Huey Lewis confirmed during a recent podcast appearance that he has been “basically deaf” for nearly nine years after living with Ménière’s disease for several decades. On Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum, the artist explained this “immeasurable” change is why “music is not part of my life anymore.”
During the interview, the 76-year-old artist said he first lost hearing in his right ear 35 years ago, after which he “existed on one ear.” My dad was a doctor, and he sent me to this famous ENT guy [who] said, ‘Well, get used to it.'”
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After the ENT reassured Lewis that Jimi Hendrix and Brian Wilson both “had one ear,” he was able to adjust and play for the next 25 years, until his left ear “bailed.”
“I’m basically deaf,” Lewis said. “I have a cochlear implant on this side, and I have a regular old hearing aid in the other one. They’re compatible, and they stream to the computer, and they stream to the phone, but I’m basically deaf.”
After initially trying everything from herbal medicines to Western medicine and fasting to a no-meat, no-salt diet, the condition kept getting worse, and Lewis had to “face the music.”
“It’s [been] eight years, eight-and-a-half years or so,” he added. “My life has changed immeasurably, and music is not part of my life anymore, which is a hard pill to swallow.”
This is because Lewis’ cochlear implant “breaks everything down into digital bits,” making speech easier to understand than music.
“Music occurs in all frequencies with harmonics [and] overtones,” he explained. “It comes at you in a lot of different frequencies, and so it distorts for me, and the cochlear, which is my only reliable form of hearing, distorts the music a little bit in the same way it distorts people’s voices.”
He continued, “People sound like they took a hit of helium and then kind of talk like that. Everybody has a little bit of that. So, it colors the pitch. It makes pitch impossible to hear, but I can hear conversations.”
So while a return to music seems impossible, there is some hope for a more comfortable life in the form of a fully internal cochlear implant, which lives inside one’s skin. “You put a little thing on your ear to charge it every once in a while, and then you take it out, and now you can swim, and you can sleep at night.”
Ménière’s disease is an inner ear disorder that can result in vertigo, tinnitus, and ear pressure. Lewis announced his diagnosis with the disease in April 2018 after losing most of his hearing during a concert in Dallas.
While appearing on CBS Sunday Morning in 2020, Lewis said that Ménière’s disease had left him unable to sing and perform. The following year, Lewis told AARP he had been having vertigo attacks for 35 years and that his original diagnosis for Ménière’s disease was 25 years earlier.
Huey Lewis’ final studio album with the News, Weather, was released in 2020. Be sure to revisit his 2024 appearance on the podcast The Story Behind the Song, in which he broke down “I Want a New Drug” off Sports, which received a 40th anniversary reissue in 2023.
