Two years ago, Cara Brindisi went into her blind audition for Season 22 of The Voice with a plan: to join Blake Shelton’s team if the country star turned his chair for her. But when both Shelton and Gwen Stefani spun around during Brindisi’s performance of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well,” Brindisi faced a difficult decision. She went with Stefani, who told her that what mattered most was “putting your heart in a song.” That idea has carried Brindisi through her 15-year career as a singer-songwriter and a music therapist working in hospice care.

Brindisi will perform songs from her debut album, I Am Home, on Saturday, April 26 at Wellfleet Preservation Hall in a concert presented by Cape Symphony. The folk-pop album, to be released this summer, is a compilation of songs spanning her adult life: some were written 10 years ago, some composed only last year.

Brindisi, who now lives in Plymouth, grew up in Shrewsbury but calls Worcester her hometown. As a child, she took vocal lessons and sang her heart out in choir and musical theater performances. She graduated from Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 2010.

Applying to Berklee, she took note of the school’s program in music therapy. But it wasn’t until months later, on a visit home, that Brindisi’s passion for that subject was awakened. Her mother asked her to sing a song for her grandfather, who had advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Brindisi sang “Loch Lomond,” a song her grandfather had known. In the Scottish song, the narrator recalls the painful beauty of the loch and a lover who he’ll never meet there again.

As Brindisi sang, she says, her grandfather’s face lit up. “He remembered the lyrics. It showed me firsthand that music reaches somewhere different — neurologically, emotionally, spiritually.”

It wasn’t only her grandfather’s reaction that inspired her, she says, but also that of her grandmother, who was experiencing a different kind of loss. “That moment of clarity shifted not only him but her as well,” she says. “I saw the power in it.”

Since that moment, Brindisi, who majored in music therapy and vocal performance at Berklee, has followed parallel careers: one in daylight, as a music therapist, and one in the evenings and on weekends as a gigging musician, “rocking out,” singing covers in restaurants and bars. Brindisi says, though, that music therapy is where her real passion lives.

According to a 2024 article in Harvard Medicine, music ignites almost the entire brain: the hippocampus, amygdala, and limbic system, along with the body’s motor system. The salience of musical sounds influences the autonomic nervous system — a network that controls involuntary processes like breathing and heart rate.

“Music is truly integrated in all of us at a cellular level,” says Brindisi. For people with neurodegenerative diseases, she says, music can elicit lucidity where otherwise a person seems lost.

A music therapist isn’t just “someone with an Alexa,” says Brindisi (she used to say “with a CD player”). Therapy is a “circular process” with no conclusion, she says. “My role isn’t just to bring music, it’s to bring therapy to music experiences.” In her work with the Visiting Nurse Association of Cape Cod, she’ll sing songs from the client’s youth or a favorite song. “I give them time to join in,” she says. “I let them sing with me. We talk about the music, or we reminisce.”

Always, she says, she includes the person’s caregivers and loved ones — those, like her grandmother, who must navigate their grief over the course of prolonged, anticipatory loss. She’ll bring small instruments for them to play or let them choose the songs and sing. Often, says Brindisi, hearing music encourages people to get physically closer to each other: “Holding their hand, stroking their hair, a kiss on the cheek.”

“Our sense of hearing is one of our last senses to leave us,” says Brindisi. In hospice settings, she says, the person at the end of life hears not just the music but the voices of their loved ones talking and singing near them.

Brindisi says her work as a music therapist has shaped her as a performer. She’ll “assess” her audience — their average age, how exuberant or solemn or spiritual the room feels — and adjust her performance accordingly. “You’re there for the people,” she says. After every performance, she hopes the audience will leave feeling like they learned something about their own lives — like the music was a vehicle for their own inner reflection.

There’s sadness in her work as a therapist, she says, and there is death. “But I like to remind people that I am really working with the living,” she says. “It’s my job to let people share their life stories with me, at the end. It’s a celebration of life every day.”

As a songwriter, she keeps coming back to “how powerful it is to be alive.”

One song on her album, “Jar of Flowers,” is especially meaningful to her. She wrote it for her mother, who, when Brindisi was growing up, always kept a bouquet of fresh flowers in the kitchen: a simple gesture of welcome and love for everyone in the house. “That’s what family is, what home is,” says Brindisi. “I always had that.”

On The Voice, Shelton described Brindisi’s voice as “hypnotic.” It’s a voice like morning light; her songs are bright and beautiful, buoyed by an accompanying bass and dusted with acoustic guitar. But Stefani’s praise, having to do with “heart,” feels more relevant. In every song on the album that has been released, Brindisi’s voice seems to tell an honest story — one that often has to do with searching for home, she says.

In Wellfleet on Saturday, Brindisi will perform songs from the album arranged for a duo with pianist Kazumi Shimokawa, who played on Lisa Loeb’s Grammy-winning album Feel What U Feel. Brindisi and Shimokawa grew up together and went to college together, says Brindisi. “He was one of the first musicians I ever played with,” she says.

On the new album’s cover, says Brindisi, the word “I” in I Am Home is italicized. That’s on purpose. “You are your own home,” she says she’s come to realize. “Like a crab or a turtle.” That sentiment rings especially true now that Brindisi is pregnant with her first child: a girl due in October. “Home is so truly within yourself,” she says.

Home on the Road

The event: Singer-songwriter Cara Brindisi with pianist Kazumi Shimokawa
The time: Saturday, April 26, 7 p.m.
The place: Wellfleet Preservation Hall, 335 Main St.
The cost: $28 at wellfleetpreservationhall.org