During the pandemic it’s been far too easy for poor coping mechanisms to creep in and become somewhat set. For many of us, I imagine we’ve spent far more time looking at screens than perhaps we did before Covid-19, I know there’s been an excess of online board gaming in my evenings and weekends.

Along with being physically distanced from so many friends, the lack of playing and creating music with the rest of Every Black Day has had a major negative impact on my wellbeing. It took quite a while for me to get back to writing new songs (four so far) and it required me to accept the situation wasn’t going to be resolved quickly.

Whilst the simple act of writing new songs did help my wellbeing, I still felt it wasn’t quite enough and after a few months started trying to relearn a little of my recording training from years ago and put that into practice. Which (many technical issues aside) has helped create a sense of achievement and progress through recording rough demos for my band mates to work with

Now, all of that hasn’t significantly cut down my screen time (you do need a computer to record onto) but has made some of that screen time feel genuinely worthwhile. Music can be stressful but is also so much fun!