Jake Rees, October 3rd, 2024
Title
Jake Rees, October 3rd, 2024
Description
In this interview, Jake Rees shares his personal story from Covid-19. He shares what it was like to switch to working online and how Covid affected his band.
Publisher
Detroit Historical Society
Date
October 3rd 2024
Rights
Detroit Historical Society
Language
en-US
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
Jake Rees
Brief Biography
Jake Rees is a longtime resident of Metro Detroit and recent Detroit resident. He is a GM employee and prolific musician in the local DIY punk/indie scene
Interviewer's Name
Kevin Hawthorne
Interview Length
18:05
Transcription
Kevin Hawthorne: Hello, this is Kevin Hawthorne with the Detroit Historical Museum on the oral history on Covid 19. And today I'm joined with may you please introduce yourself?
Jake Rees: Hey, my name is Jake Rees. I'm 30 years old, currently a resident of Detroit, Michigan. And I am a software developer as well as a musician for the local music scene.
KH: So now can you please spell your name for the record?
JR: Yeah. So, Jake, J a k e. and Rees R e e s
KH: All right. And how long have you lived in the city of Detroit?
JR: Not very long. Since April of this year. So that's almost six months.
KH: And where have you been living for or you living in the Michigan area? Metro Detroit.
JR: Yeah. So I've been in metro Detroit my whole life. The last couple years, from 2022 to the beginning of this year, I was in a Pittsfield Township, Ann Arbor, and then before that I was in Royal Oak.
Kevin Hawthorne And how long were you in Royal Oak?
Jake Rees Let's see. From 2019 until 2022. Three years.
KH: All right. And you say you went. What was your education? You say you're a software developer.
JR: Yeah. So I went to U of M University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 2012 to 2017 studying computer science.
KH: And where do you currently work?
JR: I am currently employed at GM.
KH: Okay. And you're a software developer there?
JR: Yes.
KH: All right. So getting into the nitty gritty of it with Covid, do you remember the first time you heard about the disease?
JR: It was probably I think I recall my parents bringing it up to me when I visited them. Holidays of 2019 that they had heard about it. That at that point, I think it was in China and they were worried about it coming into the US and how bad it was going to impact us. And I remember other people were more scared about the lockdown before I kind of realized how bad it was gonna be.
KH: Yeah, and that's the next question. But, you know, a lot of people that through this have been like, when it first happened, a lot of us were maybe a little overconfident of like, it'll just be like the swine flu will be like a passing thing and then things will be back to normal.
JR: I was just going to say, that's pretty much what I was thinking it was going to be like. It was because I had heard about the swine flu and bird flu and things like that. That happened when I was younger. And it was. And it wasn't good. Like people got sick and stuff, but it wasn't so widespread that everything needed to shut down.
KH: Is there a specific event that made you truly realize like, this is different, this is going to not be the same?
JR: I believe it was when they told us to start working from home full time, which was not too long before they started locking everything down. And we're mandating that things close.
KH: And how long have you been working at GM when you were told to start working from home?
JR: Let's see, 2017 to 2020, a little over two years and two and a half.
KH: And then going into the Covid lockdown, what was your experience with the lockdown?
JR: So at that point in time, I pretty much once they started announcing that we needed to stay at home, I was staying home and then not really seeing anybody. I eventually.. lets See, we started seeing like the girl I was dating at the time and my family. But other than that, and then going to the grocery store. I really didn't leave the house. Would get up, work from home, and then either play video games or watch Netflix or work on music.
Kevin Hawthorne And then during the, you know, four year period, where did you contract Covid at any point during that time?
Jake Rees Not until after the lockdown ended. The first time I contracted Covid was after I got vaccinated in 2021. I remember when I think it was 2022 maybe was actually the first time I got Covid.
KH: And what was your experience like that?
JR: Let's see. So I started out having a fever for a couple of days and really couldn't do much other than lay in bed. And then after the fever subsided, then it was more just cold symptoms for like another week after that.
KH: All right. And then in addition to your software stuff, you also mentioned being a musician. How long have you been involved with the local music scene?
JR: So I've been I've been playing music since I was a kid, but I haven't really been or didn't really start gigging regularly until 2016 or so when I got involved in the DIY music scene in Arbor. And then since then have been pretty active gigging fairly regularly.
KH: So what was it like being a musician? Especially, were you like working on any gigs that were coming up during Covid that had to be canceled?
