30 March - Days and Nights

Just logged off the state unemployment site, where I requested my first UI check of the furlough. There's no joy in this, just a sense of very slight relief in the wallet department. I suppose this is the new Monday routine until we can return to work. All I know is that this isn't much fun; it definitely feels more like house arrest than playing hooky. There's a real weight of seriousness to all this, and our mortality is really quite sharply defined right now.

A lot of performers (many of my friends included) have been filling up social media with living room concerts now that none of us can get out to the venues. I'm not inclined to do this, but it's really odd to not be able to play for people in a real life gathering, and I hope these at-home broadcasts are enough of an outlet to help folks get through these strange days and nights. My musical efforts at staying sane are all studio based. I'm lucky to have a place here at home to record, and my focus is on that. It's a very comfortable, familiar thing; there's no immediacy that's missing, no absent rapport with an audience and other players. There's just the project at hand, like there would be if we weren't in shelter-in-place mode. So it feels normal, one of the few things that does. Whatever gets us through the night, right?

Once thing I'm wondering is how much people might be missing live shows. Not talking about artists. We know we miss playing out. But what about the folks that in the past might have given in to the idiot box instead of our gigs and just stayed home? My hope is that when this is all over, they'll have a renewed sense of participation. That they'll remember what this quarantine felt like when they had no place to go or weren't allowed to go there. I hope they'll get off the couch more often.

Be safe, be well. Make some music, even if no one can hear it yet but you.

26 March - Saving the Dates

Thanks to this global pandemic, it appears that these pages are turning into a journal of the plague months (if I may borrow slightly from Daniel Defoe, who in his time borrowed more heavily from Samuel Pepys). At any rate, I had intended to post in here more frequently, and now there's plenty of opportunity. I mean, look at this. Two entries in two days.

If you glance at the right-hand portion of your screen, you'll see that my list of upcoming shows is still there. Will they happen? Anyone's guess, but I'm not taking them down until after they do, or in the event that they're postponed, and they haven't been. Is that positive thinking, or just wishful? Think what you like, but I'm still defaulting to optimism.

Stay home, stay healthy, and stay in good spirits.

25 March - Furlough

Many of my friends do not have outside employment. They rely on gigs and freelance or contract income, and I'm feeling for them right now. Been there, and suddenly not having that work is a struggle I fully understand. At the moment, I'm relieved that I decided to re-join the regular workforce a few years back, and was lucky to find something in a music-related industry. I also realize how lucky I am to have something steady to return to, once this current threat has lifted.

But here we are, at least for a while. As of yesterday, my place of work has shut down, for who knows how long. As I had already been placed on hiatus a week ago, today marks the day I became eligible to apply for unemployment insurance, and I took care of that this morning. Massachusetts has its act together, thankfully. The online process was straightforward, and as long as the layoff is temporary due to the Covid-19 situation, there are no job-hunt searches and reports required each week.

As long as the system approves my application (and there's no reason for them not to), I'll be able to get my first check next week. And then I'll be able to put what I can of it back into the local economy. Life goes on.

Be safe, be well, be creative.

19 March - Equinox & Isolation

Spring has arrived here in the Northern Hemisphere as of today. I do like the simplicity of the "meteorological" seasons, but there's something more official about the actual equinoxes and solstices, the days that mark four precise points along the orbit of this tilt-a-whirl globe of ours.

At my daytime place of work, we began our COVID-19 quarantine protocol on Tuesday, which means the only entry in this week's commute list will be the disc I listened to on Monday. For the next couple of weeks, I will be doing the self-isolation thing at home, so the list of my commute music will also be on hiatus. We're scheduled to return to the office on April 6th, barring further steps being taken (by the state, for example) to extend the quarantine.

I encourage you all to distance yourselves from as much real-life contact outside your home as possible. I'm impressed at all the creative efforts folks are making to stay in touch, whether through social media or all the other modern-day methods we've got. These are strange days, but we are a delightfully resilient species.

And it's fun to joke about what songs to scrub to, but really: wash your hands thoroughly and often. Don't give those tiny viral bastards a surface to cling to. Be smart, be well, be of good cheer. We'll get through this together.

This Week's Commute:
M: Led Zeppelin - III

13 March - Cancellation

This past Saturday, some wag on Twitter pointed out that this was going to be an odd week. Daylight savings on Sunday, a full moon on Monday, and then Friday the 13th. And while such an alignment can be amusing, simply throw in the threat of COVID-19, and we have even more weight behind the weird.

Speaking of which, tonight's gig (The Prestons and Jim K at the Friday Night Cafe) has been cancelled by the venue/organizers thanks to Coronavirus concerns. And although we're disappointed about not playing, it was the right choice.

Stay home, stay healthy. We'll see you when we can.

This Week's Commute:

M: Aerosmith - Pump

T: Dire Straits - On Every Street

W: The Replacements - Hootenanny 

F: Bangles - September Gurls

This Week's Commute.

Last year, I started posting a "This Week's Commute" list over on Facebook each Friday. The lists were of the CDs I listened to in my car on the drives to and from work that week. And as I pointed out on Twitter recently, yes, I have a day job. You can't expect me to maintain this level of comfortable obscurity on music alone. Granted, my day job is still somewhat in the music business; I work for a vacuum tube supplier. Vacuum tubes are those little bottles full of emptiness that we put electrons through to make our amplifiers go. 

I've cut back on my involvement with Facebook, and so have decided to post these lists in here instead, beginning today. I'm thinking this might be a good way to update this page more often, and this way I can simply post links to the lists on whatever social media I'm not angry with that week. Or you could even bookmark this place and check in regularly.

Oh, and by the way: I have a four day workweek now, so it's only going to be four albums from now on. Thursdays are my mid-weekday off, so you'll have to guess what what was playing in the house that day.

And so (drum roll), here's the first list for 2020:

This Week's Commute:
M: The Beatles - One

T: XTC - Drums & Wires

W: Ramones - It's Alive

F: REM - Green