I’m sitting here in my living room on a rainy mid-summer Friday afternoon in Nashville, TN, contemplating whether or not to go to an album release show that I was invited to this evening. Under normal circumstances the show would be a no brainer but when considering the rain (it’s outside) & the massive wave of COVID-19 Tennessee is currently facing I’m more than hesitant & that’s where I’ve been caught the last little while, in “the in-between.”
I’m going to once again apologize for my blog absence the last couple of weeks, I was spending time with family & was under the weather, which seems to be my new normal these days. It seems every time I leave Nashville I’m faced with the same questions; How is music going? When are you touring next? When does your next project come out? And these are questions I’d truly love to have answers to. It’s not from a lack of trying or a lack of interest or desire that my life feels held back from these things but it is more a feeling of responsibility.
As I’ve said in previous blogs, I took the pandemic very seriously, having a lot of family members in the medical fields & a lot of people I care for with auto-immune diseases, in addition to my own respiratory issues, I quarantined & masked up. As an artist, someone who is trying to make it in this business, that was hard. It was hard not only from the standpoint of having to halt any forward momentum I was having but also hard because I saw so many of my peers acting as if nothing had changed & going about business as usual, which I guess brings us to now.
I am vaccinated, I’ll happily proclaim that. I got injected as soon as I possibly could. I am also someone who has grown tired of this “anti-vax/anti-mask” movement & am 100% in favor of mask or vaccine mandates for businesses. I’m tired of sitting on the sidelines trying to be the good person who does what they can to help other people around me instead of whining about my freedoms but alas, those of us who are responsible & actually give a damn must sacrifice our own freedoms so that the selfish can continue to play & spread the disease & make things worse. I say all of this not so much to try to change the mind of anyone reading this who falls under that umbrella, because let’s face it, if the mountains of evidence won’t change your mind, how could I? I am more so saying all of this so you understand where those of us who are most vulnerable are coming from.
As I said, yes, I am vaccinated so I am protected, hopefully, from being hospitalized with COVID. That being said, I’d love to play shows, I’d love to go to events & be a person again, but I have this underlying fear or guilt that I’m then contributing to the problem. That I’m contributing to the filled ERs & the deaths, which in part, is true. I have so many friends, so many colleagues that are moving on, playing shows & what have you & I’m so jealous of them. I wish I could do that freely & not feel immediately guilty for doing so.
I’m caught in this purgatory of do I or don’t I where I know I’m vaccinated & know I can enforce that if I wanted at a show but I’m also the low guy on the totem pole, I don’t have the luxury of putting on a show & having it sell out in two minutes. So I feel stuck in inaction biding my time until the numbers start to dive again & I can psych myself up to booking shows again without the fear that they’ll just be cancelled again two weeks later.
It’s exhausting & it’s debilitating & makes you feel like crap but I feel a sense of responsibility that I wish half of the other people in this country felt as well. I’m tired of this pandemic, just as we all are, but the more days drag on, the more I’m tired of the excuses. We could be out of this, living a somewhat normal life if people would actually start giving a shit about their neighbors instead of just themselves. But I guess that’s the case with most things in this world.