It's been seven months since my last post here—most of my day-to-day minutia I'd been plopping on Instagram until my discomfort with Facebook took over—and it's safe to say for a world at temporary rest there's been a surprising amount of life passing by.
There are new and constant struggles of home/distance schooling, lack of daycare, lack of employment, health scares, family crises, quarantines, and social-distancing anxiety. My city exploded with rage over the murder of George Floyd, one more black life lost in a long list of black lives lost. The U.S. election tension is boiling over and among this politicians have cast aside their last pretense of decency to advance agenda. It's…a lot to deal with.
It's been a challenge to pretend a musician has any relevant space in this chaos. And yet—there have been shows, album sessions, video recording, demos and writing. Somewhere there is an exhausted audience asking for a little glimpse of normalcy, and a gang of artists desperate for creative outlets.
Sporadic work has been a combo of remote sessions (argh!), video recording (new and exciting!), and the occasional honest-to-goodness recording session with actual people present (yay!). Thank you face masks, open windows, and shotgun floor plans with tall ceilings. Live performances are for skeleton crews of camera people in empty venues, streamed to video. I’m thankful for those opportunities but can’t say they’re particularly exciting to do. Honestly—I don’t miss the live aspect of performing as much as I do the casual ability to make music with friends. It’s a strange world to navigate.
A few bright moments shined these last few months, though, including new releases of killer pop anthems by my friend Mary Bue and a delightful record about disappointment by the pairing of Dylan Hicks and John Munson. You can check those out and others here.
I’ll leave you for now with a beautiful rendering of a beautiful song by my beautiful pal Molly Maher, a version of “Find the Shepherd” I filmed and recorded at my studio, Bones & Wire: