5 Notes From a Quiet Year: How Music Survived the Pandemic

By March 12, the tour manager emailed to pull the plug. More cancellations followed. A few thousand dollars of contracts went bust, then $10,000, then $40,000. Then all of them. The calendar went white.

The skill I’d honed for most of my adult life — performing live to a room full of people — was no longer useful. I was suddenly a pay phone: obsolete, however fondly regarded. To stay connected to listeners, I started a weekly Instagram Live series called “Show of Force Majeure.” Using a scrap of red fabric and a chopstick, I made a tiny theater curtain to hold in front of my iPhone, and I’d whisk it up to begin the performance. And in that moment, I could feel a low dose of the old preshow adrenaline.

But after it ended, I was in the quiet of my apartment again. My Before life had been dotted with constant, minor fires — a scramble to soundcheck after a snowstorm closed the roads; a last-minute backstage press request; drums lost in transit. I’d acclimated to the urgency, and to slow down so suddenly was a jolt, like the stumbling step off a moving walkway. The music business was stressful, but it also felt purposeful. My job hadn’t just been the part of my life that paid the bills; it was the organizing principle. It accounted for my weird sleep schedule and far-flung friends; it shaped my understanding of myself and my place in the world. I’d poured most of my life into my work. And without that vessel to contain it, I wasn’t sure how to stop my life from just puddling on the counter.

Passing under a bridge on a walk last fall, the echo of my footfalls stopped me — reverb. I used to spend so much time in rooms large enough to echo. I remember lying on my back, alone onstage at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis before a show, clapping once to ring the room like a bell. My cousin Mikey, also a musician, used to work at a Brooklyn venue that had once been a mayonnaise factory. An empty giant metal storage vat was suspended over the stage. One night, drunk with friends, we climbed up the metal ladder that led inside. The acoustics were otherworldly, long, layered reflections. Somebody started singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and we all joined. Voices in harmony behave like liquid flocks of starlings, individuals discernible but most remarkable as part of the airborne formation, fanning then contracting — a cellular structure at monumental scale. Tiny flakes tumbled down, presumably ancient mayonnaise, but in the flashlights of our cellphones, it looked like snow, and the melodies in suspension made it beautiful.

Singing with other people is dangerous now. I can still harmonize with myself, layering recordings in my bedroom closet. And it’s still lovely, at least to my ear. But it’s dancing alone.

There is no analogous alternative to live performance. Nothing since last March has approached the feeling of being midset during a good show. Lightning doesn’t strike every night, but when it does, my mind works differently: My attention becomes panoramic, even prismatic, capable of attending to the scrolling lyrics of the song I am delivering, the worrisome splintering of my drummer’s right stick, the security guard chatting up the handsome barback and the girl with a flask in the second row, which I plan to lift out of her hand and drink from in the instrumental break after the chorus — to a burst of guaranteed applause. I know how far my left arm can be extended before my fingers leave the light; I know the dude in the hat is trying to snag my set list as a souvenir for his girlfriend, and with the toe of my boot, I push it toward him — I can cheat off the drummer’s when I walk over to his riser for a bit of banter after this song ends, a break we both know is designed to allow him the moment to replace his right stick.

Concerts are back in Wuhan. I’ve seen the photos online: blue lights hitting the haze of synthetic fog and steaming bodies. For now, I mumble new lyrics on long walks, my drummer practices in his attic and I presume that all of us — the barback and the guard, the girl and her flask, the couple in the front row — wait for the sign that it’s safe to take our places, for the cue to count us all back in.

Dessa is a writer and a musician. Her most recent album is “Sound the Bells.”

The site was a little hard to find, especially without cell service to track my GPS coordinates, and the directions I printed out from Hempton’s website — “follow the path over downed trees,” “walk along a tree root that spans a wet, muddy area” — were vague. I felt like a young wizard set on a quest by a harsh but transformative teacher. Right as I was about to give up, I saw it: a red stone on a log, just like the picture.

For Hempton, going into the woods isn’t just about leaving one world but entering another. This is not a metaphor. Nature has a way of making you feel simple and expendable, but it also has a way of turning you inward. I’d like to say that I loved the woods themselves, but my motivation was primarily internal: I went into the woods because I wanted to hear nature, because in nature, I thought I might be able to hear myself.

Over the past year, though, I’ve been listening to music that helps me feel as if the self doesn’t matter that much to begin with. Disco, funk, batucada drumming and New Orleans brass bands — the more people working in unison, the better. I’ve had an especially good time listening to new hardcore and punk bands on Bandcamp: noisy, short things that work my brain like steel wool and leave me riveted.

