The Resilient band of Veterans Healing through Music

Retired Marine Tim Donley turned his injuries into a powerful musical journey with The Resilient band of veterans healing through song. From singing with Roger Waters to honing his vocal skills at Berklee Online, Donley’s story shows how music can transform hardship into strength and hope.

The Resilient Band of Veterans Healing Through Music

by Pat Healy via Berklee Online

Retired Marine Corporal Tim Donley knows hardship—it’s shaped his life in ways most can’t imagine. But rather than dwell on it, he finds strength in gratitude and music, both of which have carried him through his darkest moments. 

“If you look for things to be sad about, you can find them,” says Donley. “But if you start to look for your blessings, for things to be grateful for, all of a sudden they start adding up really fast.”

That resilience is more than just a mindset—it’s also the name of his band. After surviving devastating combat injuries, Donley turned to music as part of his recovery, eventually forming The Resilient, a group that includes fellow injured veterans. The band has given him an outlet to transform struggle into song. Check out “Freedom’s Cost” below for just a sample of this transformative power.

“Is it worth the violence? Is it worth the loss? Every death is labeled as freedom’s cost.” The Resilient confront the weight of war in their powerful anthem, “Freedom’s Cost.”

While much of Donley’s vocal training has come through experience, he recently honed his skills further through Berklee Online’s Voice Technique 101course, helping him refine the voice that’s carried him this far.

It’s been a long road to recovery for Donley. In 2012, he was on patrol in Afghanistan with 1st Battalion, 8th Marines based out of Camp Lejeune, NC, when an improvised explosive device gravely injured him. The blast resulted in the loss of both legs above the knee and severe damage to his right arm. He spent two years in recovery at Walter Reed Military Hospital, where music became an essential part of his rehabilitation.

Throughout Donley’s recovery, Semper Fi & America’s Fund provided immediate and ongoing support to him and his family. Recognizing his passion for music, The Fund connected him with Berklee Online, facilitating his enrollment in Voice Technique 101 to aid his rehabilitation.

While at the hospital, Donley joined MusiCorps, a program connecting musicians with injured veterans. There, he met guitarist and Army infantryman Nathan Kalwicki, who had lost a leg to gunfire, also in Afghanistan in 2012. The two soon befriended professional musician and guitar teacher Greg Loman.

“You’ve got guys who have nothing else to do, and so they end up playing for four, six, eight hours a day,” says Donley, “and if you can’t sleep, you just play through the night.”

The three began playing music together regularly, with Donley reluctantly stepping into the role of vocalist. “The vast majority of us weren’t comfortable being stared at,” he admits. But after nine months of jamming and bonding, they were thrust into the spotlight in a way they never expected. Pink Floyd legend Roger Waters, who was dedicated to performing with injured veterans, invited them to take the stage at a fundraiser in New York City.

“It was great because it gave everybody something to kind of obsess over, to work towards to have this goal,” he says, “and with absolutely no qualifications of our own for being onstage there with him, beyond the fact that we were injured, and we love music, and it was part of how we were getting by.”

Donley is being too humble in his assessment of his own talent. After all, he impressed Roger Waters so much with his background vocals that Waters offered him a lead role, giving him the main vocal duties on “Wide River to Cross,” a song by Buddy and Julie Miller that Levon Helm of The Band made popular. 

Donley dutifully accepted the challenge, but knew he might struggle to remember the opening lyrics, so as a last resort, he wrote them down and tucked them in his pocket. But he hoped he wouldn’t need them—his Army Captain friend was supposed to whisper the first line to Donley as he wheeled him to the mic at the front of the stage. 

Donley recounts the moment: “He leans, down and goes, ‘I don’t remember what I was supposed to say to you,’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t remember what I’m supposed to say, either!’ And now we’re up here, and everybody’s looking at me, and I can’t just pull a piece of paper out of my pocket and look at it.”

