By Shea Gibbs
The “Reverend” Bill Howard found his calendar wide open when the pandemic hit last year. The musician and hospitality industry worker had been gigging regularly with his beloved Americana band, The Judy Chops, and had some free time to fill when the live shows abruptly ended.
Howard’s solution? Weekly livestreams on Facebook with up to two hours of music and conversation. Every Sunday at 7pm “Reverend Bill’s Confessional: Music, Spiritual Guidance & Whiskey” goes live. Without fail.
Howard recently posted his 46th episode, complete with its old-timey church background, on February 7—not even the Super Bowl could stop the streaming. He says he was by some measures slow to react to the pandemic, though. “It took me a while last year to come to terms with the hole in my schedule,” he says. “I didn’t write my first new, post-COVID song until halfway through the year.”
Once the Reverend opened the pearly gates of songdom, a flood of tunes followed. That means plenty of new tracks, like the cautiously optimistic “I Can Be the Light,” grace the Sunday night show. But Howard also includes lots of old songs from the Chops catalogue—such as the bluesy wailer “Drugs” from the band’s first album—not to mention that spiritual guidance and brown liquor sampling.
“It’s become a wonderful community, and I’ve picked up fans from all over the world,” Howard says.
Each show features a theme that often veers toward music—favorite bands, vocalists, and songs—but it also occasionally brings home the guidance element of the confessionals. During Howard’s January 24 stream, for example, he asked folks to take a moment for reflection.
“Tonight, we are talking about things that make you hopeful,” he said during the production. “It’s been kind of a funny week that way. It feels like a different timbre in our national dialogue. It seems like a little bit of a stress has been relieved. So, it got me feeling a little hopeful this week.”
Joining Howard during the digital concerts is his girlfriend and partner Brittany Dorman, who handles the comment board and assists on production.
Howard says the confessionals have come a long way on production quality over the year of shows. The first steps were simply improving their internet capacity in semi-rural Harrisonburg, and finding the right webcams. The Judy Chops sound engineer (and Howard’s roommate at the time) took care of the tech in early days, but he’s since moved out of the pod. Howard and Dorman’s new roomie is another serial livestreamer, and he’s brought green screen technology to the team.
“We would like to get to a point where we can do a real concert experience,” Howard says. “I don’t know if we will ever be back to the same kind of live shows, so I’m trying to figure that out.”
Howard has also partnered with Harrisonburg concert venue The Golden Pony to produce a few confessionals alongside a larger, socially distanced group. The musicians have been forced to stop the semi-monthly on-site shows with the ebbs and flows of the coronavirus, but Howard hopes they’ll be back soon.
“I would really like to take this concept on the road, eventually,” he says. “If I’m on tour with another band, we might do a confessional with a couple of their members.”
On top of his weekly Sunday session, Howard hosts the Socially Distant Fest’s Wednesday Night Devotional, which has become his outlet for cover songs that sometimes also make their way to Sunday nights (many are in response to email requests).
Howard says he doesn’t see livestreams going away even post-COVID—for his confessionals, as well as for the music industry as a whole. According to data from Twitch, music and performance arts category viewers increased from an average of 92,000 last February to 574,000 in March. And while Howard says his video audiences fluctuate from week to week, the shows have raised a fair amount of money via their “virtual collection plate,” and he believes the medium has room to grow.
“I do think the market is a little saturated…but the more you can make your streams efficient and look good and sound good, the more people will come back,” Howard says.
Whatever the role of livestreams going forward, Howard says COVID has changed his approach to music in serious ways. He had been considering doing more solo work prior to the pandemic, and the new normal has accelerated his plans.
“I noticed that, for years, I was writing with horn…and bass parts in mind,” he says. “But now I’m here with my acoustic guitar, feeling contemplative. It seems to lend itself to more singer-songwriter type stuff. I definitely have a solo album in me. We will see.“
The Judy Chops won’t be going anywhere, either. The band recently wrapped a new four-song EP, recording the final vocals on February 6 at Poetown Music with Gordon Davies. Howard expects the album to drop “in the next couple months.” The tracks may have been part of a full-length record if not for the pandemic, Howard says, but he and his bandmates decided not to push things and let the music come as the spirit moved them.
“We have nothing but time,” he says.