The beauty of the music isn’t just its aggression or physicality, but the way it shakes you out of yourself. It’s hard to consider your problems when someone is screaming at you, and I suspect it’s hard for the person screaming, too. In the face of a self-care culture that continually drives us inward, great hardcore — and a lot of great brass-band music, and great disco, too — conjure a shared space where our personal journeys and sensitivities don’t matter so much as the collective one. There’s no “I” in the spirit of Chic’s “Good Times,” but there is an ecstatic “we,” and plenty of people to sing it. And if hardcore bands play three ugly chords, it’s not because they don’t know four, but because the compositional substance of their music is secondary to the people it glues together.

It’s not that I’ve renounced solitude, only that the fruits I used to harvest from it seem out of season and hard to stomach. I think of Ella Fitzgerald singing “Don’t Fence Me In” — “Let me be by myself in the evening breeze/Listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees,” a hymn to that American promise of freedom through individuality — and suddenly feel agoraphobic and sad. I used to avoid noise, and the busy, self-subsuming experiences it seemed to represent; now I couldn’t find it if I wanted to.

Some days, the wait feels manageable. Other days, I feel as if my heart’s on ice and I’m just trying to keep it pumping until it’s safe to put it back in. In the interim, I’ve found ways to cope. The absurdity of a 38-year-old man riding his bike down an empty street blasting “Good Times” isn’t lost on me. Nor is the idea of that same man trying to keep up with all the overlapping vocals in George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” in a Safeway parking lot while his children stare from the back seat. But I hope it isn’t lost on whoever may have seen me, either: I did it to be seen, and to serve in part as a placeholder for a bigger, wilder experience still on hold. I trust that whatever connection might come from that is a good one.

At some point during the long, numbing stretch of time that characterized most of last year, a friend reached out to reminisce about going to see a group of samba musicians on the street in São Paulo, Brazil. The musicians were crowded around a table cluttered with beer cans and plastic cups, with the audience pressing in around them, singing and dancing. It wasn’t that you couldn’t tell the difference between the audience and the performers, only that whatever word you used to describe it would have to apply not just to one or the other but to the relationship between the two. Colloquially, the gathering is called a roda: a circle, but, more literally, a wheel, something that keeps turning.

I remember trying to explain to a couple of Brazilians in the crowd that my wife and I didn’t know the gender of our soon-to-be-born child. They thought I meant we were going to let the newborn decide on its own. How fantastic, they cheered. How progressive, how American! No, I started to explain — I mean, if the child did that at some point, that would be fine, but I only meant we’d told the doctor we would find out when the child was born. But I stopped myself, because the rain was falling lightly, and someone’s beer was empty, and nothing I could say felt nearly as important as the music, and the fact that we were all there to hear it.

Mike Powell is a writer in Tucson, Ariz.

Days after that last show, the pair announced a move online. They had to: Along with D.J.s, event producers and even stage designers, they were among a class of informal nightlife workers whose roles and social worlds revolved around the music venues where people gather to dance, drink and find others who affirm them. But those spaces were closing, and rent was still due. West Dakota cobbled together a flier featuring Naomi Campbell in a hazmat suit, protective goggles perched on her nose like designer shades. The new venue would be Instagram Live. Tips, typically tossed onstage, were directed to Venmo.

On the night of March 18, Chiquitita perched her iPad on her bedroom vanity; West Dakota set up in her living room. Their ensuing duet treated the constraints of Instagram’s interface (two adjacent boxes, one performer in each) as a creative invitation. Coming so close to their cameras that each performer’s face was halved, Chiquitita aligned her dolled-up eyes above West Dakota’s glossed lips to form one Frankensteinian mug belting the baritone operatics of Eduard Khil’s internet-famous “Trololo Song.” The illusion, which the pair rehearsed on incognito accounts, had several iterations. In another, using the help of a roommate, West Dakota appeared to reach into Chiquitita’s apartment to brush her hair, defying their mandated separation. At the end of the evening, the two leaned into the digital border between them and comically kissed each other good night.

As I tuned in from bed that night, the bit, in all its low-tech simplicity, felt like a thrilling escape. It felt hopeful too; proof that, with the necessary resourcefulness, we could still find modes of freedom and togetherness even as the walls closed in around us.

