Bill Copeland, mind time traveler
My name is Billy Copeland, and I’ve become unstuck in time. I see my past. I see my future. I shift from one to another like a man moving from one dream or nightmare to another. I relive the summer Sunday when my mother’s cousin threw me down a waterslide before I knew how to swim. I relive the day I fell in between a neighborhood porch and a barbed wire fence and needed to get 15 stitches in my right arm. I just relived getting my appendix removed eight years ago. I have also recently relived many music events I have attended and many I will attend in the future.
Jennifer Truesdale’s new Through The Circle album
I relived being at Chick Singer Night at The Burren in Somerville, Massachusetts. In fact, I’ve relived both my attendances at CSN. I traveled to the future in which Marcia Ridings and Jennifer Truesdale invite me out to Chick Singer Night events in the future. I relived attending the Wantu Blue Jams at the Village Trestle in Goffstown, New Hampshire. I relived the night I and my partner went to the Village Trestle to see Arthur James playing his solo acoustic blues three sets. I relived a few other times I ran into Arthur James.
Ross Arnold
I have also had flash forwards, like when I meet up with New Hampshire singer-songwriter Ross Arnold who offers to buy me a beverage and I request the most expensive one on the beer menu. I relived attending Boston Music Awards and I relived attending New England Music Awards. Uncannily, I’ve flash forwarded into the future BMAs and the future NEMAs. I am not going to say who wins the awards in the future because I do not want to interfere with the time-space continuum that we keep getting warned about in all of those science fiction movies. I will say, though, we have plenty of artists in attendance and in the nomination categories.
I also attended a music awards show in which my buddy Linda Marks receives an award and several other recognitions. During another visit to the future, Rick Berlin, Tony Savarino, Scot Gibbs, Ajda Snyder, and Malyssa BellArosa doing amazing and brilliant things.
Amy Fairchild
During one of my visits to the future, Amy Fairchild is recognized for something fantastic she achieved, and the Connecticut Music Scene is actually being recognized as a major force in the New England music scene, in large part because of efforts by Vic Steffens and
. There are so many good things happening in our future that I cannot keep track of them all. It was also a bummer to have to revisit school detentions, broken romances, and days of career setbacks in the years preceding this current time in my life. Aside from those startling visits to the darker days in the life of Bill Copeland, I have found myself reliving the day I met my current and ten year partner and the days I became a new man. I revisited the day I received my BA in English form Rivier College, and the first day I went to the newsroom where I had my first paying job as a reporter. I traveled back to the days I was an arts reporter for the Nashua Telegraph reviewing productions and concerts at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, New Hampshire. I relived, thanks to being so unstuck in time, the Blues Palace concerts of the 1996 to1997 that first got me much more interested in blues music. I returned, through some process of osmosis or time travel or out of body experience, to my days writing about music for Metronome Magazine, Blues Audience News Letter.
John Hall
I traveled, in mind out of body experiences, to some Marshfield Blues Festivals in the past as well as several coming up in years to come. Its organizer John Hall keeps working on blues events into his 90s. I traveled to the not so distant future to see New Hampshire percussionist Paul Costley and guitarist Nate Comp continuing their pursuit of fantastic New England artists at their Tuesday night series at KC’s Rib Shack in Manchester. Writing jobs have been important to me but a return visit to the past reminded my that launching my online music magazine, Bill Copeland Music News was my proudest accomplishment, even if I was too busy at that time to realize it.
Paul Costley
I just returned from one of my visits from the future where I was driving from one to another music venue that will start to reopen in the next few years. After everyone received the vaccine, the music scene gets a vigorous reawaken after everyone returns to it with the zeal of the newly converted. So, yes, the future is bright as I saw it in my numerous travels in time. Everyone is healthy and working on new material and playing it out seven nights a week, and the long suffering fans are cheering and singing along to the words from those new releases. Yes. The past was manageable but the future in our music scene is bright and shiny and we’re all all right.
(With acknowledgement of the genius of Kurt Vonnegut and his novel Slaughterhouse-Five).
