Zack Borer and Chayim Newman, who’d been in the music business for years before forming Amber Health, a company of therapists and clinicians, came up with a simple idea: to provide mental health support for struggling crew members on stadium and arena tours — with the headliners paying for it out of their own budgets.
But in 2021, when the pair landed a Zoom meeting with Marty Hom, Olivia Rodrigo’s tour director, Hom shot them down.
“This is never going to work,” Hom told them. “I’m not going to hire you, and nobody else is going to hire you. What you’re going to charge is too expensive.”
Borer and Newman were undeterred. During the pandemic, the two had conducted a survey of 1,100 touring pros and found that 34% suffered from depression, 70% had trouble sleeping, 45% regularly consumed alcohol and 26% reported “serious suicidal ideation.” The result was clear: crews needed therapy on the road. So the clinicians reworked their finances and asked for five minutes with Hom, in person, months later at the headquarters of live event production company Rock Lititz in Pennsylvania.
After re-pitching Hom, the 40-year industry vet — who has worked with Beyoncé, The Rolling Stones and Barbra Streisand — finally came around. “All right,” he responded. “Now I get it.”
This summer, Rodrigo is one of 16 major artists — including Ed Sheeran, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar and Green Day — who’ve paid Amber Health to supply free mental health benefits to all of their crews. (The company worked on four tours in 2024.)
“I never had anything like that,” Daisy Spencer, a guitarist on Rodrigo’s Guts tour in 2024 and 2025, told Billboard. “I had this free resource of incredible therapists, and I utilized the crap out of that.”
Borer had decided to become a therapist after years of trying to make it as a New York artist and songwriter, bartending all night while struggling with anxiety and depression. After making the pivot, he hooked up with a colleague, concert producer-turned-clinical psychologist Newman, to form Amber Health in 2020.
(L-R) Zack Borer and Chayim Newman
Juliana Bernstein/Alive Coverag
At first, Amber Health held traditional sessions with individual clients, focusing on artists and the music industry. Through that, they learned that artists and crew miss their families and friends and are disconnected from their support systems while on the road for months; contend with complicated group dynamics, working at impersonal venues and living on cramped tour buses with not-always-like-minded co-workers; and deal with injuries amid difficult physical work.
“We started to think about the scale, and how we could make a systemic impact, and help thousands and thousands of people,” Newman says.
In 2021, a forklift crashed into a Green Day photographer at the Philadelphia Phillies’ Citizens Bank Park, breaking his pelvis, femur and back and lacerating an artery, nearly killing him. He recovered, then sued Live Nation, the Phillies and others, settling last year for $18 million. Last August, Green Day returned to the stadium for the first time since the accident, which was “something all of us were dreading,” according to Zito, Green Day’s longtime production manager. Luckily, Amber Health was on hand to provide on-site sessions. “It was really good to know they were there,” Zito adds.
Amber Health received a similar call during Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour in 2023, after a cameraperson fell off a nine-foot-tall scaffolding and suffered an injury so severe that it traumatized fellow crew members. “How soon can you be out here?” Hom, the tour’s director, asked Newman and Borer. Within a day, the pair met the tour in Chicago and counseled some of its 500 employees. “It was a very high-pressure, high-stress tour,” Hom says. “People talk about being under-appreciated and not being taken care of on tour. This was a way we could take care of people.”
On a typical tour, Borer, Newman and other Amber Health therapists are on hand at various dates, scheduling private, confidential hour-long sessions throughout non-travel days. For the Rodrigo tour, which travels with 120 crew members, Amber Health provides a clinical team of four to six people, “taking into account age, demographics, race — culturally appropriate, so everybody on the tour will feel like there’s somebody on our clinical team they can go to,” according to Borer. The company also provides a crisis helpline and virtual sessions, and often meets with crew during pre-tour rehearsals. “We’ll sit down with the tour and map their whole routing,” Newman says. “We’ve got people traveling in and out. Then it’s like, ‘OK, cool, see you soon, book something virtually if you need to next week — otherwise, we’ll see you somewhere in Minneapolis.”
Neither Amber Health nor tour contacts would give details about costs, but Hom says the finances boil down to tours paying for individual therapy sessions, which are comparable to traditional office visits. Tours also cover travel and lodging for the clinicians.
“It’s a decimal point in a big tour’s budget, and one that shows a lot of value to the team,” Zito adds. “When you’re looking at budgets that are $20-$30-$50 million, and you’re talking $100,000 for something like this, is it worth it? Should it bring value for the team? I think it does.”
The multibillion-dollar touring industry — last year, according to Billboard Boxscore, the top 100 tours earned $15.7 billion — has until recently mostly ignored mental health services. But since the pandemic, in addition to Amber Health, the Recording Academy’s health-focused charity MusiCares and companies such as Denver-based nonprofit Backline Care and Athens, Ga.-based Nuci’s Space have provided similar services.
“There was a lot of stigma around mental welfare before. I don’t know if it’s because it was a male-dominated environment, or it’s just, ‘The show must go on,’” says Helen Himmons, production manager for Sheeran, whose 150-person team started working with Amber Health in early 2023. “COVID definitely broke down some of those barriers. Now, there’s an awareness that if you want the show to go on, you’ve got to support the people who are integral to making that happen. If you don’t look after people, you’re going to end up paying for it, one way or another.”
Adds Shaun Clair, executive vp of business development for Clair Global, which provides staff for concert tours and employs Amber Health for a range of tours: “We know at any moment if we’re in crisis, we have access to world-class services that allow us to address that crisis quickly and correctly.”
Pivotal to the success of Amber Health, which supported 4,000 concert workers in 2024 and recently partnered with the Country Music Awards, is Borer and Newman’s understanding that they must work within the concert business system.
“We don’t walk into a tour and say, ‘We have to change this,’” Borer says. “We understand the industry runs at this clip, at this level, that creates magical moments and experiences. What we do is try to support people when things get hard.”
Great Job Chris Eggertsen & the Team @ Billboard Source link for sharing this story.
