A pounding headache woke Angie Aparo early one April morning last year. A bout of nausea followed, sending him to the toilet. The pain was so severe; he was frightened. But he’d had his annual physical just two months earlier that showed he was in fine health as he approached his 55th birthday. He hoped an adjustment by his chiropractor might alleviate his discomfort.

Driving the same silver 2003 Honda Pilot that had taken him hundreds of thousands of miles up and down the East Coast playing his folksy rock songs on stages in bars, concert halls and festivals everywhere, the musician was listening to the radio as he pulled into the chiropractor’s parking lot. Suddenly the car radio went silent and the pain stopped.

Everything felt fuzzy. He couldn’t remember what to do next. Turn off the engine? Put the key in his pocket? He felt confused and disoriented. The journey across the parking lot looked like a mile.

Somehow, he managed to make it inside. 911 was called. Within minutes paramedics loaded Angie into an ambulance and took him to Hilton Head Hospital.

Angie had suffered a spontaneous carotid artery dissection — a tear in one of the main conduits for blood flow through the neck to the brain. A blood clot had formed and pieces of it had entered his brain, shutting off the world around him.

The Atlanta singer/songwriter whose songs had been recorded by Faith Hill and Tim McGraw had lost his ability to communicate. Aphasia had robbed his ability to recall the names of everyday objects. All the lyrics he’d written over the decades vanished from his memory.

Success ≠ happiness

Despite all the success Angie was having on stage and in the studio, not everything was rosy. The truth was, he’d been plagued by bouts of anxiety and depression throughout his life, and those out-of-control feelings grabbed hold of him with a vengeance. Depression felt like a heavy weight, like the physical sensation of being crushed. Getting out of bed became a struggle. Fearful of what he might do to himself, he hid all the knives in his house. A loner by nature, he was spending long stretches of time away from his family and taking comfort in excessive amounts of whiskey. Once again, Angie got divorced.

He returned to therapy and embarked on a spiritual journey. Raised by a Catholic mother, he considered himself a Christian, but he explored the tenets of ancient Eastern philosophies, too. It helped pull him out of his funk. So did Donielle Morris, a yoga and meditation instructor living in Nashville, with whom he began a long-distance relationship. He started going to Nashville once a month, spending time with Donielle and working with musicians, co-writing songs the Nashville way.

Meanwhile, Angie’s career continued to soar. Hill’s husband Tim McGraw included two of Angie’s songs on his “Emotional Traffic” album, and Angie sang on the Zac Brown album “Pass the Jar.”

Eventually Angie grew disenchanted with Nashville’s co-writing formula. He let his soul patch grow into a full beard and recommitted himself to crafting songs on his own, hoping to strike upon another organic hit like “Cry." He and Donielle moved to Hilton Head, S.C., in 2012 and three years later they married.

Angie remained busy. In between gigs he was working on a music reality TV show called “American B Sides” and a comic book-inspired animated rock opera project he called “The Legend of Crunch,” for which he’d raised nearly $10,000 on Kickstarter. He’d started writing songs for a new album.

Then everything came to a sudden halt.

Follow the good

Two months ago, Angie once again took the stage at Eddie’s Attic. This time nothing about him suggested he’d been through a traumatic, life-threatening event. He was dressed in a long white skirt, a black-and-white T-shirt with the word “Polaroid” printed across his chest, a straw hat and thick, white-rimmed sunglasses that complemented his bald head and long, brown beard. Cellist Bryan Gibson was already onstage playing a mournful melody when Angie joined him. He opened with “Seed.”

After the song’s solemnity lifted, Angie lightened the mood by engaging the audience and fielding jokes about his short stature. He told a story about meeting Bruce Springsteen in a CD store where he worked in Atlanta. The Boss had come in covered in grease from fixing his bike, and he purchased a Creedence Clearwater Revival album. Angie riffed on the “Jersey redneck’s” coarse laugh, and the crowd erupted. Then he broke into a playful cover of “Born to Run,” hitting the high notes with a vibrato that raised goose bumps. The rapport between artist and audience was so casual and intimate, it felt as though he were playing in a friend’s living room.

After the show, fan Michelle Dunlap approached the songwriter with tears in her eyes and told him what his song, “Cry,” had meant to her. Angie listened to her story intently, and when she told him she couldn’t afford to return for his next show the following night, he added her to the guest list.

As a performer, Angie wants to merge his stage persona with his real self. His goal is to destroy the stage that separates him from the audience. The loner now craves more connection. He wants to create opportunities for that by bringing up the house lights at the end of his shows and interacting with audiences, even in large venues.

Today he considers the stroke a blessing. The forced isolation and stillness it imposed upon him gave Angie time to not only heal physically but spiritually, as well. It gave him time to reflect on his life and art.

Before his stroke, Angie had begun writing his forthcoming album, “Life is a Flower; Life is a Gun.” After he recovered, he listened to what he’d recorded and realized that the songs represented all the unconscious struggles in his life – struggles with depression, with relationships.

“I looked at the record and realized I’d been fighting a spiritual war of the ego,” he said.

If he’d learned anything from Dass and Tolle, it was that he had to let his ego die.

That revelation, along with the concept of dualism — a philosophy based on the division between body and mind — are apparent on the new record, scheduled for release on Sept. 22.

In the song “Church Bells Versus the Television,” Angie examines the relationship between the physical world and the spiritual one. Sonically that concept plays out in the layering of saxophone and guitar with the computerized voice of Siri.

He realizes now that those ideas of duality and a war of the ego existed on earlier songs, too, like “Child, You’re the Revolution,” which he wrote in 2002.

“It’s all the same song,” Angie said.

Angie says he is happier and more energized than he’s ever been. He has come to believe that his music saved him and it can save others, too. His role is to take his gift and share it. He’s learned to accept the forces outside his control and focus more intently on what he can control — primarily his art. In the years he has left, he plans to record and release as many songs as he can, continue following the good and leave everything else behind.