“I was originally scheduled to play this show on March 13th of 2021, about a year after the pandemic began. That show was canceled as the pandemic lingered on and on. It was rescheduled for January of 2022 when we thought certainly we’d be safely through COVID by then. I wrote this blog post at that moment in time. And while it’s plainly dated now, it does capture the mindset of that particular moment in time — the relief of the end. Of course, COVID’s first big variant arose and flared in Austin a couple of weeks before that show, and so we chose, for the safety of the community, to postpone it once again. Reading back over this blog post, I’m appreciating the extent to which we’ve slowly dismissed all the residual uncertainties of the pandemic-era, and can step more solidly through our lives now. I’m excited to finally finally finally play this show."
This has been a dramatic and traumatic last couple of years. For all of us. For all kinds of reasons. We’re not built or evolved for societal shutdown and social distancing. We’re herd animals. We’re tribal. And we’ve been living through a forced separation from our tribes.
We’ve had to restructure our lives and watch, in real time, as our collective culture self-organized and rebuilt itself from the chaos into something new.
For musicians, that’s meant sharing our songs to blank cameras, looking deeply into our own eyes as we deliver our songs. Our audiences have been chatrooms, and the applause has been likes, hearts, and thumbs up. For music lovers, the restructuring has meant that songs have been broadcast at us rather than consuming us in a room.
Of the things we’ve lost and sacrificed during this pandemic, obviously Music is non-vital and of distant distant importance to the lives and livelihoods that have been lost. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been felt deeply, and that its loss hasn’t left a big empty place in the middle of a lot of our souls.
I hadn’t realized just how vacuous and vast that hole had become until I played my first song at my in-person semi-post-pandemic show in August in front of a festival field full of human faces and smiles and hollers and applause, cocked heads, furled brows, slow nods, squeezed hands, and belly laughs. All of it. The human exchange of emotional energy and kinetic energy, once again felt (FELT!) in a shared space with one another, lightning bits of the human experience shooting between us into the lightning rod point of a Song, giving us a common target where all the feelings flowed could touch.
I had tears. I saw tears in the crowd. It was a huge moment of release. I really hadn’t been quite aware or conscious of how much grief had built up in the last year and a half, and it was a powerful cathartic moment when we all got to let go of some of it and reconnect with one another, over music.
To say that I’m looking forward to sharing some songs on January 8th at the Austin Acoustical Cafe would be such an understatement, I don’t even have the words to raise the statement onto a true-enough pedestal. Austin is my home town, my birthplace, and a place where the songs touch my own personal sense of humanity on a deeper level. To be able to share them again, in the same room with people again, in a way that we can connect again, reawakens for me all the reasons I ever wanted to make songs in the first place.
I, for one, am quite ready for the tribe to reconvene.
-- Danny Schmidt
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