JR: Yeah. There were several gigs, maybe like 4 or 5 that we had on the books for 2020 that had to be canceled. That was a big bummer because it was we were starting to grow following. And get on some good gigs. But then those all fell through.
KH: And then what was it like? Was your band fairly new at the time when you the pandemic started?
JR: We've been around for long enough. We'd been around for maybe a little under two years at the point the pandemic started.
KH:And what was it like then? Did you focus on recording or writing? Were you able to record from home?
JR: Yes. So at that point, that was when we were writing our album, Regressing. I'm talking about No Fun Club. I don't know how you want to wear that for the interview. Yeah. So for music, was my time. Working on music during the lockdown was really just writing Regressing. A lot of it on my own and sending files back and forth to my bandmates and having Zoom calls with them to talk about stuff because we were not leaving the house. There was a point during the lockdown where things got a little bit better and we got a little more comfortable with just going to each other's house to jam. But then at that, Covid got really, really bad. Not too long after that. So we only did that a couple of times before we went back into not leaving the house and just working on writing remotely, sending files back and forth.
KH: And what was that process like versus like how you guys had, you know, like most bands, you get together, you jam. What was it like then suddenly being so isolated? What was the effect on, like, your songwriting and just like your process of like recording and doing files?
JR: Yeah. So I think it made, at least for me, I think it made me more critical of stuff because I guess there wasn't the immediate feedback and the feeling of like playing music with other people. But yeah, it was it was definitely a lot harder and I think I was harder on the music. And so because of that, then we ended up throwing a lot of arrangements out and rewriting whole arrangements for songs. And it definitely slowed things down. And then we had band members leave during Covid too and we weren't going to go looking for replacements because we were still not leaving our houses. And it was That I think slowed things down a lot and made it difficult. Plus, we didn't even want to go into the studio at that point.
KH: So during this time, did you, like, wonder if the band was going to survive, like the lockdown?
JR: Yeah, I did. I worried a lot that we just would never get any momentum going again and that things would fizzle out. We get too frustrated or too busy with other stuff. And then. So we we ultimately got got things back together once the lockdown ended and people started doing shows again and we started rebuilding our lineup. And that's when Nick and Evan in who are in the band. Well, Nick just left, but Nick and Evan, who have been in the band since Covid. Ended up joining up with us then.
KH: All right. And then you self-released your record, correct?
JR: Yeah, we did. We had a little bit of help from a tape label out of Chicago called Leave It at That Records who reached out to us after we released it, offering to do a tape run. And so we worked with them on that. But as far as the streaming and the vinyl and CD's, that was all us.
Kevin Hawthorn: Yeah. And how was getting vinyl made? Because I know in the post-COVID, if there is anything as post-COVID, we still kind of are living it. But I know and since Covid has hit, getting your vinyl records made has been harder and harder. What was your process like on that?
JR: So by the time we finally did order vinyl records, that was at the end of 2023. So by that point, getting the vinyl, there are the return times for getting vinyl pressed had gone down considerably. But I remember I had really wanted to press this record on vinyl the whole time. I was writing on it and was worried about how feasible that was going to be or how long it was going to take, because the vinyl, like collecting vinyl, really, really blew up during the pandemic. And then you started seeing headlines that like, Adele pressed so many million copies of her record and Taylor Swift pressed so many copies of her record, and all the orders for them are delaying the vinyl turnaround times for small artists who might only want to order like 100 or 200 copies, but then it still take them a year to get their records back. But by the time we pressed it, that had come down quite a bit. And we were we had a three month turnaround time for our pressing. And I guess because I had known that was what I wanted to do and it took so long to just get the record written and then get our band lineup back together. We were able to. Plan that in advance and get it mastered for final well in advance. And I've done a lot of research and knew what I needed to do to get a press.
KH: And just in general, what did you see the effects of Covid on the D.I.Y. Scene?
JR: It was really an opportunity for a big kind of changing of the guard, I think. I think a lot of people who booked shows or ran D.I.Y. spaces, not necessarily the bigger venues, but like house venues or like small art galleries or stuff that did shows. Like a lot of them aren't doing it anymore either because they were so burnt out with it by the time Covid hit and when it started back up again or when shows started back up again they didn't want to keep doing it or they were running a more commercial space their space might have closed. I can't think of any examples right now, but I'm sure, sure, there were several. And so now it is almost like a completely different group of people who are interested in music maybe that weren't as involved with it before the pandemic. Came up to start doing more and more stuff after shows started back up again. So not necessarily good or bad things just really kind of emphasizing that if you had connections with people that you worked with before the pandemic, they might not still be doing it. So you got to almost start from the ground up and start meeting new people again who want to pick your band or who you want to work with.
