Editor’s note: The following piece includes candid depictions of substance use and addiction that may be triggering for some readers. Reader discretion is advised.

By Melissa Karen Sances
For the Valley Advocate

In the spring of 2013 at an empty sober house in Boston, Jason Pascucci came to in his own private hell. A brown leather belt lay next to him, still wet with his own saliva, after he’d tied it around his bicep and pulled it tight with sharp teeth.

An unzipped pouch revealed illicit contents. Beside it was the needle he’d plunged into his arm.

His eyelids were so heavy. He reached into the pocket of his jeans for his phone and tried to cup it in his hand. Eventually — within minutes? Within hours? Time was so slippery now — he was able to grasp it and use his thumbs to type a question into Google:

How long do I have —

It was always a fight to stay present, but the heroin coursing through his veins lulled him to sleep. He gasped, peeled his eyes open. Typed.

How long do I have to be awake —

He blinked, squinted at the phone in his hands, continued:

How long do I have to be awake in an overdose — He still wasn’t finished.

How long do I have to be awake in an overdose not to die?

And then, he let go.

On a sunny Thursday afternoon last month, Pascucci welcomed his band, Pretty Killer, to his sprawling farm in Monson that he shares with his wife and sons. Several sheep, including a lamb he’d just welcomed into the world, bleated in the backyard. Homemade cider doughnuts practically gleamed on the kitchen counter. On the wraparound couch in the living room, all five members of the band sunk into cushions around two cats that were already nestled. The television displayed a silent slide show: Pascucci’s two boys, 10 and 11, playing out a picturesque childhood.

The gathering was a celebration. On March 23, following a two-year hiatus, the alt-rock band released the first single from their forthcoming full-length album, recorded in West Springfield by Ghost Hit Recording.

The song, “Sharp Teeth,” centers on the loss of Pascucci’s childhood best friend to opioid dependence. It’s both raw and reflective, exploring the unrelenting heartbreak of loving someone in the throes of addiction, knowing their days are numbered but helpless to change the outcome. Pascucci sings that the two friends “sank together to the bottom,” but he was the only one to rise again. In the accompanying music video, Pascucci, now in recovery and faced with a mirror image of his sickest self, responds with compassion:

“I’m not your enemy, you’re taking on everyone, you know / I’m not your enemy, but this time, I can’t go … Cut deep, we wasted time and now / That time is all we need … Sharp Teeth, you wanted out, you found an out / And you’re free.”

On the album, Pascucci’s lead vocals are supported by Kelli Wright, who performs under the name “Kelaska.” Before joining the band, Wright, who lives in Plainfield, Connecticut, amassed 30,000 subscribers through her YouTube channel, where she performs acoustic covers. Some of her covers and originals have been streamed more than a million times.

Ryan Kelleher of Charlton joins Wright and Pascucci on guitar, while Derek Dolan of Douglas provides the bass. Worcester-based drummer Jacob Blondin, who also co-produced the album, keeps the beat.

When the band recorded 10 songs inside a former church sanctuary in West Springfield, everyone understood they were following Pascucci’s journey from active addiction to present-day recovery. Eventually, 13 years would be compressed into 35 minutes — and they would all bear witness to a miracle.

The opioid epidemic has spanned Pascucci’s lifetime. Born in 1989 at the dawn of the public health crisis, he had just missed the airing of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America’s iconic public-service announcements.

They featured a middle-aged white man palming an egg — “This is your brain” — then swiftly splitting it open, its contents now sizzling in a frying pan — “This is your brain on drugs.” He waited a beat. “Any questions?”

The commercials only underscored that drugs were “a terrifying and monolithic evil,” argues the Journal of Social History, a message further reinforced by Nancy Reagan’s national “Just Say No” campaign. According to the Reagan Foundation, the former first lady was asked by a young girl, “What do you do if somebody offers you drugs?” The answer was easy: “Well, you just say no.”

If addiction were that black-and-white, then those who drowned in the first wave of the opioid epidemic were the problem. But according to Northwestern University’s Institute for Public Health and Medicine, it was the increased prescription of pain medication like OxyContin that led to skyrocketing drug-related deaths in the 1990s. The second wave saw a spike in heroin overdoses from 2010 to 2013. Heroin is made from morphine, a narcotic used to manage acute physical pain.