Queer nightlife has always been about conjuring joy and fantasy under any circumstance. That has been no less true during the pandemic. Parties like Papi Juice, which typically takes place in a sweaty Brooklyn concert venue, instead brought D.J.s into people’s apartments via Zoom; as did Club Quarantine, which promised a queer rave every single night at 9. Livestreamed drag quickly became a new norm: By the end of March, Digital Drag Fest was offering regular shows featuring several alumnae of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” For all kinds of performers, Instagram Live became a substitute stage — and for their fans, a chance to lose themselves in an audience again. In early May, Verzuz — an Instagram Live musician “battle” that started at the end of March — drew around 700,000 concurrent viewers to a session with Erykah Badu and Jill Scott.

That same ingenuity was soon applied to activism. In late May, as antiracism demonstrations swelled, West Dakota helped bring together a group of local L.G.B.T. producers and activists to organize Brooklyn Liberation, a rally and march drawing awareness to violence against Black trans people. For the June 14 event, organizers repurposed the production skills they would often employ to fill music venues. The artist Mohammed Fayaz, known for party fliers, illustrated the announcement; the local designer Willie Norris provided shirts and iridescent protest signs emblazoned with “BLACK TRANS LIVES MATTER”; a network of unemployed audio technicians set up an outdoor sound system for speeches, which were delivered to a sea of thousands on the steps of the Brooklyn Museum. Despite being billed as a silent march, at least one portable speaker wafted music through the crowd, and vogueing broke out in the streets. The day had the euphoria of a reunion.

West Dakota doesn’t consider herself a professional activist. But queer social life itself is a kind of politics; after all, the gay liberation movement was born during a police raid of the Stonewall Inn. “In a way,” she said, “nightlife workers are community organizers. Just the very definition of it: We bring together people, and we create the spaces where people build community.”

She’s not sure if “Oops!” now on hiatus, will return post-pandemic. After confronting her own economic precarity this past year, she’s now occupied with dreaming up possibilities for increased equity in nightlife, like what it would look like to unionize Brooklyn’s drag performers. The vision could offer a lesson to nightlife at large: Instead of merely mourning last year’s many losses, proceeding could mean inventing culture anew.

For West Dakota, that means supporting nightlife’s most vulnerable workers. “I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is how to care,” she said. “How to care for myself, and how to care for other people.”

Sarah Burke is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She was most recently the Special Projects Editor at Vice.

Those first few weeks of shelter-in-place were especially bewildering and lonesome, our fingers and shoulders itching to make contact with another patch of skin, our brains struggling to find anything to discuss beyond Netflix. Neighborhood singing was a balm — connection without the pressure of having to make conversation.

Music, blessedly, morphed to fit the pandemic with relative ease, be it professional musicians sitting around on Instagram Live playing their hits, like on the webcast Verzuz, or gig musicians streaming tiny concerts, trying to expand their fan base. For some, web shows were a financial lifeline: Even if they brought in only a fraction of what artists would be making from in-person gigs, they were better than nothing.

When shelter-in-place orders began in New Orleans, Sam Williams, a bandleader and horn player, figured that he and his band would hold off playing for two weeks, and then the world would return to normal. But as the lockdown stretched on, Williams, who goes by Big Sam, told his bandmates they had to do something, even just prop up a phone to livestream sets from his driveway. If they were lucky, maybe they could get some tips.

Williams is the sole provider for his family; as the pandemic continued, his bank account dwindled. Music had been his career for 25 years. So he kept playing, and sometimes after his shows, viewers would contribute to his Venmo account, or his neighbors would come by with tips or even a dish of food. How else was he supposed to survive an edict that banned horn players from performing indoors?

He and the band did shows every Sunday: first church music, then funk. They didn’t face the street when they performed and never told their online audience exactly where they were — Williams, worried about social distancing, was reluctant to draw a crowd — but that didn’t keep neighbors from creeping out of their front yards and onto the sidewalk to watch. People would drive to Williams’s block and listen from their parked cars; delivery workers might take a quick break to enjoy a song or two. “It helps the whole neighborhood to feel some type of normalcy when they can have live music,” he said. Indoor entertainment is limited in New Orleans, but Williams is still singing, trying to give something to his people in the hope that they can give back to him.

Jennifer Parnall, a Canadian transplant locked down in Spain, also wanted to give back: One day last March, she plugged her keyboard into an amp and played “All You Need Is Love.” Soon her neighbors started requesting songs, shouting them from their windows or scrawling them on a chalkboard and hanging it where she could see. Armed with only a guitar and a keyboard, Parnall tried her best at the Cranberries and Radiohead. In all, Parnall played four songs a day for 100 days.