KH: All right. And then just in general, thinking about Covid, how did you feel? The response was both on a national and on a state level.
JR: I think on the state level, I think Michigan did decently. I know we had some of the highest case numbers in the country and I think our state government did a decent job at least holding that at bay, at least as far as I could tell. On a national level, I think the divisiveness of partisan politics in our country may be prevented as strong of a response from the get go, because I think there was a large contingent of people on the national level who wanted to deny that Covid was even real so they could keep the economy going and keep making money for themselves or people they were connected to, to keep making money. And I think there was a lot of mixed messaging on the national level as well as far as what the proper response was to Covid. So. I don't know I'd like to think that everyone acts.. How do I want to phrase this? I'd like to think that most people have good intentions and want to just help people as much as they can, but I don't know what the response to Covid and all of the divisiveness over it as it was as strong as it could have been. If people were more concerned about helping us than just working as a country to get through it rather than trying to force some reaction because of some political beliefs.
KH: All right. And thinking about Covid going forward, like we were told that this is a, you know, once in a generation type thing. But, you know, as you know, we're also being told that there's these once in a generation storms that happen every single year. And just it seems like we know less and less about the world. Is there anything... like is are you worried about another Covid scale disease within your lifetime?
Jake Rees I think I think it's feasible. I don't think it's something that is really going to keep me from doing anything that I guess I'm just going to take it as it comes and hope that it doesn't happen, that there's nothing like this again. But who knows? With climate change and some of the once in a lifetime storms we've seen even, who knows how that's going to affect how viruses develop. Like we just saw a once in a lifetime storm totally destroyed Asheville, North Carolina, just this past week. And they went generations saying that could never happen. So who knows? I think it's definitely possible. But I try not to try not to worry about it too much.
KH: Totally understandable. And is there anything that we've touched on that you would like to speak on more or anything we haven't touched on that you'd like to bring up?
JR: Not that I can think of. I guess one thing I did think of is, since I'm mentioning GM in this, I'd probably double check with them that they're okay with this being published. If it is, either that or we could just take out references to GM specifically.
KH: Okay. Yeah, we can do that. I made sure not to... Like when you said you did GM I made sure not to like, you know, ask any specific questions. It's none of my business on, like, their stuff. I don't want you to... That's why I kept it more like just your personal life.
JR: Right right. Okay.
KH: Okay. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time.
JR: Thank you.
Jake Rees: Hey, my name is Jake Rees. I'm 30 years old, currently a resident of Detroit, Michigan. And I am a software developer as well as a musician for the local music scene.
KH: So now can you please spell your name for the record?
JR: Yeah. So, Jake, J a k e. and Rees R e e s
KH: All right. And how long have you lived in the city of Detroit?
JR: Not very long. Since April of this year. So that's almost six months.
KH: And where have you been living for or you living in the Michigan area? Metro Detroit.
JR: Yeah. So I've been in metro Detroit my whole life. The last couple years, from 2022 to the beginning of this year, I was in a Pittsfield Township, Ann Arbor, and then before that I was in Royal Oak.
Kevin Hawthorne And how long were you in Royal Oak?
Jake Rees Let's see. From 2019 until 2022. Three years.
KH: All right. And you say you went. What was your education? You say you're a software developer.
JR: Yeah. So I went to U of M University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 2012 to 2017 studying computer science.
KH: And where do you currently work?
JR: I am currently employed at GM.
KH: Okay. And you're a software developer there?
JR: Yes.
KH: All right. So getting into the nitty gritty of it with Covid, do you remember the first time you heard about the disease?
JR: It was probably I think I recall my parents bringing it up to me when I visited them. Holidays of 2019 that they had heard about it. That at that point, I think it was in China and they were worried about it coming into the US and how bad it was going to impact us. And I remember other people were more scared about the lockdown before I kind of realized how bad it was gonna be.
KH: Yeah, and that's the next question. But, you know, a lot of people that through this have been like, when it first happened, a lot of us were maybe a little overconfident of like, it'll just be like the swine flu will be like a passing thing and then things will be back to normal.
JR: I was just going to say, that's pretty much what I was thinking it was going to be like. It was because I had heard about the swine flu and bird flu and things like that. That happened when I was younger. And it was. And it wasn't good. Like people got sick and stuff, but it wasn't so widespread that everything needed to shut down.
