Song Premiere: Michael Doucet, “Covid 19 (Don’t Want No)
Michael Doucet’s ferocious, almost, savage sawing of his fiddle opens this harrowing minor chord mantra about the fear, the claustrophobia, the anxiety, the isolation we’ve all been feeling since the COVID-19 virus spread rapidly around the world. Every day, we feel as if we’re living in a horror show from which there’s no escape, even as we don our masks, practice social distance, and follow guidelines to keep others and ourselves safe. At the same, we’re frustrated and sometimes angry enough to shout to the virus, as Doucet and Sarah Quintana do in their call and response vocals, “don’t want no COVID-19 round c’here.” The song opens almost frantically and never lets up as Doucet rehearses a litany of practices he follows to fend off the virus—“well I wash my hands/then I wash my hands again”; “Well, I stayed inside/You know I stayed inside my house”—including the isolation from his lover: “well, I long for you baby/I long for you so much/I dream about you baby/but this virus is keeping us apart.” Doucet’s urgent fiddle and Chad Viator’s piercing lead guitar chase each other around in a spinning tarantella on the instrumental bridge as the song spirals up to its climactic moment where the singer comes down with a headache and fever that won’t go away and “can’t taste nothing/nothing but the taste of death.” Appropriately, the song collapse into a cacophony that is at once terrifying and boisterous. Even so, a gallows humor flows as the undertone of this song that acknowledges the ways the virus has changed our lives and declares that we don’t want it around here no more.
Of his writing of the song, Doucet recalls, “I was merely playing around with what was happening to all of us at the end of April when I awoke to the grim fact that this was our new reality; cancelled gigs, face masks, Dr Fauci, etc. The song came out complete in 30 minutes. What I had never considered before suddenly became a routine everyday mantra.”
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Michael Doucet, fiddle & vocals
Chad Viator, electric guitar
Sarah Quintana, vocals & acoustic guitar
Billy Ware, percussion
Chris French, acoustic bass
> Michael Doucet music at Compass Records
> Facebook – @michaeldoucet