For the very last song of her very last show, she ran up to her roof with her guitar and performed “Dreams,” by Fleetwood Mac; passers-by and neighbors joined for the chorus, their voices undoing all those months of silence. Not even the GoPro she brought with her could fully capture the exuberance of that moment: Parnall saw one woman across the way, who had been pregnant for months, watching the concert while cradling her newborn baby. It felt like magic, creating something so beautiful for her community in a time of such isolation.

In Brooklyn, a year later, I watched everyone’s videos: Kline and her neighbors in Dormont, recorded by a local videographer. Williams in New Orleans, doing the two-step in his driveway. Parnall in Barcelona, playing to the building facing her own; in one video, she began a song, only to be interrupted by a blaring car horn.

The pandemic changed our relationship to noise: With people stuck inside, the atmospheric sounds of the world — car alarms, barking dogs, ambulance sirens — felt amplified. The human sounds, though, lessened. Even the online concerts were sort of eerie without applause. Parnall waited until the car horn stopped, then began her song again. When she finished, more noise trickled in from the outside: clapping and whooping. People had been there, listening. Somehow, it was the best part.

Jazmine Hughes is a reporter for The Times's Metro section and a staff writer for the magazine.

So this year I have been hanging out on Zoom with musicians and not playing music. Instead, we’ve been doing what Zoom was designed for: conferencing. This is a new activity for most of us. Musicians generally don’t have business meetings, at least not with one another. What happens when you put us in a virtual conference room together? The same thing that happens whenever you gather a group of workers: We organize.

The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (U.M.A.W.) could probably have come about only in a year without touring. Normally, musicians who don’t regularly play together cross paths only briefly, when we share a stage or pass through one another’s hometowns. We’re too itinerant for regular get-togethers; there are roadies who don’t even bother having permanent addresses. But with all of us at home, scheduling Zoom meetings proved easy. Musicians contacted other musicians. We talked about the situation we’d found ourselves in and what we might do about it.

At the first meeting, in April, I knew only a few people in the virtual room — mostly the members of the political punk band Downtown Boys. There were others I knew from their music, though we’d never met: Sadie Dupuis from the band Speedy Ortiz; Ryan Mahan from Algiers; Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, or SAMMUS; Cole Smith from DIIV. Then there were many whose music I would learn about only as I got to know them. Musicians are fast at forming bonds. I think the intensity of our relationships mirrors the intensity of our work: You get to know someone very well and very quickly in the close confines of a stage or a van.

Soon we were comparing notes on our industry. Ever since streaming took hold a decade ago, the only real income many of us can earn is through performance. When the pandemic shuttered venues, it threw us all out of work. Musicians still made music, of course; many have managed to record and release new material during lockdown. But few have any hope of earning much money from that labor. Streaming now represents some 80 percent of all revenue for recorded music, and it’s not a great proposition for artists. Spotify, for instance, doesn’t pay on a per-stream basis, but the U.M.A.W. calculated that each stream is worth, on average, about $0.0038. In order to earn the equivalent of a $15-per-hour job, you’d need 657,895 streams of your music per month — for each person in your band.

The first band my partner Naomi Yang and I were in, Galaxie 500, sees about three-quarters of a million monthly streams on Spotify, which earns the three members about $1,000 each. That’s for material we own outright. Typically, the money a band brings in will be shared not just with a label, but with producers, with managers — all the labor it takes to get a recording heard. You might need tens, even hundreds of millions of streams per month to make a living wage, something only the very top of the industry’s pyramid can expect.

This state of affairs will be painfully familiar to workers in many industries. Musicians are just the original “gig” workers: Like Uber drivers, we’re independent contractors who bear the cost of our own tools, health care and self-employment taxes, while the corporations that control access to our work take in billions in revenue. Spotify saw its stock more than double in value during the pandemic; it is currently capitalized to the tune of $54 billion.

All year, locked out from touring, we did what workers before us have done. We researched and talked about our industry’s structure and made plans — things we would never have been able to do from the back of a van. Our first action was to join many other organizations in successfully lobbying Congress to include gig workers in pandemic unemployment assistance. The second, started in October, is called Justice at Spotify: a set of demands asking the company to include musicians’ material interests in its goals and practices.

