Most people are well aware of the struggles that musicians are facing amid the ongoing pandemic. For the majority of artists, gigging has been impossible, and it’s only been over the last few weeks that the biggest acts have been able to return to the stage to play in front of socially-distanced crowds.
For smaller artists, including unsigned ones such as my band Ocean Flaws, the sounds and smells of music venues are mere memories, and it is still very much unclear when we’ll be able to reacquaint ourselves with such sensory stimulators. This reality of course affects venue owners and fans as much as it affects musicians, if not more so.
Another struggle has been recording. In fact, we were forced to abandon a session in March when Boris Johnson announced lockdown after day one of our two-day schedule in Liverpool. We’d laid down drums, bass, guitar and keys on the Monday, with vocals on the agenda for the Tuesday. But that Monday evening we sat in our Air BnB, eating pizza and watching the PM’s broadcast in what was a surreal moment, before packing our bags and heading back to Essex at midnight, only to arrive at 4am.
Thankfully we were able to resume and finish that session in Liverpool in July under social-distancing protocols and with hygiene as top priority, and we’re hoping to visit the same studio at the end of October, budget permitting, which brings me onto the main point of this blog.
Not only are we hoping to record again in October, but we’re already daydreaming about further sessions in January and potentially April next year, because – for the first time in this band’s existence – we have songs pouring out of us.
The four of us all balance the band with full-time jobs (before that it was uni, and before that it was school), which means writing prolifically has always been a little bit of a struggle – especially when we strive for quality over quantity anyway. We normally find ourselves in the position of having one song set for release and the next track half-written. But now we’re about a month away from dropping our upcoming single, and we have four more songs ready to go – each better than the last, in our ears.
That means that our 2021 is already mapped out to a great extent (in terms of releases, at least – who knows what the year will have in store as far as gigs go?)
We’ve all been through our fair share over the last six-plus months, so it helps that we’ve not had a shortage of things to write about, but we tend to write lyrics rooted in fiction a lot of the time anyway, so this burst of creativity has actually had less to do with capitalising on personal experiences from the pandemic and more to do with the fact that we’ve had so much time on our hands to focus on creating.
See, last year was a fantastic one for us in terms of gigs, but that meant that a lot of our time outside of our jobs was spent rehearsing old songs and promoting live shows. So, as much as we’ve missed the incomparable feeling of playing in front of fans and friends, a lack of live shows has meant our time together has been spent writing and developing ideas, much to our benefit.
As such, we’re trying to employ some cautious optimism to weather the emergent expectation that 2021 will be our most successful year yet.
It’s been a tough, tough time for artists recently, but we’re hopeful as a band that we’ll be fortunate in coming out of the pandemic in a better state than we were when we entered it.
Fingers crossed, hey?
Written by Alex Pattle (@alexpattle)
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