“Invisible Forces,” a new song out from Steve Rodgers, begins with a flurry of driving percussion and a guitar that sounds a bit like a siren. An organ lays down a pulsing rhythm. And then there’s Steve Rodgers’s voice, in harmony with itself. The lyrics — and the images from the accompanying video — are pulled from the headlines about the Covid-19 outbreak.
“This is not somewhere else’s battle,” he sings. “This time it is every human’s war / The swords in our hearts start to rattle / Against these invisible forces.”
The song pulses with an anger that feels invigorating and cathartic. It marks both a departure from his last album, Count It All Joy, and something of a return to his youth, as “Invisible Forces” is one of several songs that Rodgers has been writing during the pandemic. “With the amount of songs I’ve written, I can see putting out a whole album,” he said. “I’ve never focused on writing this much in my life.”
It’s all in response to the suffering he sees around him. “My heart’s broken for so many of my friends, and people that I’ve known,” Rodgers said. “I try not to be on Facebook all the time, but I have a huge network of people through the Space, and there are so many sad stories. There’s people who are worried about eating. And the only way I know how to cope with that is writing — writing songs, and reaching out to people. It’s a dark time and I try to be a light, but I’m used to going out and giving hugs and spending time with people, and I can’t do that. So I’m really pissed off.”
Rodgers’s anger at his inability to help others through the Covid-19 outbreak has a dramatic counterpoint in his tranquility at home. “It’s weird to be stuck on the third of an acre we’re calling our desert island,” Rodgers said. The Rodgers family already home-schools its children, so that much, for them, has not changed. “We are in good spirits and practicing family closening time,” Rodgers said. “I was growing my coronavirus shut-in beard, but I wimped out.” He has been feeling the lack of in-person connections. He saw friend and fellow musician Seth Adam in March before the social isolation restrictions went into effect. “That’s the last time I saw people,” Rodgers said.
Thomas J. Nanos Photo
As a former club owner of the Space, Outer Space, and Space Ballroom in Hamden, Rodgers finds himself thinking about the small club owners in the area — at Cafe Nine, the State House, and the Cellar, “My heart’s been breaking” for them, he said. “They don’t have Daddy Warbucks money backing them up anywhere.”
“Even when the Space and the Outer Space were on top of the game and doing amazing, it was still a struggle,” Rodgers said. “I wake up every morning thinking about those guys. I think about all my friends who are service-industry people, and they’re really struggling.”
The Rodgers household has its own struggles, too. Rodgers’s wife lost most of her work. “I’ve been a music director at a church in Westport, and even though we haven’t had services, the pastor called me and is paying the whole praise and worship band during this. For them to be able to do that for us and keep us on their books during this time — it’s huge and really humbling. And there’s lots of little churches out there that can’t do that,” Rodgers said.
So Rodgers has been cooking meals, tending his home garden, and teaching his children. “I’m really following the stay-at-home orders,” he said, and “I’ve been sitting in my music room.”
The songs that are coming out of him, in response to the current situation, “are a lot less gentle than the album I put out a year ago,” Rodgers said. “Literally I’ve written two albums of stuff in the past month. I haven’t had a time this fertile in a long time,” not “since Mighty Purple,” the touring band he fronted with brother Jon Rodgers when they were teenagers and in their early 20s in the 1990s.
Rodgers also finds himself with the means to realize those songs. “A friend of mine gave me a Fender Rhodes about a month ago. I’ve always wanted one and it inspired new vibes.”
He wrote and recorded “Invisible Forces” on the same day in March, “and then I did some touchups and overdubs. Then there are some electronic drums and a dumbek that I put on this recording. I’ve only ever been a rhythm guitar player. I’m a remedial keyboard player. I’m not that great at it, but I’m good enough for rock ‘n’ roll, And I had this junky old bass laying around. I soldered it back together. Only the pickups for the top two strings work, but that’s close enough for me,” Rodgers said.
As a “frequenter of flea markets,” he’d managed to assemble a home studio for not much money. He found a bass amp for $25. A friend gave him a good recording microphone. “I bought a pair of studio monitors for $15. I couldn’t imagine they’d come in so handy,” he said.
He sent the recorded music to producer Vic Steffens, who mixed and mastered the song while Rodgers made the video for it. “I can’t run around and take footage with our crappy old camera, so I used stock footage, except for a couple shots of my son looking out the window,” Rodgers said. “I’ve been making a lot of videos, learning how to use iMovie. In the past year, I’ve made a dozen.”
“I want to make sure the everything I’m writing about is truth. But I’m more focused on pinpointing exactly what I’m writing about. I used to write with lots of imagery and metaphor, and now I’m just honed in on the situation. I can’t think about anything else.”
While Rodgers’s new songs have a darker tinge to them, he noted that “they’re not all darker. Some of them are much more ‘beacon-of-hope’ songs.”
“I always want to spread hope,” he said, “but I want to ring the alarm bell too. We all have to be in this together or we’re going to screw each other.”
He has also noticed that he’s not alone in making music to get through the outbreak. “I talked to an old friend who used to play a lot, but her guitar was in the closet for a long time. She’s doing well because her significant other has a decent job,” he said. “Go get the thing out of your closet and put it where you hang out,” he recalled telling her. “She got back to me four hours later and said, ‘I wrote a song.’”
