Coronavirus … The Album

Nick Grunerud, a.k.a. Underwear, starts off his latest release, CORONA, Light, The Coronavirus Musical, with what sounds almost like a public service announcement, echoing off the sides of apartment buildings. ​“Welcome to coronavirus, the album. You cannot wash your hands for 32 minutes. Enjoy!”

It’s an apt setup for ​“Phase I: Time to Waste,” which finds Grunerud assuming the mentality of someone who is already a little weary of the societal changes the virus has wrought. ​“So we don’t want to waste our time buying masks and Purell,” he sings. ​“We don’t want to waste our time doing nothing / We don’t want to waste our time buying masks for nothing.” It’s the last time that gets the treatment, as Grunerud repeats it and stacks harmonies on it. At a time when many are just asking what it is they should be doing, Grunerud is asking a somewhat more complicated question: What will our response to the outbreak mean?

Given the half-improvisatory way Grunerud makes music, and the prolific rate at which he does it, it’s not all that surprising that he finished an album about coronavirus before the first case was reported in the state of Connecticut.

“I made it in a day,” Grunerud said; that day was last Monday, March 9. Listeners’ responses were equally rapid. ​“I made something topical,” he said. ​“This is happening right now.”

The songs on the album crackle with that kind of immediacy, as Grunerud jumps from character to character. There are people panicking and hoarding. People mocking those who panic and hoard. People who want to do something. People who just want to be left alone, as on ​“Phase II: Inside Of My Room,” where Grunerud sings about the social conditions the virus has created with a tone that partakes somewhat of the tone of a jilted lover (“Why don’t you just tell me what is wrong with me / so I can stay inside of my room?”). They’re dispatches from people glued to the news that won’t quite give them the answers they’re looking for.

“It’s what the news is,” said Grunerud. ​“It’s just information. And in some ways there is no information.”

Grunerud takes the outbreak and the public response seriously; he works as a nurse. But without a vaccine or ability to do widespread testing, apart from the social distancing we’re quickly growing accustomed to, much of the medical advice boils down to the sound advice we hear from doctors all the time; as Grunerud put it, ​“be healthy. Eat good food. Wash your hands.”

What drives the album are mostly his observations of others, and the things they reveal about themselves when they talk about what they’re going to do as cases of coronavirus mount. ​“You see what people are actually like,” Grunerud said. He has noticed, for example, that some people are a little more likely to strike up a conversation on the street, while others seem a little ruder. He also sardonically recalled a recent trip to Stop and Shop, where he used a public bathroom.

“Bathrooms are the cleanest they’ve ever been,” he said. Which led him to another thought: ​‘It could be this clean all the time.” Which leads to larger thoughts about the way the outbreak has revealed something a little surreal about the priorities we’ve established for ourselves as a society. ​“If we didn’t spent $90 billion on a bomb the size of Rhode Island,” he said, ​“we could have a test kit in everybody’s mailbox.”

As Grunerud sings on ​“Phase IV: FBI,” ​“I don’t know when this began / it must have been another place.” With its head-hopping from response to response, the album hints at the ways we might have been better prepared — not just in terms of test kits and hospital beds, but in terms of people’s general ability to adapt, if there weren’t so many bills to pay, and if those bills weren’t so high; if we all had a couple more hours in the day, or were able to keep ourselves a little healthier in the first place.

Speaking of the arts community generally, Grunerud felt it was likely that there’d be a flurry of artistic output in the wake of the virus. ​“People have a lot of time to work on stuff,” he said. Then added: ​“Maybe we’ll all learn how to farm and cook.”

Corona, Light, The Coronavirus Musical is available on Bandcamp.