KH: Is there a specific event that made you truly realize like, this is different, this is going to not be the same?
JR: I believe it was when they told us to start working from home full time, which was not too long before they started locking everything down. And we're mandating that things close.
KH: And how long have you been working at GM when you were told to start working from home?
JR: Let's see, 2017 to 2020, a little over two years and two and a half.
KH: And then going into the Covid lockdown, what was your experience with the lockdown?
JR: So at that point in time, I pretty much once they started announcing that we needed to stay at home, I was staying home and then not really seeing anybody. I eventually.. lets See, we started seeing like the girl I was dating at the time and my family. But other than that, and then going to the grocery store. I really didn't leave the house. Would get up, work from home, and then either play video games or watch Netflix or work on music.
Kevin Hawthorne And then during the, you know, four year period, where did you contract Covid at any point during that time?
Jake Rees Not until after the lockdown ended. The first time I contracted Covid was after I got vaccinated in 2021. I remember when I think it was 2022 maybe was actually the first time I got Covid.
KH: And what was your experience like that?
JR: Let's see. So I started out having a fever for a couple of days and really couldn't do much other than lay in bed. And then after the fever subsided, then it was more just cold symptoms for like another week after that.
KH: All right. And then in addition to your software stuff, you also mentioned being a musician. How long have you been involved with the local music scene?
JR: So I've been I've been playing music since I was a kid, but I haven't really been or didn't really start gigging regularly until 2016 or so when I got involved in the DIY music scene in Arbor. And then since then have been pretty active gigging fairly regularly.
KH: So what was it like being a musician? Especially, were you like working on any gigs that were coming up during Covid that had to be canceled?
JR: Yeah. There were several gigs, maybe like 4 or 5 that we had on the books for 2020 that had to be canceled. That was a big bummer because it was we were starting to grow following. And get on some good gigs. But then those all fell through.
KH: And then what was it like? Was your band fairly new at the time when you the pandemic started?
JR: We've been around for long enough. We'd been around for maybe a little under two years at the point the pandemic started.
KH:And what was it like then? Did you focus on recording or writing? Were you able to record from home?
JR: Yes. So at that point, that was when we were writing our album, Regressing. I'm talking about No Fun Club. I don't know how you want to wear that for the interview. Yeah. So for music, was my time. Working on music during the lockdown was really just writing Regressing. A lot of it on my own and sending files back and forth to my bandmates and having Zoom calls with them to talk about stuff because we were not leaving the house. There was a point during the lockdown where things got a little bit better and we got a little more comfortable with just going to each other's house to jam. But then at that, Covid got really, really bad. Not too long after that. So we only did that a couple of times before we went back into not leaving the house and just working on writing remotely, sending files back and forth.
KH: And what was that process like versus like how you guys had, you know, like most bands, you get together, you jam. What was it like then suddenly being so isolated? What was the effect on, like, your songwriting and just like your process of like recording and doing files?
JR: Yeah. So I think it made, at least for me, I think it made me more critical of stuff because I guess there wasn't the immediate feedback and the feeling of like playing music with other people. But yeah, it was it was definitely a lot harder and I think I was harder on the music. And so because of that, then we ended up throwing a lot of arrangements out and rewriting whole arrangements for songs. And it definitely slowed things down. And then we had band members leave during Covid too and we weren't going to go looking for replacements because we were still not leaving our houses. And it was That I think slowed things down a lot and made it difficult. Plus, we didn't even want to go into the studio at that point.
KH: So during this time, did you, like, wonder if the band was going to survive, like the lockdown?
JR: Yeah, I did. I worried a lot that we just would never get any momentum going again and that things would fizzle out. We get too frustrated or too busy with other stuff. And then. So we we ultimately got got things back together once the lockdown ended and people started doing shows again and we started rebuilding our lineup. And that's when Nick and Evan in who are in the band. Well, Nick just left, but Nick and Evan, who have been in the band since Covid. Ended up joining up with us then.
KH: All right. And then you self-released your record, correct?
JR: Yeah, we did. We had a little bit of help from a tape label out of Chicago called Leave It at That Records who reached out to us after we released it, offering to do a tape run. And so we worked with them on that. But as far as the streaming and the vinyl and CD's, that was all us.
Kevin Hawthorn: Yeah. And how was getting vinyl made? Because I know in the post-COVID, if there is anything as post-COVID, we still kind of are living it. But I know and since Covid has hit, getting your vinyl records made has been harder and harder. What was your process like on that?
