Bones of a Nation Livestream

Last night, Erin and I joined with some close friends and helped produce this fantastic livestream focused on the theme “Bones of a Nation.” Our good friend Shane Palko hosted the event, which featured Mannie T’Chawi & a pre-recorded performance from Jason Chu.

When I don’t have to run a PA system or perform, livestreaming production is much simpler and I’m able to do more. It was a really meaningful and thought-provoking evening.

Interesting note - there is often a rumor online amongst the folk musician crowds about Facebook not liking it when people play cover songs on livestreams. That is absolutely incorrect. Facebook is fine with musicians performing anything live. The real issue is playing recorded/copywritten content. For the intro and outro music of this stream, I had a pre-release/not-final mix of Shane Palko’s tune “Captain Dan” playing. Interestingly enough, it played back fine when we were actually live. But, if you go back and watch the replay, Facebook cuts the audio entirely after 1 second (I checked and it’s the same on Desktop and Mobile). It’s strange that they were able to detect the song and match it to the final mastered version, and also strange that Shane is the one who owns that copyright and we were streaming onto his official page. It makes me wonder if Facebook has any kind of appeals process for copyright owners sharing their own music.

The backdrop for the stream was the old dilapidated brick house on Shane’s property. He is in the process of tearing out the old and eventually rebuilding it. It was a beautifully fitting environment for the stream.

Once we packed up gear from the livestream, we got out our pizza dough that we made earlier in the day and baked some delicious pizzas in Shane’s newly christened wood fired pizza oven. Pizza is good. These pizzas were great. There was some magical bespoke milled-with-love-by-bicycle-power cornmeal involved.

After eating and hanging out for a while, we went on an almost-midnight almost-full moon hike. We listened to the trees and the stream and watched the shadows of backlit deer run away across the moonlit fields. As we trekked through the snow and neared the end of the hike, we looked up and saw that the almost-full moon was entirely circumscribed by a perfectly complete ring of circular misty magic. It is apparently called a Lunar Halo and is some type of meteorological predictor of impending storms. What a special and unique thing to see. What a great evening. There are a bunch of mediocre photos from my cell phone in this post to document these good memories.

Thanks for reading.

-Michael