Adam Baxter is among the many who have been forced to take full stock of their lives, a complete inventory of their souls and their homes, and a reckoning with their mental wellbeing, as the pandemic put a kibosh on live music performances, our social plans, and life as we once knew it.
For Baxter, who thrives on performing, 2020 has been a bit bleak. His aptly titled new single “These Days”, a co-write between himself and Quote the Raven’s Jordan Coaker, was, in itself, an act of self-preservation. As Baxter puts it, he was “looking for the faintest glowing spark to guide me through the dark.”
With COVID-19 putting Baxter’s career as a singer-songwriter and high school band director on hold, he was immediately facing an awful lot of unwanted change and uncertainty. More concerning was Baxter’s mental health, which he felt would immediately suffer if he wasn’t keeping busy by creating music, and reading, and exercising, and revisiting his childhood games, and the vast multitude of hobbies people have discovered over the last five months, as we can see in the video.
“All my gigs were cancelled, I couldn’t take my school ensembles on stage to perform at their Kiwanis/Spring Concerts and I wasn’t able to even really leave the house to see friends,” says Baxter. “It felt like I was in that movie Groundhog Day – the days and evenings were melting together and if I didn’t put my focus on something substantial, I knew I would have fallen into a dark place.
“Then one day, I set up a virtual co-write session with St. John’s vocalist Jordan Coaker (Quote the Raven, With Violet). Little did I know that it would inspire me to move past all the negatives and be inspired enough to take on a larger scale project.”
Of course, if you’re going to be combating social isolation, the only way to manage that is with friends, and so Baxter enlisted musicians from across Newfoundland to perform on the song with him, albeit socially distanced. While Baxter recorded guitar and vocals in Campbellton, NL, he was joined by Stuart Gallant (percussion) in Kippens, Rick Waterman (bass) in Corner Brook, Paul Heppleston (electric guitar) in Pasadena, and Justin Hickey (backing vocals) in Pouch Cove.
It might be a while yet before we get back to normal, but it’s exercises like this that are going to get us through it. We’re all in this together, just not closer than six feet.