If Adriano Mollica had written a letter to his 18-year-old self when he was graduating from Saint Paul Catholic High School in 2009, he never would have dreamed that one day he’d be reading it as a doctor.
Throughout high school, Mollica’s passion was music, spurred on by now-retired Saint Paul music teacher John Navarroli. He gave little thought to much else, “so much so that when I was in my senior year of high school, I dropped most of my academic courses.” After graduation, Mollica packed up his guitar and headed to Boston, ready to take on the music world as a student at the prestigious Berklee College of Music.
“When I got there, I think what I mostly wanted to do was write songs and major in Music Production and Engineering,” said Mollica.
But you know the old adage: Man makes plans, God laughs. And God was gearing up for a full-bellied roar.
When didn’t get into his major of choice at Berklee, Mollica had to look at other options. He was serendipitously introduced to music therapy, and that’s where this story really begins.
“I was introduced to how the brain processes music, and how the music can be used as a therapeutic tool,” he said. Inspired by the work of Brian Levitin (This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession) and Dr. Oliver Sacks (Musicophelia: Tales of Music and the Brain), Mollica leaned into music therapy as a career. He worked in long term care homes supporting people with dementia, and at McMaster Children’s Hospital, supporting children and youth with cancer and other medical conditions. It was life changing.
“Once I saw the positive impact that music therapy had, I was deeply move by it and it unlocked something in me that made me want to care for people,” He said.
And so, Mollica became fixated on getting into medical school. He wrote the MCAT (the Medical College Admissions Test) and applied to several medical schools. In his first year applying, he was passed over for interviews. But the next year, the University of Toronto offered an interview, and then an offer of admission to one of 250 highly coveted medical program placements. Mollica completed four years of medical school, followed by five years of psychiatry residency, recently starting the Azrieli Brain Medicine Fellowship at the U of T to subspecialize in neuropsychiatry.
“This doesn’t focus on music,” Mollica said. “It will have a clinical focus in post-concussive syndrome (PCS), Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), and how to treat people with complex brain disorders more holistically. PCS and FND are very common and very
debilitating, and my research will be in neuromodulation – stimulating the brain with very powerful magnets through a process called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS).”
With an illness like depression, there are parts of the brain that are under-active, he said. TMS can target dysfunctional brain circuitry in certain disorders and levels things out.
“We’re still in the early stages of learning about this,” Mollica said. “But we know these are disorders of the brain, so if we know what areas of the brain aren’t working properly, we can find ways to correct their function. It’s a very exciting avenue of psychiatry.”
What Mollica couldn’t have expected, though, was that someone close to him would face a devastating mental health battle - and that he would be unable to help, despite his best efforts.
The personal tragedy left him shattered, disillusioned with the field he had dedicated his life to. He took time away from his training, doing just enough to complete his board certifications while he processed his grief.
In the wake of that loss, Mollica found his way back to music. What had once been a passion became a refuge, a way to rebuild what had been broken. Music offered him solace and structure in a time when everything else felt like it was falling apart.
“For five or six months, I worked on songwriting,” Mollica said. “I could express a lot of the complex emotions of things. If I came across melodies and chords on my guitar, I’d record them on voice notes on my phone. I put things together for fun. It was very therapeutic.”
Enter local music producer Paul Gigliotti. A fellow Saint Paul alumnus, Gigliotti was one-half of former Niagara Falls-based band Wave, and a member of local band The Madhatters. Mollica worked with Gigliotti on refining the music.
“I just started recording (the songs),” said Mollica. “It was a bit of a personal pilgrimage in a way. I’d drive an hour and a half each way (between Toronto and Niagara Falls) to go to the studio a few times a week. It was a very unconscious, creative process. All I know is that it felt good, and it felt right.”
“It” became Mollica’s first album, Fortune, produced in a few months earlier this year, which was released at The Exchange in Niagara Falls last month.
The name, he said, has multiple meanings.
“It’s a reflection on how fortune and misfortune are intertwined. Fortune-telling and fortune through luck might feel meaningful, but they can also be fickle and hollow. The album is really about asking what true treasure in life is—what are the best parts of life we can build for ourselves, and what does that take?”
Fortune also means something else.
We seek comfort from grief from different places. Faith. Reflection. Prayer. Sports. Creativity. And, occasionally, a need to find a different connection. Mollica was with friends one night when they decided to have a tarot card reading. Revealed to Mollica was the Five of Cups. The grief card. Pulled upright, it focuses on loss, despair, and loneliness. Pulled upside down, “you focus on what’s still standing.”
“The symbolism of the card is very powerful,” said Mollica.
So powerful, it’s the first song on the seven-track album. Next up are Valkyrie and Ghostlands, which also focus on that upright position. Then the tone shifts to focus on the upside down card: Curse the Dark, By the Pound, Pale Blue Dot, and Halfway Up.
Fortune is haunting and beautiful; stripped down where the focus is on Mollica’s voice and his lyrics, telling his story from the darkness of grief to the light of hope. It’s the throughline from music to medicine to music again.
“Once it was done and I looked at what I had, I realized it was inspired by the tragic event,” he said. “The first few songs focus on the upright position. The last few are about moving forward. I think what I love about it the most is that it was good for me. These are songs that I wrote and that I love, and it feels right to be able to do it.”
The launch event at The Exchange September 15 included a special fundraiser for the Canadian Mental Health Association. Mollica hoped to raise maybe $1,500 at the event but raised more than $8,000.
“I was kind of shocked by that. I’m very grateful for everyone who came out and donated,” he said. “It was also to honour the person in my life that I lost. Music became my own therapy. In terms of doing something for myself, it was something that I had to do. It was part of the healing that I needed to do to get back to psychiatry.
“I needed to fill my cup.”
Find Adriano Mollica @the_adriatic on Instagram and as MollicaAdriano on X (formerly Twitter). Fortune is available on Spotify and Apple Music (the Adriatic).