So many of us our circling back to places where we left off in the before times, and I’m no exception. In just the past week, I was a guest on the latest episode of DJ Webble’s Hangover Sessions podcast, and I revisited and performed work I started writing right before the pandemic shutdowns began.
At the very beginning of March 2020 I was immersed in a songwriting residency at Chalk Hill, slated to perform some of what I'd worked on at that year's Spring Open Studio. When that got shuttled as Covid arrived on our shores, I went home and started a residency of another kind altogether, and porch concerts and other more-immediate projects got underway.
Fast-forward two years, and several sea changes of pandemic-induced experiences, and I played at the belated Open Studio this past weekend. Performing at the site felt at once like touching base with a former self, reigniting an inspiration from the before-times, and realizing anew how much has shifted on the inside these past few years.
How hopeful I felt when I’d arrived, after playing a few gigs in Oregon and Washington! How innocent we were! On the way, I dropped Kwame off in Portland for work, and drove south, listening to music and podcasts, coasting down Siskiyou Pass, feeling the vastness and the possibility of it all. We knew the pandemic was encroaching but I couldn’t imagine—didn’t want to imagine—what it would really be like.
It's useful to remember such moments of inspiration when the going gets slow and confused, the mind gets overgrown with weeds, or simply redirected, which is what the pandemic has done on so many levels. So revisiting my project through the lens of having gone through the past few years was, and is, exciting, motivating … and a lot more grounded. Though I find it that much more interesting now, that one of the last things I worked on at the end of my residency was a song called “Life Goes On” !
And onward we go….
I had another opportunity to take stock last week as a guest on the latest episode of DJ Webble’s Hangover Sessions podcast series. We talked more about music during the pandemic, desert island songs and more. You can take a listen here: