SILVER LINING
‘It’s happening,’ Hiromi says, over a Skype call from Tokyo. The Fuji Rock Festival will start tomorrow, she assures me – ‘or at least it looks like it’s happening, but you never know until you perform. It can change any minute.’ More than a year and a half into the pandemic, Hiromi is still adapting to the uncertainties that surround her concert schedule. The fallout began in March 2020, when she left Seattle for California, where – as the rate of Covid infection soared – a state of emergency was announced and her concert in San Francisco was cancelled. It would be the first of many: cancellations in Hawaii, Canada and on the East Coast followed. Psychologically, it took its toll.
‘Every time there’s a last-minute cancellation I feel like I lose the place for my energy to go, because I prepare – not just the material, but mentally I’m prepared too. Then all of a sudden I lose the opportunity to perform, so where should all this energy go? It’s really difficult, I feel lost every time.’
Hiromi says she has got better at coping with the sense of anticlimax, and has been adapting to an altogether different kind of day-to-day schedule. Whereas in pre-pandemic days she would
