Mike Frazier doesn’t waste time. A title card flashes over footage of him opening a garage door: “The Belly Is In the Brain.”
It immediately cuts to Frazier, now seated and centered in the frame.
“For two years I felt debilitating nausea, chronic pain, and the worst mental health crisis of my life.” As he speaks, he sort of sways, flickering between eye contact and looking down.
Daily bouts of dry heaving and nausea led him to all the sorts of doctors you’d imagine you’d go to in this situation: gastroenterologists, general practitioners, cardiologists. They all ended up telling him the same thing: He had acid reflux.
The thing was, the usual treatments for acid reflux like antacids and cutting down on his coffee intake weren’t doing anything to help.
Some time later, back in Virginia for the funeral of his godfather, he and a friend went to lunch. They were talking Springsteen, and mid-sentence, Frazier “started to fade,” in the words of his friend.
He was having a seizure.
For about a minute Frazier sat with clenched fists, jaw open and silent. And then he snapped out of it, grumbled an apology for his “acid reflux” that has him all out of sorts, and continued where he had left off about Springsteen as if nothing had happened—because he wasn’t aware that something did happen.
That friend, thankfully, came from a medical family so he told his nurse mother and doctor father, who agreed that it sounded like a seizure. Soon Frazier was having tests done that determined he had been having seizures, and suddenly he had something he had been yearning for throughout all of the pain, both physical and mental: an answer.
“It sounds psychotic, ’cause I was just elated for surgery because I thought, they’re going to slice the thing out of my brain that’s making me feel like this,” Frazier said on Zoom from his Seattle home.
Frazier was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. He’d need to undergo brain surgery, which is scary for anyone, no less someone whose life depends on their creativity. Frazier wasn’t too phased by that, though. He was ready to put this behind him.
And he did, to some extent. He still made the movie.
The Belly Is In the Brain is a documentary not only about Frazier’s search for a diagnosis, surgery, and eventual recovery. It’s also a complementary piece to the creative output he started working on while he was still in the hospital recovering from the surgery—an album titled April Days.
The warmth of April Days is felt immediately. You don’t even have to hit play. The album cover shows Frazier and his wife, Stephanie (who coincidentally also was diagnosed with epilepsy prior to Frazier), walking through a picturesque Seattle holding their dog, looking at each other happily. It’s the kind of creative output that comes from weathering a horrific and scary storm, coming out on the other end not only with a greater appreciation for your own life, but a desire to bring peace to everyone. That’s the crux of April Days. It’s not just about Frazier’s own healing, it’s a call to heal the world with an end of violence and genocide, with the clarity of someone who’s had to face the void and can see how stupid it is to throw away life anywhere for any reason.
“I was writing April Days in the hospital, and a hospital in Gaza had just been bombed,” Frazier says. “So it’s like, I’m watching that unfold. My mind is going through this experience of ‘I’m about to have brain surgery.’ It was really, like, trying to also capture the world around me in suffering and pain. I really tried to, like, capture this healing of Earth in general.”
The songs on April Days oscillate between Frazier’s own experience and the bigger picture, focusing on his own journey on songs like “What’s Wrong With Me?” with lyrics like “My heart aches from something / I can’t see it / My mind feels out of control / My darkness steals away my memory / Give me a break from the pain / Medication has silenced the melody / And no one seems to understand but me.”
He plays on global themes and this idea of universal healing on songs like “World Without Empires,” which feels like a modern successor to “Imagine,” but without the cringey celebrity video: “Envision a world without empires / I’m sure it’ll happen somehow”
His twangy accent betrays his Appalachian Virginia roots despite his new Seattle home, giving the whole thing an even greater sense of heart-on-sleeve downhome warmth.
As for The Belly Is In the Brain, Frazier hopes that by telling his own story, he can create healing for others, whether those who’ve had similar experiences and need to know they’re not alone, or those currently facing their own uncertainty who might find answers in his journey.
Healing, in Frazier’s view, comes from community. We, the global community, owe it to each other to fix our problems and heal the world. More personally, the communities we create—family, friends, support groups—can be vital in that healing process, as it was for Frazier. This is clear when Frazier brings his music to people with epilepsy in one of the documentary’s most touching moments: a group singalong of ‘We’re gonna heal.”
For Frazier, that refrain of “We’re gonna heal,” went from future to past tense.
“I’ll never forget, it was April 21st this year,” he says. “I woke up. I did my usual routine—-some yoga, meditate a little bit, and I swear to you, it was the first time that in this entire experience or up to that point where my brain wasn’t just constantly like, ‘I’m going to get through, I’m going to get through. I’m going to get through.’ It was the first time I was like, ‘I got through it.’
Even with so many people who loved him all around him working hard to help him find answers and find peace, Frazier still felt alone. He was the one dealing with it, after all, and he felt like he was going insane, not to mention the actual physical symptoms he was experiencing. With April Days and The Belly Is In the Brain, Frazier is hoping that no one anywhere, dealing with anything, feels alone.
And now that he’s back on his feet and back on the road, he’s bringing his story to his show night after night, hoping to inspire others and connect with someone who needs it.
“Every time I play a gig now I start off the set with, ‘Hi, I’m Mike Frazier. I’m gonna play a song off the new album I wrote and put out this year. I had brain surgery and I’ve been seizure-free since.’ Every gig I have.”
Watch The Belly Is In the Brain on YouTube.
You can also catch Frazier on tour on the following dates:
Oct. 1- Portland, OR @ White Eagle Hall
Oct. 4 – Chicago, IL @ GMan Tavern
Oct. 5 – Hermann, MO @ Tin Mill Brewing
Oct. 7 – Little Rock, AR @ Vinos
Oct. 8 – MO @ Lindberg’s
Oct. 9 – St. Louis, MO @ The Stellar Hog
Oct. 10 – Topeka, KS @ Bassett Brewing
Oct. 12 – Kansas City, MO @ Greenwood Social Hall
Oct. 16 – Seattle, WA @ Tim’s Tavern
