Friends, we’re sure we speak for many of you as well when we say we’re not sorry to see 2020 in the rearview mirror, but despite all the chaos of this year, we still have a lot to be thankful for, as evidenced by the sheer length of this post!
For one thing, we want to thank all of you, particularly in a year like this one. Our Patreon is a little over a year old, and we have been blown away with the response we’ve gotten from this community! Your ongoing support has been a lifeline for us, and we are truly, profoundly grateful to you for believing in and contributing to our music and mission.
In honor of the silver linings of 2020, we wanted to share some highlights from this past year, and we’d love to hear YOUR highlights in the comments!
Reaching our first Community Goal on Patreon: When we launched our Patreon, we set our first goal at building a community of 50 patrons, with the reward being the release of Bayside Lament Deconstructed, our “how-to guide” song that has often been our favorite encore. We have purposefully not posted it publicly because we love the special feeling of it being an in-person experience, but we thought it would be a fun bonus for our Patreon community. We also figured it would take a good long while to build up to that number of supporters, but we were astounded when we had breezed past that mark in just a few months! It was a huge cause for celebration for us, and a wonderful way to begin 2020! The post with the video, if you want to see it again, is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/33336980
Showcasing at Folk Alliance International (FAI): Way back in January, we had the distinct honor of performing as a Showcase Artist at Folk Alliance International in New Orleans, which was a Really Big Deal. Folk Alliance conferences are gatherings of artists, presenters, and other industry professionals, and FAI was an opportunity for us to make personal connections with some major players as well as reconnecting with old friends.
At some point, we’ll write a whole post to tell you about the hilarious adventure of our showcase concert, where our a capella vocal harmony set got some unintentional accompaniment by the band in the adjoining room (which featured electric bass and a full drumkit), but that’s a story for another day… 🙂 We had a great time nevertheless and are very glad we went!
The photo below is from a shoot we did with photographer Jeff Fasano during the conference. We were trying very hard to look awake after many long days and late nights of nonstop networking and performing!
Our fourth(!) UK tour and first foray into mainland Europe: It’s a little surreal to think back on that five weeks of touring and realize that it was also in 2020, but we are so glad we were able to give all those concerts and workshops before COVID lockdown started (we arrived home on March 10 as scheduled, just a few days before travel restrictions and other more serious COVID measures went into place in the US). While there is no one photo that could possibly encapsulate our whole trip, we did (of course) take a lot of jumping photos and this one is pretty darn epic:
St Michael’s Mount in Marazion, Cornwall
The memories of all our touring feel so sweet at this time when that reality is so far away. Thank you to all of you who came to concerts, sang with us in a workshops, made us a cup of tea, fed us when we were hungry, laughed at our jokes, hosted us in your homes, let us pamper your cats, and welcomed us into your lives. We miss you all so much.
Livestreaming: We’re not sure how much you all have perused the Community Goals section of our Patreon page, but our original “reward” for reaching 100 patrons was a livestream concert for our Patreon community. In the fall of 2019, we felt pretty darn clever for coming up with this innovative way to perform for a geographically dispersed group of people… oh, how things have changed! 🙂
It has been really fun and weird to delve into the world of livestreaming–we have often talked about how lucky we feel that we are a group (as opposed to a solo artist) so at least we have each other to talk to in those strange silent moments after a song ends! But it has also been so delightful to watch the chat roll by and see you all connecting with each other in ways that might be harder at an in-person show. At least, we’re pretty sure you weren’t all texting each other during our concerts in the Before Times, right? 🙂
Our first livestream concert from March, as well as our Happy Hour and Brunch events are still publicly available on Facebook at www.facebook.com/windbornesingers/live and we’ve posted our other livestream concerts as Patreon-only videos–scroll to the end of this post for a list of the livestream links all in one place!
Collaborative projects with other artists: As you may have heard us say before, one of the benefits and downsides of full-time touring is that we meet all sorts of amazing artists that we would love to collaborate with (that’s the benefit part) but it’s really hard to actually find time to make a collaboration happen (that’s the downside). This year, however, we had the opportunity to collaborate with several artists in a variety of different ways! Some highlights: We arranged and recorded Songs Stay Sung with the incredible Zoe Mulford (full story on that in this post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/38751374), which has already touched so many people. Brattleboro composer Stephen Spitzer, best known for his beautiful piece Hallowell, commissioned us to record and create videos of his compositions. The first one we did was St. Gaudens (https://www.patreon.com/posts/41496959), and we will be sharing the rest with you as they are released!
In the recording studio with Zoe
We upped our digital media game: One product of having a lot of time on our hands was that Lauren and Jeremy both learned a bit more about video editing, which resulted in a lot of new videos for you! The “feature” video in this post is a promo reel we put together for the Arts Midwest/Western Arts Alliance conference that we attended (online) in September. We’d never thought about having a promo reel for us as a band before, but at an online conference it became something of a digital business card, and we think it makes us look very fancy. 🙂
We also produced and released more music videos this year than in the last four years combined! We’ve shared them all with you here on Patreon throughout the year, but some of our favorites include: singing The Terror Time at Mont Saint Michel in France; self-produced music videos like St. Gaudens and The Song of Hard Times; and Very Silly Videos like the stop-motion Darling Corey and our parody version of the Yeaster Anthem. We’ve got a bunch more videos in the pipeline, and you will be the first to know about them!
Political action: We hosted several online letter-writing parties with Vote Forward to encourage voters in key states to turn out for the general election and the runoff in Georgia in just a few days. For us, these parties were a really important way to feel involved in the electoral process and connect face to face with many of you. Together, members of the Windborne community wrote over 1600 letters to voters!
Screenshot from one of our letter-writing parties on Zoom
Finally, a HUGE success of 2020 was putting together our upcoming album, Of Hard Times & Harmony. With summer gigs cancelled, we had time to develop more new material for this album than we’d originally expected, and we found COVID-safe ways to record the tracks with our sound engineer. With your help, we surpassed our ambitious fundraising goal on Indiegogo, and we are currently working on the artwork and written material that will accompany the music. We are so excited to share Of Hard Times & Harmony with you in the next few months!
We know we’ve said this a lot, but we want to once again thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We were able to weather the storm of this year because of the support and love of this community, and it means so much to us to have you in our lives.
We always love hearing from you–what were your highlights in 2020? What are you looking forward to in 2021?
In gratitude, solidarity, and hope,
Lauren, Jeremy, Lynn, and Will
Windborne Livestream Links:
Our first Livestream concert (March 14): https://www.patreon.com/posts/34916506
All our Happy Hour and Brunch events from April are publicly available at https://www.facebook.com/WindborneSingers/live_videos/
August 1 Livestream concerts (afternoon and evening shows): https://www.patreon.com/posts/40595490
Sept 21 Livestream concert (plus a secret link to the video where we sounded like chipmunks, if you want to relive those hilarious 9 minutes): https://www.patreon.com/posts/41946741
Nov 18 Livestream, where we celebrated meeting our Indiegogo goal: https://www.patreon.com/posts/44666689
