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BiTS: That's absolutely fabulous. What about the other songs that are on the album, was there any
one that is outstanding for you, one that you look forward to playing to when you're playing a gig?
DA: Well, honestly, I love all of those songs. I think they're all good solid tunes and what I think is
fun about the album and about that collection of songs and really just about us as a band in general,
is the variety of musical styles that we have there. Blues is definitely part of it, but there's
obviously kind of jazzier stuff like ‘Swingling’, there's some stuff that's more soul-oriented and
roots rock and some country music on there. All of the styles get touched on, and I think that's kind
of what's fun about the record. I guess ‘Say My Name’ is a really fun song, the opening track and
one that we kind of treated as one of the singles. That's one that Mark actually wrote the bulk of
and I kind of helped finish the lyrics on it, but it's got a great hook and it's got a great kind of a
unique feel. It's sort of like a soul tune, but it's almost sort of got like a surfie thing going on which
makes it a lot of fun. ‘Dealer's Lament’, another one of my favourite songs, it's almost sort of like a
southern rock kind of Black Crowsie type of a ballad and that's another one that I really always
enjoy playing. It's tough to pick favourites. I'm proud of a lot of those songs because I feel like we
put together some good tunes there.
BiTS: Have you been badly affected by COVID? Are the gigs starting to come back, or not?
DA: Well, yes. To answer your question, yes, we have been affected by COVID pretty significantly,
although I will say because of the area of the country in which we live, we've maybe been less
impacted as musicians than other parts of the country. Kansas, because of a variety of socio-
political factors [laughing], for part of the year was more open than some places were. And also our
virus numbers were lower than some areas for a while as well, so that helped. Over the summer
from about mid-June and into the early fall, we were able to play fairly regularly. There were
enough clubs that have outdoor stages or places that got creative as far as like doing parking lot
shows or things like that where we could play outdoors, and people could spread out and be a little
more safe, or at least in theory they could. Many of them didn't choose to, unfortunately, but we
were at least able to work somewhat regularly for a few months there and then unfortunately as
fall hit, our infection rate around here just went nuts and still are not in a good place and so that
kind of coincided with the weather getting colder and us not really being comfortable playing
indoor shows, so at this point, we have not been able to do much over the last six weeks to two
months, and of course, from about March till June, things were pretty well shut down as well.
While we did have a stretch of time where we were able to work some, it's not been anything close
to what we would normally do, and we certainly lost almost all of our festival gigs and concert
series gigs that are where we make the bulk of our money, so, unfortunately, I think we're probably
looking until at least spring, early summer before we're going to get back to working with any
regularity again.
BiTS: There are many people who are on their uppers because they haven't been able to get gigs
and that kind of thing.
DA: Yeah, it's a tough situation, and from what I've heard from friends in the UK, it sounds like
you guys are in a very tough situation as well and so it's a very tough thing it's like it's really hard