Artists, as they do, coped. They werent going anywhere during lockdown either. Since tour dates evaporated, many made music at home. Some Norah Jones, Phoebe Bridgers, Jorma Kaukonen appeared often online, keeping their voices and fingers limber, seeking connections with the fans they could no longer see. Some sequestered themselves to work on their own, then revealed unexpected projects that were recorded at home(s) and completed via file-sharing: like Charli XCXs candid, self-recorded and frantically meta-poppy How Im Feeling Now and two full albums by Taylor Swift, Folklore and Evermore, along with a pristine sequestered living-room performance, The Long Pond Studio Sessions, that physically united Swift and her main collaborators for the first time.
Long before 2020, musicians had been constructing tracks virtually and long-distance rather than through face-to-face interaction, particularly in hip-hop, electronic dance music and whats loosely termed bedroom pop. But the pandemic made working in isolation alone, perhaps as a family unit, or via the internet closer to universal. (There was a considerable learning curve as musicians became their own recording engineers.) Musicians were also processing their upended routines and the same emotions as everyone else in 2020: anxiety, loneliness, boredom, claustrophobia, agoraphobia, doubt, distrust and, at the same time, the political furies of the 2020 election and the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.
Musics social expectations unraveled and atomized. The immediate responses of musical collaborators working together a raised eyebrow, a bobbing head, an involuntary grin gave way to video latency at best and obliviousness at worst. The mere presence of an audience provides subliminal editing cues, but audiences were far away and, more likely than not, distracted. Musicians who imagine real-world spaces for their music arena, dance floor, rock club, car could no longer count on an obvious physical destination for their work beyond the computer screens that had become everyones main connection.read more
All Alone With a Microphone
