David Brendan Hall

Daftolmen

During the months before COVID-19 traumatized our community, I was already in the throes of my own emotional ordeal. A relationship that I’d seen as my end-all-be-all fell to pieces in November, and I continued treating my depression with liberal drug and alcohol use. With those detrimental decisions and my refusal to let anyone in on my self-imposed suffering, I avoided my grief as ardently as some of us have evaded the grocery store in recent months. I felt trapped in the nutrient-deficient hopelessness of the fear of my own feelings.

So, when the mushroom cloud of coronavirus overtook South by Southwest, all concerts (arguably my lifeblood) and, eventually, every aspect of social life, the illusion that my world was ending felt more real than ever. Would I ever emerge from this? And if so, how? 

For a time, attempts to answer those questions remained purely personal. I turned inward, lamenting my emotional and financial situations, unable to settle on any satisfying solution. As a person who spent an average of 160 days per year seeing live music, I was devastated by its indefinite absence. I felt like an island, alone in grappling with that loss. Grief, self-blame surrounding my shattered romance, and self-destruction consumed me. Suddenly having more time than I knew what to do with, I tried to tap into a silver lining. But I found that finishing my taxes early, completing paused creative projects, picking up my neglected guitar … felt impossible. Noticing others pursuing those ends more successfully — many of them facing more challenges than myself — further amplified that feeling. 

Weeks passed like years. I’d had enough stifling alone-time. Desperate to reconnect with the music community, I conceived a photo project similar to Ismael’s, but partially inspired by living alone with my dog for months. Fuck it if it sounds dramatic, because it’s true: the baseline of my pup’s unconditional love sustained my will to live. So, I asked musicians to pose with their beloved pets who were helping them cope with isolation. During that journey — filling my schedule by driving all over the city several days per week, interacting with dozens of musicians — I finally confronted my grief. 

Turning outward and listening to others express the pain I felt made me realize I’d been foolish. Within empathy, I gained perspective. My grief over the immense loss of live music wasn’t mine alone, and neither were my struggles for self-control and self-worth. Just as we all share love for Austin’s music scene, we all shared the pain of losing our connection to it, so, inevitably, processing the grief became a collective effort. Yet, there was another question left to reconcile: how could we communally grieve, grow and reemerge more resolutely creative and united while physically so divided, so isolated?

At this point in this already-too-lengthy essay, I need to shift gears and offer my sincerest thanks to every artist featured in this book. After reading and editing all the entries detailing the ways you attempted to (and in many cases, succeeded to) grow from your grief, the answer to my question was amplified as surely as a stage PA transmits the notes of great songs to all members of an audience simultaneously, cementing the experience — at once shared and individualistic — in each person’s consciousness.

Your writings made it clear that the genesis of the thing we were all grieving — the feeling we get from playing and hearing live music — is dependent on our allied effort. The bandmates playing cohesively, or solo artist harmonizing with their compositions, the intuitive exchange between the creators on stage and people in the audience, the excited and elated conversations between fans after a solid show — we all perceive this separately, but no single person is responsible for the whole feeling.

French composer Claude Debussy once purportedly said, “Music is the space between the notes.” Just as notes played together produce music, so do individuals relate to sounds (and one another) to attain the immaterial feeling of music. Because the feeling is shared — confirmed so concretely by each of you in your own words — it’s natural that we should likewise share the grieving process, completely necessary for our affective growth as a community.

That’s not to discount the requisite for each of us to equalize our spirits separately. Despite initial frustrations, I believe we all likely benefited — perhaps unconsciously, in some cases — from a new sense of stillness in solitude. Many of us dove into writing more music immediately. Others couldn’t muster it so quickly and instead put our energy into new hobbies like reading, gardening, exercising, Zoom catch-ups with old friends, completing old projects or taking on new ones and, most recently, activism. For me, the ways in which some of you made connections between that final undertaking and your grief solidified the notion of our interdependence. 

Is not creation — including the group effort involved in making this book — an act of protest in itself? In discovering more of our common identity by continuing to make art together, despite being separated and the odds of our industry’s survival against us, we are protesting the idea that the feeling of music could ever be stripped from us. We are protesting that we could ever stop producing it. Our harmonic pursuit of music’s survival mirrors the voices of many calling for the justice and equity necessary for the whole of humanity’s survival. 

This isn’t at all meant to minimize the gravity of the demonstrations on our streets, which are the most consequential of our lives. Yet, the comparison feels valid. Protests represent collective cries for restitution. They are also mutual expressions of pain, one of humanity’s universal constants. Confronting pain is tied to grief, and protests, like creating art, are methods of processing it. A large part of that is presence, simply showing up for others, which proliferates an understanding that we share common ground in the often confusing cornucopia of feelings forced to the surface by our individual struggles. No individual can comprehend alone — it requires at least some sense of solidarity, relatability or active collaboration (even if only with oneself) to defeat injustices, and likewise, to overcome grief. 

And to secure that communion, it takes the willingness of individuals to express vulnerability. From where I’m sitting, that’s where each of you came in, whether adding to the ranks of those marching in the streets, helping in the creation of this book or delving into other new projects. Within this volume, you didn’t just contribute your thoughts or an image of yourself. By allowing Ismael to photograph you during this traumatic experience and offering your candid thoughts, you contributed pieces of your most vulnerable selves, which, melded together, produced an artistic antidote to our aggregate grief, an expression of our push toward emotional evolution. You proved that catharsis via creation never really left us and continues to propel us. 

Yet, the fight — for equity, and for the full reclamation of our shared creative space — is far from finished. More showdowns with potential pain loom large on the horizon. And we shouldn’t shy from them. In Edward Snowden’s 2019 memoir, “Permanent Record” — one of the books I finally got around to finishing during quarantine — he writes, “The unexpected blessing of trauma — the opportunity for reinvention — taught me to appreciate the world beyond the four walls of home.” He was referring to his parents’ divorce, but it feels just as applicable to this moment. We’ve been divorced from one another, from the tangible source of the feeling of music, then confined in our respective spaces, and in the span of months, our country has become more divided than ever. But I dare to hope we can confront any trauma and resulting grief, each of us in our own distinct ways, which will inevitably intersect and make us stronger, just like our creations. 

Again, thank you all for collectively furthering the ideal that — whether in public demonstrations, or here in this book — we are capable of more vulnerability, compassion and unity despite this pandemic. You’ve all offered proof of our innate will to survive and our capacity for reinvention. In the long run, we will be better, more resolute versions of ourselves, prepared to support one another emotionally and creatively no matter the circumstances. In large part because of y’all, I even mustered enough courage to pick up my guitar again. So, here’s to us. Here’s to the pursuit of justice. Here’s to music’s immortality. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some songs to finish.