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Pandemic Blues
Metadata
- title
- Pandemic Blues
- meaning
- Stir-crazy lockdown blues: comfort prison with a guitar in your cell, moldy-bread sandwich math, marijuana and malt liquor and HBO: I've got it good, and it's still the pandemic blues.
- year
- 2020
- release
- Masks and Monsters
- releaseType
- album
- artist
- Scoobert Doobert
- artistId
- #scoobert
- credits
- Written, performed, mixed, and mastered by Luke Francis Walton. Album art by Gentle Giant Illustrations.
- spotify
- https://open.spotify.com/album/13zzM1QEnrvJ7kRwUGNIFw
- officialVideo
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkBICgUp4N0
- apple
- https://music.apple.com/us/album/pandemic-blues/1526427944?i=1526428026
- themes
- pandemic
- blues
- lockdown
- domestic
- Masks and Monsters
- depression
- Essie Jenkins
- isrc
- QZK6P2060450
- isrcSource
- soundexchange
- draft
- false
Lyrics
Stir crazy Is another kind of hell Comfort prison With a guitar in my cell I got to make Me a sandwich With the butts of moldy bread But that mean I'll have to get up from my bed I've got the pandemic blues I've got it good Got marijuana Got malt alcohol Got HBO Go now Oh, I've got it all Got the pandemic blues I've got it good The pandemic blues I got it good I do
Content
Track five on Masks and Monsters: Luke solo, North Park lockdown, August 2020. The LP's named blues track in the album essay, alongside It Can Get Worse, Creature Comfort, and When It's Over.
The title nods to The 1919 Influenza Blues by Essie Jenkins, the stark piano blues about the last century's plague (disease that killed the rich, killed the poor and sent the doctors all home to bed), preserved on Smithsonian Folkways. Luke's version sits in that lineage, not parody but the form itself updated for stir-crazy 2020.
The verse is domestic absurdism: a musician in a comfort prison with a guitar in my cell, a sandwich built from the butts of moldy bread, and the heroic act of getting up from bed (depression physics). The chorus flips the idiom from "got it bad" to I've got the pandemic blues, I've got it good, then inventories the low-rent comforts (marijuana, malt alcohol, HBO Go), privilege and collapse in the same breath. Same register as Creature Comfort.
Pairs with 2020 Is Over (December single, same season) and leads toward recovery on Little Hug. Distinct from track four, When It's Over: different song, same end-is-near mood.