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: