Music in Lockdown! Secrets of Mariana

with Secrets of Mariana

Birmingham (UK) hard rock band Secrets of Mariana are, like all musicians around the world, affected by the virus lockdown. As part of our continuing investigation into how the virus and lockdown is affecting musicians, venues and promoters we asked them how they're coping.

We don’t think the lockdown has come at a good time for anyone really, especially those who work and earn a living from the live music industry. We really feel for the venues, sound engineers, light techs, bands and crew who are struggling right now as so many tours have had to be cancelled/rescheduled. 

We’ve have gigs cancelled through May that we were excited to be performing at. Luckily, most of them have been rescheduled for next year but some have been cancelled all together. We’ve also got gigs booked from June to the end of the year that at this point we don’t know if they’re going to happen or not so it’s a scary time for venues and a situation that could potentially change the future of how we experience live events.

For us personally, we’re in the middle of writing EP number 3. We were hoping to be in the studio recording around now and planning to release new music towards the end of this year so it’s really knocked those plans back. We’re still writing individually at home but we’re dying to get back to our lock up room to keep writing together as that’s how we feel we work best.

It’s also challenging us to think outside of the box in terms of our social media. It’s a catch 22 situation between wanting to stay in touch with our followers and keeping the content relevant. When we have no new music to release and potentially no gigs for the rest of the year that becomes really hard as essentially that’s our core content. We also can’t live stream any gigs from home until the restrictions get lifted as we’re all under different roofs. 

Although our social media content isn’t as busy as it was before lockdown we’re still busy behind the scenes. We’re video calling each other for catch ups and writing sessions every week or so and we’re thinking ahead by booking gigs and posting about events we’ve got planned for 2021. We’re also planning on doing a facebook live stream, which will be a Q and A / updates session on Sunday 31st May at 6:30pm.

All of us are taking this time to listen to new music and up skill in terms of our own instruments, learning new instruments, learning music theory (or brushing up on it) so there are definitely positives to the lockdown. We’re definitely going to be doing some long practise sessions when all this is over as we’re all missing playing music together! Plus with all these new ideas and influences we have, the new EP will probably have some new songs we never thought we’d write. Every cloud aye!

https://www.facebook.com/SecretsOfMariana/

https://secretsofmariana.bandcamp.com/