farm.

“I feel like I’m not stuck, I don’t have an anchor pulling me back,” Welch said of how he feels after going through the program. “I don’t know what I’m doing now. Like, I’m a farmer now. I moved from a subdivision with an HOA in Colorado, snowboarding and fishing to the country with chickens and ducks and gardening. But, I feel like the anchor has been lifted up to where I can freely roam. I’m able to move on. It’s kind of making it easier,” he explained.

Featured Image by Ed Rode