KEEPING yourself occupied as a musician in isolation who normally who likes to party, play and rock out is not going to be an easy task but it will be worth it.
Standing in front of YouTube playing along with Paul MacCartney’s Blackbird or Goerge Harrison’s Here Come The Sun is useful practice and it is pleasureable. You start learning 9 or 10 or 20 covers all at once and you think – why wasn’t I doing this in the first place. Decades ago. Well… I was partying, cigarettes and alcohol, hanging out with girlfriends, excess laughter and leisure, between bouts of boredom and misery – stuff I’m not going to write about.
Was it worth it? Waking up in 2020 with no kids, no house, no savings, no job. Of course it was. Life is dull and hard at times. Everything you did is gone and eventually you’re left with nothing either way. I had a wild time of ecstatic adventure laced with unrealistic daydreams. It’s a life lived. Rock n roll.
I’m not on my own. Choosing between Fairtrade Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference coffees and stalling anxiously over downloading Zoom for online teaching, stuck wondering why your first video edits on your SD card have no sound. Knowing you’ll work it out gradually – slowly and with patience.
One thing I am certain of, for myself at least, Facebook open mic groups and musicians groups where people post their own videos and posters was always a waste of time. It’s an overcrowded comeptition between people promoting themselves. We’ve been playing to ourselves for a long time and complaining that our half interested audiences weren’t really listening. You need to find your audience without trying to push something unnaturally in people’s faces. If you don’t – tough.
Combined with the bleak British weather of cold clammy, blank grey white coldness, the limited local music scene threatens me with the depressive paralysis that plagued me in hopeless years before I took my cruise contract and started sailing from San Francisco to Hawaii and Mexico.
I’m not going back there.
Personally I recommend exercise. Having recovered from COVID-19 I can safely say it messed nastily with my asthma and has left me wheezy – which is lucky compared to what it can do to people of all ages. I found over the years that I can run off my asthma, run through it and out the other side. Plus it’s a known physiological anti depressant.
Last night’s 4 bottles of Mexican Corona – the drink of the year obviously – and singing at the telly may or may not have helped. It relieved the boredom. Running, stretching and weights, which I managed in the morning, will have.
I promised myself I would do a daily musicworkersdiary blog to focus myself and anyone else for fun and I am.
Apparently the Colombian Coffee is “smooth, sweet and nutty” – that’s the green one in the photo; the Costa Rican Tarrazu (pink) is “zingy, floral and peppery” and I’m recommending LouderMilk as an Amazon Prime series to break up the day.
Loudermilk – recovering alcoholic comedy
The Music Workers Diary 