Musicians may be off of stages right now, but they are still creating music inspired by an uncertain world, which will remain a marker of a time that has changed everything
It’s been a while since we’ve seen Jon Bon Jovi solo. But with touring at a halt, and his new album release postponed until Fall, he’s spending a lot of his time at his non-profit JBJ Soul Kitchen restaurants in New Jersey, as an essential worker, helping cook take-out for the hungry.
His wife, Dorothea, took this picture of him recently doing the dishes:
“She said, ‘What should the caption be?’ And I said, ‘If you can’t do what you do, do what you can,” Bon Jovi said.
The next day, that caption became a chorus… and the chorus a song.
“[I] carefully presented it to my audience, which was my family!” he laughed. “And hoped that they liked it enough that I wanted to share it with others. Because, you know, I was proud of it.”
Correspondent Lee Cowan asked, “Does it feel like you’re more, I don’t know, creative maybe isn’t the right word. But there’s something there, right?”
“There’s something there. And I realized that it was something that we are all going through. No matter who you are, no matter where you live on this planet, we experience COVID-19 together.
The COVID music muse has tapped a lot of bands on the shoulder recently. The Rolling Stones hadn’t released an original song in eight years, until this one: “Living in a Ghost Town,” complete with a video featuring a fish-eyed view of empty streets, screamed the headlines of our times:
You can look for me But I can’t be found You can search for me I had to go underground Life was so beautiful Then we all got locked down Feel a like ghost Living in a ghost town, yeah
Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande captured the other pandemic’s signature – our endless posting of selfies in quarantine – in “Stuck With U,” a video musical chat.
And if that’s not enough of a mirror on our lives, there’s the upbeat COVID collaboration of Michael Bublé, Barenaked Ladies and Sofia Reyes, who remind us all we just “Gotta Be Patient.”
But now there’s almost a new genre blossoming that some are calling “Pandemic Pop.” Like Luke Combs’ “Six Feet Apart”:
On Spotify, one of the nation’s largest music streaming platforms, there’s a “Sound of the Virus” playlist that contains nearly 5,000 new COVID-related songs.
