A teacher and songwriter from Bismarck has created a powerful, poetic song inspired by and dedicated to Tyanna Weeks of Minot.

Dr. Nick Emmel, wanted to give back to Weeks and her family after Weeks sustained severe, life-altering injuries due to a head-on vehicular collision on Jan. 31. Weeks was crashed into by an impaired driver heading the wrong way on a state highway. Both Weeks and the impaired driver were 18 years old at the time.

Emmel met Weeks a few months prior to the accident and seeing Weeks and her family work through the trials and sufferings incurred by the accident had a profound impact on Emmel.

This impact inspired Emmel to write lyrics, compose the music and record a song involving various collaborators dedicated to Weeks. That song, “18 Reasons,” was released on Aug. 22.

Dr. Nick Emmel has written, recorded and dedicated a song to Tyanna Weeks of Minot. Photos from Nick Emmel.

“I think that a rather appropriate response to some of these difficult things that we’re faced with is to address them with the gift of our imagination and the beauty of what we create,” Emmel said.

Any revenue generated by the song via downloads across all major music platforms is to be donated to Weeks and her family.“We thought, what better way to do this than to offer proceeds from downloads to the Weeks family in an attempt to help defray some of the medical costs,” Emmel said. “It’s a great opportunity for us to respond to the suffering in the community with, hopefully, some grace.

“Our hope is to make our first gift to the family before Christmas,” Emmel said.

Emmel met Weeks a little more than a year ago while they were both on a pilgrimage trip to Rome, Italy, through the University of Mary’s Rising Senior Pilgrimage to Rome. Emmel has chaperoned for the study abroad pilgrimage several times.

“Each year, roughly 140 students from the Catholic high schools of North Dakota participate in the pilgrimage and we tour various locations and sacred sites in Italy,” Emmel said.

Weeks was a student at Bishop Ryan Catholic School at the time and was on the June 2023 pilgrimage, a trip lasting around 12 days.

“Even though I teach at St. Mary’s Central High School, you get to know all the pilgrims on the pilgrimage when you’re involved in teaching and chaperoning,” Emmel said.

Weeks was similar to many of the students Emmel had seen on the pilgrimage trip, a wide-eyed student excited to learn and explore.

“She was very, very much involved in the life of her school. Just an inquisitive mind and very, very kind-hearted and very prayerful,” Emmel said.

A couple of months after Weeks sustained injuries in the collision, Emmel gave a talk at Bishop Ryan Catholic School on March 13.

“The topic of the talk was ‘suffering,’ because I knew the community at Bishop Ryan had experienced, obviously, the difficulty of Tyanna’s accident, but they also had a teacher pass away about a year earlier. And so I decided to frame the talk around suffering and the problem of suffering and how do human beings work through that,” Emmel said.

Emmel also performed the song he had written in honor of Weeks at his Bishop Ryan talk.

“That was the first time that I performed the song live,” Emmel said. The song is performed as a duet with Chloe Watterud on the recording.

“She’s got a really dynamic voice. I was just overjoyed to be able to work with her as a person, but also she’s got an amazing instrument,” Emmel said.

The song was inspired by the trials of suffering Weeks and her family have endured because of and since the accident. Emmel asked both Tyanna Weeks and her mother, Brianna Weeks, if he could write a song about Tyanna Weeks’ story.

“And Brianna just said, ‘You know, we really want to be able to tell the world Tyanna’s story because we have great hope that it can help others,'” Emmel said. “I was grateful to hear it because I agree. I think that there is a great deal of hope in the midst of it.”

Since the release of the song, both Brianna and Tyanna Weeks have responded to Emmel to share their thoughts about it.

“They appreciate the beauty of the song and also the hope that’s present in the lyrics,” Emmel said.

“Suffering is like sunlight. It’s impossible to avoid. And so it challenges the listener to consider, what do we do with that? Then toward the end of the song is sort of what perhaps might be God’s response,” Emmel said.

Emmel composed the music on acoustic guitar. His friend, Jacob Olson, produced the track and helped Emmel and Watterud with the instrumentation and sound design. Emmel also invited another friend, Bridget Dorman, to play violin and assist with the strings on the song.

“One of the things that sort of haunted me as I was working on this project was how the two people involved in the accident were both 18 years old, and that’s where you get sort of this idea of 18 reasons. That’s a time where often there are a ton of changes that happen in our lives,” Emmel said.

“It’s a really pivotal time in life. But then also, on top of that, for those involved in this accident, it was an extremely pivotal moment in their lives, both being 18 years old and sort of heading in two different directions,” Emmel said.

Emmel studied music at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and graduated in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in music education. Emmel entered his 16th year of teaching this fall and currently teaches at St. Mary’s Central High School in Bismarck.