Good morning.
It's Monday, the start of the week, and we're going to make it through this one, just like we made it through the last one.
Today's message comes from Matt Bishop, the singer in the band Hey Marseilles, "one of your many local orchestral folk-pop feelings bands," as Matt puts it, hilariously.
"I miss you terribly, just walking around my neighborhood," he says in his message. "I miss people and crowds and the general city-ness of things. But I am also increasingly grateful, recently, that I am a part of this community. And in that spirit, I would love to sing to you a song about hope."
Hey Marseilles has been on a bit of a hiatus since their last record came out in 2016, and since their last show in 2019. Part of that is because a few of them have gone to grad school.
They were planning a 10th anniversary show of their first record for this summer, and were about to announce it when COVID-19 shut everything down. So it's to-be-determined when that will occur. They might have to turn it into an 11th anniversary show.
Bonus music video: Here's the Hey Marseilles video of the same song Matt performs aboveâa video made in 2010, back when people were allowed to stand close to each other:
Matt is a lifelong Northwesterner. He grew up in Snohomish, he's a double UW grad, and he's been reading The Stranger since he came to Seattle for college.
Now he's about to graduate from the MBA program at the Foster School at UW. He decided to go to business school after making music and touring full-time with Hey Marseilles for four years and watching his rent double in that time, and realizing he needed to make more money if he wanted to stay in Seattle. He's spending his last term in "hours and hours of Zoom classes and looking forward to virtual graduation."
But he also tells us he's using this time of isolation to tap back into writing new music.
Thanks for singing to us this morning, Matt.
It's inspiring to hear you're writing new music.
Good luck this week, everyone.
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Previously in this series:
