Mark Doyle

Before March and the COVID shut down, I was a full-time musician, dividing my time between record production, live performances, and private one-on-one teaching.

In the blink of an eye, everything went away.

I was in the middle of producing and recording an album with the artist I tour with, Mary Fahl, which was supposed to be finished and released this year. Since most of this album is created one-on-one in my small home studio, the project had to be shelved. The next stretch of the record would have employed not only me as producer/arranger, but 6 string players, a drummer/percussionist, and other studios and engineers, all in the Syracuse area.

A second album project that I had already spent a great deal of time casting, hiring players, and booking studios for, had to also be shelved because it would’ve involved a collection of musicians and singers all playing at once in small quarters.

(And oh yeah, all the studios were closed)

The cancellation of these two projects alone affected the livelihoods of dozens of people.

In terms of live performance, I tour the Northeast with Ms. Fahl, play locally with my band Mark Doyle and The Maniacs, and do private shows and concerts with Joe Whiting as the Doyle-Whiting Band and Jukin’ Bone. All of those shows and concerts from March out to the end of this year have been canceled.

I also teach privately at home, one-on-one. To date, none of those lessons have come back because nobody feels safe in the confined space (a lot of my students are older.)

On a personal note, my wife works as an esthetician and she has only now been given the go-ahead to return to work, after six months.

The toll that this has taken on all of my musician friends is impossible to quantify. Being able to make a living by playing and/or recording music and sharing it with others in a safe environment is really the whole point of our existence. Live streams don’t seem like a viable alternative, other than giving us something to do, since they are really over-populated right now.

I was grateful for the unemployment but once the $600 ran out, the bare minimum is not cutting it. We need real support from the government, and we need the state to stop punishing the good venue operators who are bending over backward to follow compliance.