Just as the song was about to start, Roger Waters abruptly stopped the band—his bass wasn’t working. While the crew scrambled to fix the technical problem, Donley discreetly pulled out his paper, scanned the lyrics, and when the music resumed, he delivered. And then some!

He says getting through such an intense onstage moment made him feel like he could accomplish anything, because nothing could ever feel quite as nerve-wracking again. He even shared the ordeal with Waters, who shrugged it off, saying, “Screw it. Who cares?” That sentiment stuck with Donley, reinforcing the idea that, in the grand scheme of things, a forgotten lyric or a vocal slip isn’t the end of the world. 

It was something Donley would hear echoed later in his Berklee Online course with his instructor, Cass McKinley: “She said, ‘It’s just one song, you know, whether you mess up or your voice breaks, or you forget the words or whatever. But at the end of the day, you’re not the center of everything. The world doesn’t come to a screeching halt.’”

The philosophy works both ways, his instructor explained: Even if you nail a performance, you don’t suddenly become a worldwide sensation. It all requires work, which is precisely what brought Donley to Berklee Online.

“Just like any other skill or any other discipline, if you put your mind to it, you work it out,” he says. “I realized I could spend hours working on something and at times feels like I’m just banging my head against the wall, trying to figure something out, but with a half-hour of instruction and somebody listening to you and being like, ‘Do this a little different there,’ or ‘This is what you’re doing here,’ and just a couple pointers, then all of the pieces fall into place, and it replaces hours of struggle on your own.”

 “It really was just massively beneficial in a lot of ways about how I thought about the way I sing, and especially so with the wheelchair: I sing sitting down, and it’s tougher, but you’ve got to make up for it, and they definitely gave me some tricks and the mindset of how to go about the techniques. It just made everything so much easier.” 
– Retired Marine Corporal Tim Donley on Berklee Online’s Voice Technique 101 course

His bandmates—which also include drummer Juan “Dom” Dominguez and bassist Erik Kalwicki (Nathan’s brother)—noticed the results before Donley even mentioned he was taking the course. 

“The guys in the band have all made comments, like, ‘Obviously, you’ve opened up more. You’ve figured out some of the range, and you’re hitting some of those notes you used to struggle for. You’re a stronger singer!’” he says. “One of the guys didn’t even know I was taking the course, and he was like, ‘You know, man, I don’t know what it is, but you’re doing good lately. You’re doing great!’ And I was like, ‘Thanks, man.’”

For Donley, it wasn’t just about improving technique—it was about reclaiming something deeper. Music had become more than a creative outlet; it was a way to process what he and his bandmates had been through. “For us, we had pushed all that so far away,” he says. “You know, it’s about the mission, it doesn’t matter what you see, doesn’t matter what happens. You deal with it. You push that crap down and you move on, and you do what you need to do. We were all just little boxed-up emotions. And just numb.”

Through music, those emotions had a place to go. “It really did make it possible to reconnect with feeling and with your own heart, your own loss, and because you’re feeling, you can deal with it.”

It’s something he’s seen in the audiences The Resilient play for—veterans, families of the fallen, and people carrying their own grief. “Music and that process, I think, is really what helped bring a lot of guys through. And helped them heal in a lot of ways.”

“We’ve been given unique life circumstances, and we want to use that for something,” says Donley. “And so some of our writing is about the struggle, just that pit inside, when everything feels like it’s just going to be darkness forever, and you’re just circling that drain. And when you’re there, it doesn’t feel like there’s an end to it. And sometimes all it took was somebody saying, ‘It’s gonna be okay. There will be an end to it.’ Life gets hard, but it always gets better. There’s always so much possibility.”

Semper Fi & America’s Fund cares for our Nation’s critically wounded, ill, and injured service members, veterans, and military families. Started in 2004 by military spouses, it supports all branches of the US Armed Forces and has provided grants, programs, and services, to more than 33,000 service members, veterans, and military families. 

The appearance of US Department of Defense (DoD) or military-themed visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement. For more on how we support service members, veterans, and their families, please visit online.berklee.edu/military.