Mattawa musician makes the most of self isolation

By Kevin J Pecore

Regardless of where I’m sitting in the house there is a guitar within grasp for that moment of inspiration.

Sometimes that spark will ignite quickly while other times the moment remains buried under myriad distractions that come with normal life. At the moment things are far from normal. Over the past few months, distractions have all but disappeared due to the COVID-19 pandemic leaving me with nothing but time and relative solitude. If I ruminate too much over things I don’t have direct control over I tend to freak out a little.

I’ve been using much of this indoor time to work on my craft, primarily new ways of approaching the guitar and songwriting

In years past, professional musicians who were hired to play at tourist resorts in the Catskills and such, would sneak off to spend their spare time honing new techniques away from the paying audiences, literally often in a distant woodshed, which is where ‘woodshedding’ as a musical term originates. Today, ‘woodshedding’ can apply to any remote location away from the home. Well, we don’t have a woodshed but there are enough rooms in the home where I can compose and practice.

As co-founding member of the band Broken Down Lori, I have stacks of dog-eared notebooks with snippets of lyrics; orphaned rhymes just waiting for a home. I seldom write a song from start to finish but rather start, stop, revise, discard and begin again as the song evolves. This can be a timely process but in the end the reward of creating something out of nothing is huge.

Whether the song has any merit or if it will actually be performed is very much beside the point. The prospect of working with a canvas composed of nothing but silence is always an exciting challenge. A recent song Sway, that deals with COVID-19 essentially wrote itself, which seldom happens. I recorded it hastily with warts and all. This is what live human music is. Art cannot exist in a vacuum, but is rather a reflection of the current state of affairs.

These are admittedly extraordinary times with a prevailing sense of anxiety and fear of the unknown. To sit and dwell can be paralyzing which is why this is an opportune time to take up a new interest, something that one has been putting off for years due to just not having the time.

Take a break from the 24-hour news cycle. Don’t worry, it’ll still be there when you turn it back on. Dig out that copy of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and tackle it. Take up chess or extreme knitting. Build a riding lawnmower that can hit 200 km/hr in your basement. It doesn’t matter what you do just do it.  

As a guitar teacher I encourage and challenge people to pick up an instrument and use YouTube to just get at it. Hit the ‘woodshed’ and you may surprise yourself at the ease of just learning the basics of an instrument.

When the dust settles and things return to this new state of ‘normalcy’ (this pandemic does not signal the end of civilization) you’ll come out of it with a really fun, healthy, and positive skill set. Ukuleles are hopelessly addictive. The tuba? Well, that may pose more of a challenge.

Watch Kevin perform Sway below.