PORT ANGELES — The morning of Jan. 7, Chandra Johnson was in a highway wreck that turned her life upside-down.
The violinist’s right radius, her forearm bone, was shattered; one of her lungs was punctured and collapsed; her spleen was badly damaged; and her hand tendons and nerves severed.
She also suffered a concussion, while broken glass was embedded in her hand and forehead.
Johnson, 24, says she’s lucky to be alive after the wreck, which happened on U.S. Highway 101 just east of Laird Road.
But in the weeks following, she felt devastated. A classically trained musician who’s spent the past 14 years playing in all kinds of bands all over the Northwest, Johnson felt she’d lost her identity.
But she didn’t give up or sit still.
About a month after the wreck — still confined to her house in Port Angeles — Johnson reached out, via Facebook, for voice lessons.
“I was thinking some of my music friends in Seattle might be able to take me on once a month,” she said, “when I go to have my different hand surgeries.”
It was a Port Angeles musician who responded.
“Michael Rivers, out of the graciousness of his dear heart, offered me free lessons,” Johnson recalled.
The founding director of the Peninsula Men’s Gospel Singers, Rivers also runs a private music studio. He remembered Johnson from one of the musical pizza parties he hosted several years ago.
“The jamming at those parties was thick with talent, but Chandra stood out with fearless playing on her fiddle,” Rivers remembered.
Johnson, a fourth-grader in Betty Hanson’s class at Franklin Elementary School when she took up the violin, has gone on to join Seattle singer Mary Lambert’s band, the Seattle Rock Orchestra and the Gypsy-blues band Hot Damn Scandal.
Oh, and she played on Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ album “The Heist,” which won a Grammy Award last year.
When Johnson came to his studio, Rivers said, she brought her high standards and fierce expressiveness.
In four months, he marveled, she has become a singer.
Johnson’s debut vocal recital, an evening of blues, pop, folk, country and soul, comes this Friday.
Admission is free and all ages are welcome at the 7 p.m. concert at Wine on the Waterfront, upstairs in The Landing mall, 115 E. Railroad Ave.
Randy Powell, another of Rivers’ students, will do a short opening set; then Johnson will sing with Powell and the Port Angeles band Good Machine, featuring Hayden Pomeroy, Taylor Thomas and Cole Gibson.
It was no simple, straight line to this point. Furious about what had happened to her, Johnson first picked out a set full of angry songs about terrible people.
Rivers, she said, talked her out of that.
Her voice teacher taught her about compassion, Johnson said, and how to “sing through my problems . . . and come back to being Chandra.”
Even as she’s found her voice, Johnson has also healed enough over the past five months to play her violin again.
She’s performed some with the Bellingham band Wild Rabbit, and she and her fiddle are soon to go on a Northwest tour with the Clumsy Lovers, a folk rock-bluegrass-Celtic jam band originally from Vancouver, B.C.
She still has many trips to the doctor and the physical therapist, though, plus more surgeries on her right hand.
Working with Rivers taught her about patience, Johnson said, and about enjoying her life day by day.
As for Friday’s recital, she added, “it will be an adventure.”
________
Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
