If there has been one thing to emerge from 2020, it’s that we’ve all had a lot of time to contemplate what is truly important to us… and how to cope with a very new version of day to day life. For me, in a life usually surrounded by non-stop performances and my amazing colleagues, it has been disturbingly quiet.

Lockdown life, without the melodies I live and breathe every day has been a true indicator of what an emotional outlet music is. I miss it, and I now realise how truly lucky I am to be a musician.

Therefore, recently I’ve relied far more heavily than I usually do on listening to the somewhat eclectic collection of music that I’ve accumulated over the years. Classical, jazz, grunge, funk, pop, indie folk rock… you name it, I probably love it!

Some of it uplifts, some of it inspires, some of it reminds me of people and places… But more importantly at the moment, some just allows me to simply be. And on grey, rainy Melbourne days, when the news seems more than a bit grim, the idea of just being is sometimes all we can really ask of ourselves.

With that in mind, here is my ‘grey day list’. Some of my favourite bands like The National, The Decemberists, The Beatles and Radiohead; Sufjan Stephens and the touching lyric brilliance of Tim Minchin; my favourite sentimental Sinatra, and then some of my most treasured classical works like Bach, Messaien, Faure and Schubert. And to end, a little of the Hans Zimmer score to the film A Thin Red Line.

This list, for me, is proof that sometimes music doesn’t need to move us in a particular direction, or necessarily ‘do’ anything. It can just let us be exactly where we are.