By then, Pascucci, who grew up in Boylston, noticed a terrifying trend. “I came up in a time and place where there was literally an epidemic,” he said. “What are the odds that my five best friends also became the only five heroin addicts in my small-town school? And you know, my story is not unique. Not the addiction part, sadly. I think the recovery part is.”

He wondered if the culture reinforced a predisposition to addiction.

“It’s a chicken-or-the-egg kind of thing,” he said.

In 2013, the third wave of the opioid epidemic was defined by an uptick in overdoses from synthetic drugs like fentanyl, which can be 50 times more potent than heroin. A 2020 study found that from 2010 to 2017, deaths from fentanyl increased nearly tenfold. Currently, the fourth wave of the epidemic is distinguished by the lethal combination of fentanyl with stimulants like cocaine or methamphetamines.

In that tiny room in that empty sober house, Pascucci decided to try a 12-Step program and follow it to the letter, which includes choosing a sponsor, finding a Higher Power, taking an uncompromising moral inventory and making amends.

“I didn’t want my mom to have to read books anymore about how to deal with a child of addiction,” he explained. “And it’s not even just people with your same last name. The list was long of amends I had to make. I’m grateful every day that these guys weren’t on that list. ‘Cause a lot of people said, ‘F— off,’ you know?”

It felt a little bit like a 12-Step meeting in Pascucci’s living room. The space was filled with gentle laughter. Everyone spoke from the heart. The band was in sync.

Pretty Killer started with Pascucci and Blondin in 2021; at the time, the band sounded “way more pop-centric electronic,” said Blondin.

Blondin, 32, said that the new record is “a love letter to the music we grew up on,” like grunge and emo pop. One of their biggest influences was Nirvana, whose frontman, Kurt Cobain, struggled with heroin addiction and died by suicide at age 27.

“Our main rule for this was, like, all real,” said Pascucci. “All real sounds, all real instruments.” All real lyrics.

In “Healing,” the second song on the album, Pascucci wrestles with his burgeoning faith: “Cuz I’ve been thinking about it / No, I just can’t fit it with logic / I’m a mess, you’re a martyr / I’ll confess a little harder / I’ll do my best, but it’s still water.”

By the eighth song, “222,” his wife’s love has become restorative:

“I was hearing demons on my shoulder / I remember things they used to say like ‘you deserve to feel good, / half a Percocet could really help you change your day’ … It’s like every time I burned out, the thought of you would turn up.

“Love is not a fact; it’s faith.”

“With this album,” said Kelleher, “everyone just believed.”

“I’ve never really had the addiction thing in me,” said the guitarist, 32, who felt protective of Pascucci when he was brought into the fold through Blondin. As an experienced producer (though not on this album), he said he was “coming from a place of, ‘I need you to tell me what it feels like, and I want to make sure your story is told right so that somebody who doesn’t understand this gets it.’”

Pascucci and Blondin had previously worked with Wright, 34, and Blondin had played with Dolan, 40, who teared up during the conversation. Like others in the band, Dolan had family or friends in active addiction and had watched them spin out or pass on. “I just think that growing is the point of living,” he said.

“We need honesty and vulnerability,” said Kelleher. “What is the point of everything if we’re not trying to understand each other?”

Wright nodded. “There’s a lot of feeling behind everything [on the album],” she said.

Pascucci, getting choked up, said that was intentional. “I can’t express through art anything but my own experience,” he said. “That’s what music did for me. The music that moved me the most feels genuine.”

Authenticity lays bare our pain so hope becomes a shared experience.

“I’m not ashamed that I’m an addict,” said Pascucci, getting choked up. “But I look at my kids and I look at my wife and I look at my life now and I just think, like, how easily that could have all not happened.”

The last song on the album, “In the end,” is the singer’s parting conversation with God: “And in the end / Will you tell me everything / Nothing ever made much sense / We just played pretend / Is this the end / I feel something happening / On the verge of reckoning / Hold my hand let’s sing.”

“What happens at the end, you know?” asked Pascucci. “Hopefully we’ll make another album.”

And then, he let go.

Follow Pretty Killer on Instagram @prettykillermusic. Songs will be released monthly and the full album will drop this summer.

Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.