The Albums
Bacliff 83 • St Charles 95 • Chicago 08 • Saint Louis 12 • United States 20 • World 22
In 2020 (and possibly 2019) the United States entered into a worldwide pandemic of Sars-Cov-2 later named Covid-19. The response was unsure, the communication illogical, the data manipulated and the economy was shot twice in the head with the promise that it would be able to walk it off in no time.
Basically a normal day in the 21st Century .
The music was made at million dollar home studios with thousand dollar condenser mics and fifty dollar webcams.
The clothing was sweatpants, decade old work conference t-shirts, & sandals.
The themes were panic & cold sweat, shelves were empty, stores were closed, unemployment exploded, the media swore your parents, spouse and children were going to die, the Federal Reserve showed signs of worry as it QE’d mountains of cash, your Facebook friends felt it was the perfect time for a revolution, you drove on interstates at 8am not a car on the road & there was no end in sight.
Yet the sun rose, the birds sang each morning and you thanked the powers that be that this didn’t happen to you in the dead of winter, never thinking of anyone else while you said it.
Life Album
United States ’20
Back to Baseline
Tracks
- Elbow “Something in the Air”
- Foo Fighters “Times Like These” Acoustic Version
- Disturbed “The Sound of Silence”
- Powfu “Death Bed (coffee for your head)”
- Twenty One Pilots “Level of Concern”
- Ariana Grande “Stuck with U”
- Luke Combs “Six Feet Apart”
- The Mynabirds “Numbers Don’t Lie”
- Talking Heads “Don’t Worry About the Government”
- Radiohead “Idioteque”
- Dead Kennedys “Government Flu”
- Tom MacDonald “Coronavirus”
- Grace Potter – “Eachother”
- Collective Soul – “Run”
- Bublé, Barenaked Ladies & Reyes “Gotta Be Patient”
- OneRepublic “Better Days”
- Maren Morris “The Bones”
The Life Album series was taken from a talk director Cameron Crowe had where he talked about his practice of collecting mixtapes from every year indexing songs that may have not been huge hits but had resonance for him personally or emotionally. I took that as a springboard and created albums based on the mood and times I lived in different cities.