JR: So by the time we finally did order vinyl records, that was at the end of 2023. So by that point, getting the vinyl, there are the return times for getting vinyl pressed had gone down considerably. But I remember I had really wanted to press this record on vinyl the whole time. I was writing on it and was worried about how feasible that was going to be or how long it was going to take, because the vinyl, like collecting vinyl, really, really blew up during the pandemic. And then you started seeing headlines that like, Adele pressed so many million copies of her record and Taylor Swift pressed so many copies of her record, and all the orders for them are delaying the vinyl turnaround times for small artists who might only want to order like 100 or 200 copies, but then it still take them a year to get their records back. But by the time we pressed it, that had come down quite a bit. And we were we had a three month turnaround time for our pressing. And I guess because I had known that was what I wanted to do and it took so long to just get the record written and then get our band lineup back together. We were able to. Plan that in advance and get it mastered for final well in advance. And I've done a lot of research and knew what I needed to do to get a press.
KH: And just in general, what did you see the effects of Covid on the D.I.Y. Scene?
JR: It was really an opportunity for a big kind of changing of the guard, I think. I think a lot of people who booked shows or ran D.I.Y. spaces, not necessarily the bigger venues, but like house venues or like small art galleries or stuff that did shows. Like a lot of them aren't doing it anymore either because they were so burnt out with it by the time Covid hit and when it started back up again or when shows started back up again they didn't want to keep doing it or they were running a more commercial space their space might have closed. I can't think of any examples right now, but I'm sure, sure, there were several. And so now it is almost like a completely different group of people who are interested in music maybe that weren't as involved with it before the pandemic. Came up to start doing more and more stuff after shows started back up again. So not necessarily good or bad things just really kind of emphasizing that if you had connections with people that you worked with before the pandemic, they might not still be doing it. So you got to almost start from the ground up and start meeting new people again who want to pick your band or who you want to work with.
KH: All right. And then just in general, thinking about Covid, how did you feel? The response was both on a national and on a state level.
JR: I think on the state level, I think Michigan did decently. I know we had some of the highest case numbers in the country and I think our state government did a decent job at least holding that at bay, at least as far as I could tell. On a national level, I think the divisiveness of partisan politics in our country may be prevented as strong of a response from the get go, because I think there was a large contingent of people on the national level who wanted to deny that Covid was even real so they could keep the economy going and keep making money for themselves or people they were connected to, to keep making money. And I think there was a lot of mixed messaging on the national level as well as far as what the proper response was to Covid. So. I don't know I'd like to think that everyone acts.. How do I want to phrase this? I'd like to think that most people have good intentions and want to just help people as much as they can, but I don't know what the response to Covid and all of the divisiveness over it as it was as strong as it could have been. If people were more concerned about helping us than just working as a country to get through it rather than trying to force some reaction because of some political beliefs.
KH: All right. And thinking about Covid going forward, like we were told that this is a, you know, once in a generation type thing. But, you know, as you know, we're also being told that there's these once in a generation storms that happen every single year. And just it seems like we know less and less about the world. Is there anything... like is are you worried about another Covid scale disease within your lifetime?
Jake Rees I think I think it's feasible. I don't think it's something that is really going to keep me from doing anything that I guess I'm just going to take it as it comes and hope that it doesn't happen, that there's nothing like this again. But who knows? With climate change and some of the once in a lifetime storms we've seen even, who knows how that's going to affect how viruses develop. Like we just saw a once in a lifetime storm totally destroyed Asheville, North Carolina, just this past week. And they went generations saying that could never happen. So who knows? I think it's definitely possible. But I try not to try not to worry about it too much.
KH: Totally understandable. And is there anything that we've touched on that you would like to speak on more or anything we haven't touched on that you'd like to bring up?
JR: Not that I can think of. I guess one thing I did think of is, since I'm mentioning GM in this, I'd probably double check with them that they're okay with this being published. If it is, either that or we could just take out references to GM specifically.
KH: Okay. Yeah, we can do that. I made sure not to... Like when you said you did GM I made sure not to like, you know, ask any specific questions. It's none of my business on, like, their stuff. I don't want you to... That's why I kept it more like just your personal life.
JR: Right right. Okay.
KH: Okay. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time.
JR: Thank you.
Files
Collection
Citation
“Jake Rees, October 3rd, 2024,” Detroit Historical Society Oral History Archive, accessed December 4, 2024, https://oralhistory.detroithistorical.org/items/show/1081.