Goodbye 2020

Well friends, we are finally here - the end of 2020. It’s been both the longest and the shortest year, the busiest and the slowest. An utterly bizarre lost year, whose long-term impacts I’ll be curious to discover from our anthropologists in the future.

True to 2020, December was a busy month, with five new live videos, four live-streams, me mothering the hell out of our first proper family Christmas, repairing our gas oven (which needed a new igniter - the 6th appliance to crap out on us this year, and the only one I was able to actually fix) and prep for the co-op’s upcoming projects in 2021. And my “Home For The Holidays” concert via Zoom raised more than $1000 for Ronald MacDonald House Charities, which is the most money a performance of mine has ever raised for charity!

Putting aside the fact that pandemics have haunted my dreams since my teenage years (the subject of angst-ridden short stories, poems, and songs I wrote in high-school), this year has overall been good enough to me, and has been the busiest year of my life. In January and February, I managed to kick up a good bit of fuss for my album Heirloom and put together a wonderful 9-piece backing band for a fantastic album release show. Before the pandemic hit, I was already featured three times on CBC in 2020 - once for the launch of the Soul City Music Co-op, once for my blog post about disordered eating in the music industry, and again for Heirloom’s release.

On March 13, we went into lockdown, and in this house, we never came out of it. We quickly adapted our careers, producing more video content in 2020 than in all other years of our careers combined - I did 23 live-streams, plus pre-recorded virtual concerts for CBC, BluesFest Windsor, 93.9FM Hear + Now, The Bank Theatre’s 12 Days of Christmas, Jeff’s Musical Car, the Windsor Public Library, the Downtown Windsor BIA, and CFTV. And I released two music videos and almost a dozen live performance videos on my YouTube channel, and did some camera-work of my own on two music videos for Mike. My first-ever co-write, the pandemic-inspired “Can We Go Back”, was covered on radio, television, and print in its first week. I was also a guest on five different podcasts (and ran my own Soul City Music Co-op Podcast for a few months which ultimately fizzled - how very 2020), did PR for 11 different releases through the Soul City Music Co-op - 14 if you count my own releases, too - and the label was the subject of a documentary that aired on CBC TV nationwide this fall. I started my own Patreon and reached my first goal of signing up more than $100 of monthly support.

Besides all this, I’ve raising a toddler in isolation, without new experiences, new friends, and general interaction with the world. But this girl is growing like the most tenacious flower, like a lotus, out of absolute mud. Her verbal skills are shocking for her age, and she’s been speaking in clear sentences since turning 2 in the spring. She’s begun writing songs, and endlessly improvises new words to the songs she knows, narrating her thoughts with melodies, inventing stories, memorizing the most unexpected little facts and phrases, and generally giving plenty of indication that she’ll “learn much more than I’ll ever know”, to quote Louis Armstrong.

And it is a wonderful world, our little realm that spans from the back gate to the front hedge. I’m looking forward to releasing more music in 2021, continuing my live-streams, and getting back to playing in-person, once it is safe to do so. I’m also excited about our daughter getting to be with more people, and be babysat, especially as she’s wailing and climbing all over my lap as I type. Did you know that, second to keeping your child safe, your biggest job as a parent is managing your own emotions?

I hope you’ve had a happy holiday season and I wish you all the best in 2021!