The Last Show On Earth

Filmed live at The Burdock, Thursday March 12 2020

Walking in to soundcheck, I had forgotten how it all felt.  How I had missed the stress and the laughter and the pride of actually getting it together — we did it, this might not suck!  This was to be my first proper show back in years — a reintroduction of myself to the people I had met in and out of music the past 10 years.  It was to be an intimate show in a small venue, packed with family and friends, with a new band, and a renewed faith in myself and my artistic vision.  

Underneath the nervous energy, was a more sobering one, one that skated through the whole evening, weaving in and out of the music and the crowd.  Half of my bandmates had just found out all their summer tours had been cancelled, and by Monday, the other half would learn the same thing. 

It was hard to really understand what was happening — at that point we had been told that maybe by the weekend we would all be told to limit gatherings to less than 250 — that didn’t sound too bad.  My bartending jobs would tuck under that number, we could all still make it in small clubs, we had a fighting chance.  Of course, by Monday, we were living in some sort of dystopian fantasy.

With the rest of the world tucked under their covers endlessly scanning the news, we were present for the shift in real life, minute by minute.  It all seemed so surreal, it was hard to relate to.  Hard not to joke about.  That night, we were all living in the active transition from one world to the next, we could feel it, it felt so close, yet so large and so out of reach.  

The band was new, and most of them I had never played with.  I myself hadn’t played a proper show in years, save for a few solo opening slots and a few pickup bar gigs — and the longer I left the instruments in cases, the harder it was to open them back up.  I booked the burdock show before I had even put a band together.  I was worried that I had lost an integral part of my identity, that thing inside of you that pushes you forward no matter how much you stumble.  But inevitably, I learned, that thing never goes away, it just grows and evolves, shifting your will from the inside.  It was nice to feel it again, however fleeting. 

Looking forward to playing more shows, but that is a far off dream at this point.  In the meantime, this video can serve as a reminder to what it used to be, and how it could be again.