At this point after doing an interview I would’ve hung up the phone and started writing up the feature piece for the Dr. Music website, but today I closed my Skype screen and realized something – times have changed.
I think all of us are struggling to find the silver linings here in 2020. It hasn’t been a stellar year, but like most things in life, positive things have a way of sprouting from even polluted ground.
One of the great changes that I see as a music journalist is the access to musicians in their natural setting. Interviews used to be a chat over the phone, now I’m literally sitting across from a visual of the person when I speak with them. More often than not, the musician I’m speaking with is in the comfort of their home or in their recording studio. The visual alone can open the conversation to avenues that wouldn’t have existed in a simple phone conversation.
One interview that was recently done with drummer Marco Minnemann found him in a room with more drums than you could count. After some polite greetings, the discussion quickly turned to descriptions of the instruments he surrounded himself with. On another interview with Dirty Honey singer Marc LaBelle, my first vision of Marc was of him on his couch with an acoustic guitar in hand. He had just stopped playing to answer my video call, and now I was sitting just feet away from him and his guitar. This kind of intimacy has become the new normal in the industry.
The year of 2020 will definitely go down in the books as one I would’ve rather missed, but a total failure it is not. I hope all of you can find your silver linings in these dismal times. It can be as easy as looking at things through the eyes of yesterday.
