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get by at that point. It took us a couple of months to figure out unemployment which we
eventually got, and we also got some grants for musicians.

BiTS: It's truly dreadful for musicians at the moment. Absolutely awful for professional
musicians at the moment. Are the gigs starting to come back or not?

EH: Well, we did some gigs through the summer that were outdoors and socially distanced,

outdoors, wearing masks. I didn't wear a mask when we were outside, but the audience does. We
did, I don't know, maybe 20 of those. Maybe not 20, maybe 12. I don't know, I'd have to count,
but not very many. Usually, in our summer, we play three or four times a week, but this year it
was maybe once a month. Two times a month at the most. Anyway, I think our last gig of the year
may have just happened. We
actually did an indoor gig, but I The Blues Duo

wore a mask for the whole show Erin Harpe and Jim Countryman
and sang through the mask, up in
New Hampshire.

BiTS: Really.

EH: Yeah, it was at a retirement
community and everybody was

sitting far apart from each other
[chuckling], it was really weird.

BiTS: On the album, there are a
couple of songs which I know very
well that you wrote yourself. How
do you go about writing a song? Do Dorothy Moore with Teeny Tucker

you have a melody in your head
before you start, or do you write the
lyrics down and then put a melody
to it? How does it work for you?

EH: Well, for instance, the song
‘Meet Me in the Middle’, what I'll do is a lot of times I'll come up with little bits of lines and I'll

write them down and keep them in a collection of just scribblings that I have. Then for Meet Me
in the Middle, I was playing around in open G on my guitar and I came up with this lick that went
up and then it went down, and up and down, and then I went into my lyric fragments and I found
a lyric that was actually about flat-earthers. It was [sings] “You say flat, I say round”. I usually
come up with the lyrics separately from the music and then I try to see what fits. It's not always
that way. Sometimes I'll have a whole guitar part and I'll have to start from scratch, but a lot of

times I like to scribble down things that I think might make a good song, but usually, it's just a
title or phrase and then I have to expand upon that. Sometimes I'll go through a thesaurus and
look for a whole bunch of words, or rhyming dictionaries and stuff like that and try to come up
with a lot of possibilities and then I narrow it down from there.

BiTS: I was talking to Doug Macleod a few months ago and he told me that he records everything

on his cell phone. When he gets an idea, he does a little bit on his cell phone in order to
remember it.

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