Working with other musicians to help build the U.M.A.W. has, for me, been an uplifting experience in depressing times. Many of the other members are close to half my age, and I’ve been continually inspired by their energy, their care for one another, their fury at injustice. Passions sometimes spill over, as they do in bands, but the way these younger musicians model both giving and demanding respect is something I don’t remember learning so well anywhere else — definitely not in my era’s indie-rock scene, anyway.

It’s been a relief simply to have space for hanging out with other musicians at all — a theme many of our recent meetings have turned to. Musicians are, almost to a one, very social beings. That’s why we form bands. We can’t play music now in the ways we are used to. But we can, my comrades and I have discovered, still work together.

Damon Krukowski is a musician (Damon & Naomi and Galaxie 500) and a writer (“The New Analog” and “Ways of Hearing”) in Cambridge, Mass.

Everything was so scary and stressful in March, in April and May, and I’m a very anxious person by nature. I’ve been in complete solo isolation for nearly a year now; I’ve not touched another person in a year. So my music tastes changed simply because I didn’t want to completely fall apart. I listened to a lot of Meters. I listened to a lot of the Numero Group’s “Eccentric Soul” compilations. My No.1 song I listened to the most — hold on, I made a playlist for this call. It’s the Del-Reys’ “Don’t You Know.” It’s such a beautifully simple song.

I was obsessed with a lot of music that I literally have no reference for. I feel like I’m having another adolescence — being stuck in my room, just listening to music and watching movies. It’s like a second go at being a teenager, when the only way to access stuff was to try to find new music. Which is why I think I’m drawn to all these reissue labels, all these labels that are finding stuff that I just have not known about: Numero Group or Tompkins Square or Mississippi Records or Awesome Tapes From Africa.

I know that you studied transcendental music. Was that something you came back to this year? Huge. I feel like holy music has been reintroduced into my life. I’ve gone back to Moroccan Gnawa music. Also a lot of great spiritual jazz stuff — the Alice Coltrane record from a couple of years ago. Did you watch “Ragas Live,” by any chance? You can sign up and watch the whole thing: 24 hours of uninterrupted, absolutely incredible music performances. They had Zakir Hussain, Terry Riley, all these names. They’re all playing from home, so they’re like, “Here’s Terry Riley from Japan!” They went to Venezuela and played this band I’ve never heard of, fronted by this woman named Betsayda Machado. Do you know who this is? I’m going to send you a song. The visual of them out in this beautiful, idyllic, lush green setting, with the river behind them and people going by and boats, and they’re singing and playing this — I was, like, mouth agape. I stood up, I got so excited.

One of the true surprises of the year was that I listened to a lot of music that made me want to dance around. The Machado song makes me move. All I do is sit and read, sit and type, sit and watch — I don’t need music that just pushes me further into the chair. There’s something about forcing myself to expend energy, even if it’s just out on my porch for 10 minutes. There’s something about that release. That is such a part of my normal life, either through performing or being with friends.

Or even just getting the experience of two people in a room, being like, “Here, listen to this.” I could literally do this for the next three hours!

I would love for you to send me your playlist. The playlist is five hours long. I was like: You know what? I’m just going to dump a bunch of songs in there, because I could talk about any of them as part of this year. And then suddenly, it’s five hours.

The flip side of all this dance-music stuff is that I also spent a tremendous amount of the year deep-diving into ambient and New Age music. This artist who goes by Green-House. And then there was also the Hiroshi Yoshimura reissue of the album “Green.” That Mary Lattimore record “Silver Ladders” — just very calming, a record that really helped me not to spiral out. Beverly Glenn-Copeland. In years past, I would lean more toward harder, experimental ambient stuff — Fennesz, Tim Hecker.

I’m constantly searching for and trying to find ways to discover new music. One thing that has been hardest for me, in the last 10 years, is that so many of those avenues have been closed, because a lot of them were physical. For me, a lot of discovering music came from being able to walk into Other Music in New York. Amoeba Records in Los Angeles. Aquarius Records, out of San Francisco — they would put out a comprehensive list of new releases, with big, chunky write-ups.

One thing I’ve spent the last year doing — and again, I’m 48 years old — is trying to understand Bandcamp and use it as a portal to discover stuff. Digging deep and unearthing stuff that was like: “I don’t know what this is. But because I’ve been listening to this other thing, now that weird label has shown me this thing.” Now I’m listening to this Brazilian artist who I’ve never heard of who’s blowing my mind.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jeremy D. Larson is the reviews editor for Pitchfork.