How a Mostly Fake Band Helped Me Through 2020
This is Willie Nelson, who is real.
The defining song of those early, wash-your-groceries days of the pandemic goes like this:
Black coffee from a pot
Red wine from a box
Give us this day our daily ibuprofen
Take it from the top
(repeat)
If you don’t know the tune, that’s probably because it’s by my friend Jeff. It’s called “The Wayhighmen Diet (How to Survive Everything, Live Forever and Feel Good All the Time).” The Wayhighmen is the sort-of band some friends and I started a while back. (Calling us a band would be a bit much, but we decided we should have a name anyway. We have also briefly been, among others: Snakes of Michigan; Frail Pontiff; Jeff-Shaped Bear; Probably Wolves; Whole Cukes; Tater and the Spuds; and Bowfin After Dark. The Wayhighmen has stuck.) I doubt we’ll survive everything or live forever, but being The Wayhighmen helped us feel occasionally good some of the time when there was not much to feel good about.
To be clear, The Wayhighmen are all very fortunate and have nothing to complain about. Still, those first few months, especially, were at least a little bit tough for everyone. When the coronavirus killed John Prine—probably the most beloved songwriter among this group of friends, and one of our favorite people—we all took it harder than the usual celebrity death. A few days later, around 2 in the morning, with his kids tucked in and a few glasses of wine (from a box) in him, Jeff took his phone and guitar out to the family Subaru, pushed record, and belted out a favorite Prine song, “Rocky Mountain Time,” which can knock the wind out of you:
Christ I'm so mixed up and lonely
I can't even make friends with my brain
I'm too young to be where I'm going
But I'm too old to go back again
It was Jeff’s idea to try collaborating remotely. After a few weeks in lockdown, we didn’t need any convincing. There are other options out there, but we picked BandLab. Tutorials were viewed. Microphones were purchased. The Wayhighmen became session men.
Recording songs from our own homes was sort of the inverse of how I usually play music with these guys. Once or twice a year, ostensibly to go fishing, we rent a cabin somewhere, eat stew, drink beer, and pick country and bluegrass tunes until our fingers don’t work. (Wayhighman Pete made a short film on the subject.) There is so much that can and usually does go wrong when we play together: forgotten lyrics, improvised solos gone shockingly off the rails, inevitable disagreement about when to go to the bridge on “Friend of the Devil.” But occasionally we find a tight groove, we hit a mysterious harmony, things sound pretty good. (Not bad. Can’t complain.)
You don’t get the same how-are-we-doing-this jolt from a recorded track that required several takes, but on the plus side you can listen to it over and over again. I’ve been digging back into our archive lately and I have to say, we’ve had our moments. The harmonies are damn near pristine on our version of “Ruby” by David Rawlings. Nobody’s going to confuse our “Isn’t It a Pity” with George Harrison’s, but we slathered so many tracks on it that there’s something new to hear on each listen. We even came up with some decent original material. Wayhighman Benny wrote and recorded a pretty bluegrass instrumental on his mandolin that has just sat there unaccompanied for months because none of us is skilled enough to play along.
Most of my phone alerts in the pandemic’s darkest moments were little zaps of dread: A hundred thousand Americans are dead. The cops murdered someone again. The seditionists are in the rotunda. But it was different with those Bandlab alerts. Whenever my phone told me one of the guys had added a new song or layered a new track on a tune I recorded, I’d lose my mind for a second. I couldn’t wait to hear how it sounded.
Hey, it didn’t always sound great. I could never figure out how to prevent the annoying pops of static that spoiled some of my tracks. Benny has played a good number of shows on mandolin and steel guitar, but the rest of us don’t practice much. You can tell we didn’t use click tracks.
But on Bandlab you can always go back and try again. And since you couldn’t do much else in those awful weeks when everything was going wrong, you might as well keep at it until you’ve got your part right. The world won’t hear it, but The Wayhighmen will. Deep breath. Take it from the top.