No Normal, Only After

A thing you likely know about me at this point, Dames Nationals, is that I love going to see live music. That it’s a rare month where I don’t go to at least one show, and that those rare months are usually balanced by ones containing weeks where I must re-learn, from bitter experience, that four shows in one week is more than I can manage, no matter how much I love the acts in question. So while it ranks well below “hugging my friends” and “having reasonable confidence no one I love will fall dangerously ill” in Margaret’s Hierarchy of Needs, the question of when I’ll be able to see a show again is weighing heavily on me this week, because the answer is: who on Earth knows? Who on EARTH knows when it’s going to be safe to densely pack a small dark room with people who can raptly listen to a Mary Martin-esque niche pop star or an indie pop-jazz singer with a broken foot or a California folk-rock band who make you cry like almost no other band can? And, once it is safe, will the spaces to see them in even exist anymore? Will the bands?

Pertaining specifically to that last band (Dawes, now one of my very favorite bands) and that last question, I learned this week that Great Scott, the storied Boston dive where I saw them play for the first time, is closing down permanently thanks to the pandemic/their rapacious landlord being unwilling to renew their lease. This venue is tiny— it doesn’t even have an elevated stage, the band is just right there on the floor with you. It’s so small that when the lead singer of the band you’re watching forgets the words to your favorite song on their one album partway through (because it’s their first ever national tour and they’ve never been in a room full of people rapturously singing their songs back to them before and he’s joyously overwhelmed), he can hear you shout the next lyric, find you in the third row, and look right in your eyes as he gives a grateful nod and carries on with the song, as Taylor Goldsmith did when I saw Dawes that first time in 2010.

Great Scott was really the last venue of this size that still exists in Boston— big enough to book national tours, but small enough that the performers can find out that they have a following in your city at the show because no one made them prove a following existed to book the show at all. And while I have seen many great shows, few things can compare with the joy of getting to watch an artist realize they’ve made it right in front of you. I am heartbroken to think my city could be losing that. I have written letters to many people to protest this closure, as have many others (as can you, if you’re from here), and maybe we’ll be able to bring it back. Maybe other venues of this size will open up, or bigger ones will start to book smaller. Maybe. But this closure? It’s just the part of the monster we can see right now.

There is no part of the impact of this epidemic that seems light, or breezy. I am worried about so much. But as a person who deeply loves art, who uses art to cope with dread and loneliness and grief, my anxieties about the viability of creative careers in the wake of this pandemic hit especially hard because they lace my best source of comfort with an edge of panic. How much of this will still be here once we get to after? Because the only thing I can say with certainty right now is that there will be no normal to come back to anymore.

I know these sentiments are not necessarily what you seek when you open up a Two Bossy Dames email, and I do have a recommendation to end on, not just a detailing of things to dread. But I am grateful to feel like you, as an audience of readers, will come with us into these dark corners if they’re the only place we can write from. I don’t know the way out of this one yet, but I can tell you something that’s helped: Sylvan Esso’s new live album, WITH. The band, who’ve released two excellent albums, usually consists of two people: singer Amelia Meath and producer Nick Sanborn on soundboards, creating the electric backdrop that accompanies Meath’s vocals. And even with just those two, the performances are arresting and lovely:

But for WITH, Meath and Sanborn decided to do something special: they decided to transform Sanborn’s electric backdrops into live instrumental arrangements executed by a ten piece band of their friends, just for a touring show, just to see what it would be like. And it turns out that what it’s like— even recorded— is exactly what you want a live show to be. You can hear the joy in the performers and the joy in the crowd. You hear songs you love played in a totally new way that makes you love them even more. You witness virtuosic instrumental skill. It’s wonderful. I have been listening to it a lot since it came out on April 24th. It can’t ease my dread about what comes next. But it does remind me what I will be fighting to find and keep once we get to after. It reminds me what I need to bring forward with us from our old normal. And that’s no small thing.

I hope you enjoy it. More than that, I hope you are well and I hope you stay well. Write and let me know what you’ll be fighting to bring forward once we get to after.

Love, Margaret