Lockdown forestalled all of our lives for a dull couple of years, which was painful enough for us average joes bashing wooden spoons on saucepans outside our houses on a Thursday evening, painful also for the entertainment industry whose main outlets were closed up, stuck in furlough, painful especially for those people who had to put their dreams on the backburner until the moment passed, at a time when it felt like it would never pass.
Jack Velero was one such stranded musician, having just set out to make waves with his ex-band The RPMs. Instead he embraced livestreams and built up an arsenal of songs to let loose when the nightlife doors opened back up again. Valero’s debut, ‘Heaven Help Me’, is one of those lockdown-nurtured songs. A tender acoustic and piano strum, in part exploring the effects of being stuck indoors on a young artist hungry to chase his vision and the effect enforced limitation had on his small-screen personal life, chucking his hands up to fate for support in a period of history when even human connection was put on pause.
Now COVID lockdown is all but over and done with, Jack has spent the past few weeks out on the road with fellow solo-musician Will Varley. He also found time to produce a video for his current single – an inverse David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ – Valero playing an astronaut stuck on earth instead of stuck in space.
‘Heaven Help Me’ was released on 11th April 2022. Have a watch of the video below: