Greg Webb and Kiki Carter Webb have written and performed music for many years around northern Minnesota. Their duo is called Dancing Light, and they are used to performing 60-75 times a year. The Covid-19 pandemic has changed things significantly. "It's been a challenge," says Greg."We don't seek gigs anymore...We put out one little video from home. We recorded one song and sent it out. We haven't done much more than that. We're a little traumatized; not functioning at our normal level, which is...strange."
One project that did bring the duo back into the music scene came out of their hometown in Gainesville Florida. It was an audio/video collaboration developed by songwriter Bob McPeek, called On the Other Side. "He initially wrote the song for himself," Greg explained, "because he was really worried about what was going on with the pandemic in our world. He was inspired by the frontline workers in health care, and the other frontline workers that were defending us. He thought to reach out and create it online, as so much music has gone online now."
Greg and Kiki were two of the 25 musicians that participated in the project. They lent their vocals and an accompanying video to the song, and sent those tracks to McPeek. Bob McPeek was both the songwriter and the audio engineer. Robert Rothschild did the video editing. Those two people collected music and video clips from musicians all across the country and took on the difficult task, as Greg said, "to somehow make it into a cohesive whole."
Kiki said it was "amazing to reconnect" with other musicians through the project. "Everyone involved was part of the Gainesville music scene in some profound way in the past." She described her hometown of Gainesville as a "hotbed; a thriving incubator of talent."
Greg and Kiki are coping with the pandemic through gardening more than music these days. "We talk about it [playing music together] like, every day," says Kiki, "and then it doesn't happen. But Greg built a beautiful new garden bed with trellises for Mother's Day, and now we've got 14 garden beds. We've been planting our plants and watching them grow. We're trying to provide more organic produce for ourselves here at home so we don't have to go out into the world as much right now."
Listen to the full interview below for much more information about how On the Other Side was performed and put together.
You can find more of Greg and Kiki's music on the Dancing Light Facebook page or at their website.
You can find the YouTube video, (I'll See You) On the Other Side by Bob McPeek, here.
