Crisis reopens a door to music

Editor's note: Katie Young was killed in a car crash on Friday, Oct. 30, in Chesapeake, Va.

Nothing Katie Young had gone through before had prepared her for that night last February.

Young's husband, Justin, said his wife woke up in pain — pain so intense that "she felt like her abdomen was being ripped to shreds."

The Youngs had thought her health problems through the years were food allergies. But this was different.

Justin Young said his wife told him the pain was the worst she had ever felt — even worse than giving birth to their two children naturally. "She's not one to go to the doctor," Young said, but he rushed her to the hospital. "Sure enough, they admitted her, rushed her into surgery, (discovered a perforation) and then they diagnosed it as Crohn's disease," a chronic inflammation of the digestive tract.

__IMAGE1__Doctors removed about 10 inches of Katie Young's small intestine and a small portion of her large intestine, her husband said. They didn't have any health insurance because he "had been job-hopping for a while. I got into real estate as soon as the market tanked, so I went to something else, a commission-only job, then I started applying to go back to school, and that's when this all came together."

Young, a member of the Salem Ward in the Virginia Beach (Virginia) Stake, credits the doctors with saving Katie Young's life. But with a mountain of unpaid medical bills, he had to find a way to pay them. That's when he decided to lean on his love of music and a CD that was recorded 10 years earlier.

Justin Young has always enjoyed entertaining. His mom had him start with piano lessons when he was 5. He liked it but dropped out later because various acting opportunities diverted him.

"My schedule got busy — I became a professional actor, making money from it starting at age 10," he said.

"It wasn't until I got into high school that I started discovering that, hey, I've got music in my head — let's see if I can play it." He found that he could.

When he went on a Mormon mission to the Denver South Mission (Spanish-speaking), he met a fellow Virginia elder, Chris Sorensen. Their meeting would lead to music collaboration and a friendship that continues to this day. "When you find somebody that's from your home state when everyone else around you is from either California, Arizona, Utah and Idaho, you kind of gravitate towards them," Young said. " He'd seen me play (the piano) at some zone conferences (and) he said, 'Do you actually write music?' And I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'I have some lyrics that I want to put some music to.'

"We sat down after one zone conference ... it was as if ... picture a beam of light coming down into the top of my head and not my fingers, because it just came together and flowed through so perfectly ... that you can't take credit for it."

Sorensen, who is now married with four children and is a counselor at Manchester High School in Midlothian, Va., remembers the music happening much the same way.

"I like to write poetry just as a way to relax," he said. He heard Young playing the piano at a missionary zone conference. "It hit me that one of the poems I had recently written I wanted to try to make it into a song. It just clicked that I needed to get with him and see if he would be able to do music for it. It worked out ... we clicked friendship-wise as well."

They collaborated on lyrics and music for several songs and got permission from their leaders to do simple recordings. After their missions, they went to Utah to record a CD, and the result was "Just for Me," released in 1999. Several of the songs had Sorensen's lyrics, and Young provided the music and vocals.

After "Just for Me" came out with its nine tracks, Young said he and Sorensen did firesides and youth conferences in Colorado, California, Florida and Virginia. "We got such an overwhelming response," Young said. "People came up and said their kids requested our music at nighttime when they were going to sleep. That surprised me a lot that kids actually liked it."

But it was more than just kids who liked it.

Richard Bracey, a Church Educational System coordinator in Virginia at the time, said Young performed at a CES kickoff fireside in Virginia Beach. "It was a good performance," Bracey said. "He's a talented young man."

Renae Blackburn, a member of Young's ward in Virginia Beach, said she has followed his musical talent for years. "I listened to his music when he did the (concert) tour and so I bought one (CD) for myself and then I bought one for my children," she said. "Then my children called and asked me to buy more for their friends, and that's how it kind of roller-coastered.

"I just like the message in the songs," Blackburn said. "I think he's a great guy, and I'd certainly like to see his music get more publicity and he can be able to do the thing he likes to do, which is sing. He's good at it, and I think he composes some good tunes."

But after the initial push on the album, Young and Soren?sen moved on to other things.
"(Sorensen) left to pursue another career," Young said. "We both got married, both had kids, and life started taking over."

Katie Young is feeling OK these days, with no severe flare-ups recently. She is managing her condition through diet.

"She has to be very careful what she eats," Justin Young said, "because if she even takes a bite of anything she shouldn't have she starts to have some problems. ... She did not want to deal with the nasty side-effects of the drugs, so she's doing it through her diet. But she's a tough girl and she's doing the best right now that she can."
What dogs the family now are those medical bills, and Young has been doing a lot of thinking about them.

"When I was going through this with my wife, the thought came to me ... there's one thing I can do, put up music, get it on iTunes, on Rhapsody, through Amazon, and put it out there, just get it out there to a mass audience," he said. "That's one way to provide some income to help you knock out these bills. I thought about it, prayed about it and then just did it."

Sorensen said, "It's been a wake-up call for (Young that) maybe it's time to help spread his gift again. ... He's got an amazing gift. ... If people are looking for good, relaxing music with a message, I think they'll enjoy the album. ... If they give him a chance, I think they'll appreciate where he's coming from and the heart that he puts into it."

Young said, "This is my Hail Mary. This is my last shot. I'm throwing it into the end zone right now and seeing if people will catch it.

"These doctors worked so hard," he said, "and they saved my wife's life and they need to be paid. ... (The music) came from another source, and I just followed what I thought I should do."

Young said his family's story "is not a sob story, it's a hope story ... it's faith ... it's endurance ... it's all the good things. I don't look at it negatively at all.

"You look at the trials that happen in your life and say, OK, why am I going through this? What am I supposed to learn from this? Let's learn this and move on. That's how we're looking at it."

E-mail: rwalsh@desnews.com

To learn more about his music and find links for buying it, visit www.justinyoung.com.