Singer-songwriter Tara Watts sings the gospel of the bike helmet

A year and a half after suffering a traumatic bike crash in Windsor, Ont., singer-songwriter Tara Watts is returning to her old self. “Everything was stopped, you know?” she said, looking back on the accident. “But now, it’s all—it’s back!” A legacy of the crash that hasn’t stopped, though, is her message for other Canadian cyclists: whatever and wherever you ride, wear your helmet.

Fans, friends and supporters of the Canadian musician, with deep roots in rock, gospel and folk, feared the worst for Watts after her accident in June 2016.

“I don’t have any recollection of the night,” she said. “I don’t know what happened, to be honest, other than I got pretty banged up.” She remembered going out for a ride on a warm Windsor evening that June, somewhere in the vicinity of Winderemere Road and Ottawa Street, but the next thing she remembered, she said, was waking up in the hospital with a “litany” of injuries, covered in blood.

A severe brain injury was part of that litany—and speaking to the CBC that summer from her hospital bed, it was one of the reasons she regrets not wearing a helmet.

Pleading with her fellow cyclists to protect their noggins, Watts told CBC reporters, “I’ve learned the hard way that it’s worth it. I’m lucky to be alive. I’m lucky to be walking and talking today. So, I think the wear and tear on your hair is worth it.” To this day, the impact of the crash and the effect of hitting her head on the pavement, through reports published nearly 18 months later, are clearly evident. Watts still can’t remember details from the accident. All she recalls, she told the CBC this week, is that she was found sprawled out in the street near her bike that night, and the rest is history—six-weeks bed rest in hospital, and a long process of recovery that, today, is finding her gaining new momentum all over again.

“I have a new appreciation on life and my days at a time,” she told the CBC, noting how the experience changed her approach to her craft. “Before I think I used music as therapy. I would write in the depths of despair, in the midst of heaviness and hardships.”

That, she said, has changed. “I really want to work towawrd looking at beauty in every thing and cherishing that.”

What hasn’t changed, though, is her insistence that a bike helmet is worth the occasional inconvenience of wearing one, and to friends and fans—some of whom started a GoFundMe to aid in Watts’s recovery—her message has resonated. Many others who never wore helmets in the past rarely take to the saddle without one these days, they said.

“I don’t really wear a helmet,” said Maciejka Gorzelnik, one of two supporters behind the GoFundMe campaign. “I’ll be the first to admit it. That’s going to change. I don’t ever want to be in that situation.”