Today Deserves a Theme Song

Today will forever mark the day in my mind when both the vaccine, and my band’s pandemic song were ready for release. I am feeling hopeful again. For creativity. And for my mom.

I started writing “Howl” on the evening of April 4th, 2020. In my living room. Alone with my guitar. It had been a beautiful day in Denver. A high of fifty-nine degrees and a low of nineteen. The first flower had bloomed on the phlox I had planted in my yard the summer before.

I took a perfect hike that day. Sunshine on my face was a great relief after a few days of snow and cold.

Then I went to visit my mom at the balcony of her new home. Hellbent on gratitude, she put on a happy face, as I waved up from the ground.

I wanted to feel uplifted. And I did. But I also felt sad. I missed hugging my mom and I missed my band. Normally I would work through my emotions in a song with them. But we had cancelled our rehearsals for the last two weeks, and I didn’t know when we would be able to collaborate safely again. So I wrote my sorrow into a song.

Trying to chase away the loneliness as we hide away. We connect to one another separately.

Now we’re masking our expressions. We keep it safe. Find your eyes to know your thinking. Don’t look away. Don’t look away.

And we’re howling from a distant memory. Acting out the part of predator. When together we’re prey. Together we’re prey.

When I started writing this song, we were eleven days into the Covid-19 storm. Eleven days since “Shelter at Home” had become a phrase with new meaning. It had been twenty-three days since I had last hugged my mother. Six-and-a-half weeks since she had fallen and broken her hip in her garage, spent the evening on the frozen floor and nearly died from hypothermia until her neighbor finally heard her calls. So clear in my memory, that day seemed an eternity away.

When my husband Robert got home that evening, he listened to what I was working on and immediately grabbed his jimbe and started playing with me. In doing so, he reminded me that together we were still half of the band.

Just a month prior, we had been considering a plan to move back to Mexico to build another house with our family as we had done almost a decade prior. But this feeling of longing for the two other members of our band was reminding me of how it had felt living in another country. This distance was more than I could take. As others dreamed of escape, all I wanted was to stay in one place.

The next day, Robert and I spent two hours in our music studio in the basement of our garage. I turned the power on to my microphone and electric guitar as he worked out a beat on his drum kit. I sent a clip to our two other bandmates Mark Penner-Howell and Christopher Nelsen with a note that read, “Who’s going to build the chorus and bridge?” The next day we received a new version of the song from Mark, his keys playing out his suggestion for a fully flushed out song. I expected nothing less from him. My happy was back on. It would be several more weeks until we would get together as a band to work the song out with our instruments and I would find the lyrics to the chorus. But there was hope for the song, and that was what I needed to carry on.

Today, exactly thirty-six weeks later, we are back in a heightened state of emergency. Denver is under a Severe Risk Public Health Order and we are back to working remotely. But yesterday, I received a final mastered version of the song from Mark who spent countless hours arranging it.

Hours later, I also received a letter from my mother’s assisted living residence with the news that she and all the residents would be offered the Phizer vaccine. Officially. Just in time for my son’s fifteenth birthday.

I am missing my mother and my band again. But this time not so desperately. The vaccine is on the horizon. Soon I will hug my mother. And who knows, maybe the local radio station will play the song. We will give them a day or two before we release it to the public.

For now, it is feeling safe to dream again.