BEDROOM
BEATS Even a pandemic can’t stop the music in the digital age
BY MOLLY LIEBERGALL
I
n their final moments together, Matthew and Vanessa tearfully nestle into each other’s arms. “I was really getting strong feelings for you,” she says into the nape of his neck. Matthew lets out a sob into Vanessa’s shoulder, barely able to utter a word. The mood in the villa is somber — and tense. “That was the fakest cry I have ever seen in my — ” Vanessa, now talking to two of her friends elsewhere, says before freezing. Jack Wright sits up, remote in hand, while Vanessa remains plastered on-screen. Wright, a UW–Madison senior, turns to his bandmate William Lorenz with an idea. It’s March in Twin Lakes, on the border of Illinois, and the pair, known on stage as the musical duo Staring in Spaces, haven’t seen a soul in days.
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They’re holed up with their instruments and digital equipment in Lorenz’s grandmother’s house, where they will ultimately spend two weeks writing, playing and creating music while COVID-19 lockdowns commence across the United States. Safe from infection but isolated from the rest of the world, Wright says the lack of human contact sometimes led their creative process down rather interesting routes. “We started writing songs about people’s relationships in those reality TV shows,” Wright says over Zoom with a laugh. “When you don’t have any social interactions, you run out of ideas.” Matthew and Vanessa’s dramatic split in season two of “Love Island Australia” inspired Wright and Lorenz to write a breakup ballad that they may eventually release, but it’s on the back burner for now. At grandma’s house, the duo
ground out “a bunch of really cool stuff,” Wright says, including the music for their late August single “Float,” which outperformed most of their previous songs in Spotify streams within months. Just a few decades ago, none of this — the band’s creation, production and promotion of a new song — would have been safe or possible during a global health crisis. But with recent developments in music production technology and the rise of social media, countless independent artists like Staring in Spaces can keep making music from the same place where they always have: at home. Now sitting in his apartment in Madison, Wright holds a small keyboard — maybe a foot long — up to the camera. “MIDI is sick,” he says, admiring the pseudo-piano’s plastic ivories and thumb-sized buttons. MIDI stands for
