This is unashamedly a pandemic song from modern Bluegrass outfit Eugene Tyler Band, musing in a suitably jaunty way on all the Covid tropes you can think of – watching, or not watching, the news; drinking beer with a zoom buddy, and wishing “for the world to slow down / But I didn’t mean this way“. Well, “at least the death toll’s growing slower / At least that’s what they say.” And if we in the UK think we had it bad (and we did, nudging 200,000 deaths wholly or in part due to Covid), then spare a thought for the USA – where the 1 million marker has been passed and there’s a new 100,000 cases every week. Jeez, this is getting all very serious, ain’t it?
New York is not the first place that you’d think of for a modern, angst ridden bluegrass band – but Eugene Gardner (vocals/guitar/mandolin), Daniel Tyler (guitar/banjo), and Marc Jaffee (upright bass/vocals) all grew up within a couple of miles of each other in downstate New York. So now it should be. Hit play somebody…
