As a songwriter, this was supposed to be a dream. Free from all the distractions and noise of campus, I could finally sit down and polish the songs I had been working on for so long. I could spend hours in a room by myself trying to reach that “flow state” I so loved. A state I wasn’t able to get into with roommates, deadlines, and lack of sleep.

Like the economists predict a baby boom in nine months, I suspect we’ll have all kinds of new albums to savor. When quarantine began, I left campus to my Uncle’s house in the mountains of Colorado for I couldn’t return to my parents who lived abroad. Part of me romanticized this idea – I would be like Bon Iver escaping to his father’s cabin in Wisconsin for a few months, or composer Sergei Prokofiev walking through the Russian countryside writing his ‘Classical Symphony’ without a piano.

But between Zoom fatigue and pundits spewing nonsense, my creativity often felt stale. The things I had written about – campus life, relationships – all felt part of a world that didn’t exist anymore. This new world of strange memes, my Mother’s purchase of Zoom stock, and the misery in the country was a lot to digest. I’m sure in a few months I’ll write about the absurdity of all of it.

I eventually decided I better finish what I started though and began to spend countless hours in my Uncle’s basement writing and recording my songs. I’ll have an EP out soon with some kind of digital live concert element, I still need to figure that out. It’s sad, whenever I put music out in the past, I’d throw a release show and celebrate the music with friends.

Despite this, I feel incredibly lucky to be a songwriter right now. There’s enough musical rabbit holes to get lost in on Youtube and I think I can create songs with this kind of space and time for as long as the pandemic goes.

[submitted on 6/1/2020]