INTERVIEW: In these coronavirus times, Spencer Day and Effie Passero make the best of it

Photo: Spencer Day and Effie Passero collaborate on “State of Emergency,” a coronavirus-influenced tune. Photo courtesy of artists / Provided by Fortune Creative with permission.

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Spencer Day, a celebrated singer-songwriter whose album Vagabond climbed the charts, and Effie Passero, a top contestant on the revitalized American Idol, have had one of the more unique experiences during the current coronavirus pandemic. The two were set to take part in a multi-date set of concerts in Mexico, but after they landed in the neighboring country to the south, lockdowns and quarantines took hold — almost like an episode of The Twilight Zone.

They found their musical plans disrupted, their flights canceled and their connection to the United States severed. What else to do but start writing a song.

“We are presently in Puerto Vallarta, and we’re both good,” Day said in a recent phone interview. “The border was shut down here for travel, and a bunch of flights were canceled. … When we left to come down here, I think Trump was still saying it was a hoax, and New York still had Broadway plays on. … As a musician, I’m like if people are showing up, then I feel obligated to do the show.”

Alas, Day and Passero (and Broadway, for that matter) could not stick to the old adage that the show must go on. They ended up voluntarily canceling their performances in Mexico, and that was a real bummer because they even had friends from Seattle who had traveled south to see them.

“So we came down to do about 10 shows, all of them canceled, except for the first one we did,” said Day, who was born Utah and raised in Arizona. “Kind of overnight we watched all this happen, and by the time we were here, the border was shut. And also in San Diego, if I go back right now, it sounds like there’s not even just self-distancing; it sounds like a full-on lockdown. … As far as we can tell, they’re taking it pretty seriously here. The streets are a ghost town.”

They decided not to wallow in self-isolation, but instead put their creativity to good use. Their output resulted in a coronavirus-themed song called “State of Emergency.” Amazingly, this tune actually has been on their minds — in one form or another — for quite some time before this current pandemic.

“Back in October there were really, really, really bad wildfires all over California,” Passero said. “It was the worst fire season we’ve seen in a while, and Spencer and I had a gig in Sonoma where we could literally see the fires burning on the hill across the way from our gig. So we were kind of joking at that time about writing a song about the end of the world, and then as we saw all of this stuff happening, we were like, well, we’ve got to finish that song now.”

Day, who has dabbled in jazz, musical theater, cabaret, soul and folk, echoed those sentiments, saying that the seed of the idea was born in October 2019, and then the COVID-19 outbreak brought the tune into focus. In many ways, despite the sad news that is circulating the global, the two can still find the levity.

“I was like, ‘Effie, if we don’t finish this now, we don’t deserve to call ourselves songwriters,’” Day said with a laugh. “What happened is I have a music studio in Tijuana I was renting. We were already in Mexico, and then overnight a state of emergency was declared right then. We were stunned, and all of the power went out in my entire neighborhood in Tijuana. So we were in the dark. Fortunately I had a candle, and I had my little one-octave keyboard I could plug into my laptop, which we did. So we were writing it then, so we wrote it in probably 30 minutes.”

Passero, a winner of the Hollywood Media in Music Award, added: “It wrote itself.”

The two assembled two other musicians — what they called the quarantine crew — and started to recording. Then they headed to a friend’s rooftop in Mexico to make a video, the result of which can be seen on YouTube.

“I would describe it as a satire piece, but also I would definitely say that it’s one of the more uplifting songs that have been released in the past couple weeks,” Passero said. “We have a good outlook on everything, even though we still have our moments, but that song is definitely the kind of atmosphere that we’re hoping to see more in the next couple of weeks.”

Day added: “There’s something fatalistic about it and obviously very sarcastic. It’s talking about, ‘at least if the world is burning, I get to watch it burn with you.’ There’s a surrender. There’s so much of this that none of us can control. What really can you do, except hoping you have someone to smile with and kind of laugh at it with — laugh while you’re crying, which we’ve done multiple times. Like a lot of artists, we’ve watched all of our plans for the entire year evaporate overnight.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

“State of Emergency,” by Spencer Day and Effie Passero, is now available. Click here for more information.