After a pregnancy and a pandemic, I worried I'd never play music live again

This First Person article is the experience of Xania Keane, a musician who lives in Montreal's Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

About a month ago, I excitedly dusted off my instruments and plugged them into some beefy speakers. I hoped playing my songs would be like riding a bike — the chords and lyrics flooding back as soon as I put my fingertips to my synth.

I hadn't performed or practised since I was six months pregnant. That was over three years ago. A deadly virus emerged when my daughter was five months old, and live music just about disappeared from the face of the earth.

The anxiety caused by living through a pandemic sapped my creativity. Ideas and music didn't just magically come to me anymore; my brain had to work really hard to go there. If you ever saw my pre-pandemic live shows — which included tap-dancing, confetti and group hugs — you witnessed something that is now gone forever.

I still played around with song ideas here and there, but I didn't think about my live show, something once so vital to how my music was created. When musical performances halted across the globe, I let my live show collect dust and slowly decay in a sealed box in the back of my mind.

So when Porchfest NDG — a community music festival in my neighbourhood — spread the word that their annual event would be back for the first time since 2019, I couldn't think of a better way to get back into performing live.

Signing up was easy, but as I sat down in front of my musical gear to practice, I couldn't remember a thing. No lyrics, no chords, no beats per minute, no settings for songs I'd performed hundreds of times. I was beyond rusty — I had rusted solid.

As my synth, looper and drum machines blinked in front of me, my mind was a blank canvas. I knew that I had to start over. After flipping through instruction manuals to remember how to get my instruments in sync with each other, I noticed two of my looper's buttons had stopped working. They had to be replaced with a special piece shipped from Texas.

Yet, despite these minor technical obstacles, I was excited to start over. To really take apart my songs and rebuild them. To listen to my old recordings and reimagine lyrics that I had written when I was a different person.

During my first practice, I filtered through different synth sounds, drum patterns, tempos and started to play. I instantly got swept away in a rush of new music. The next day, I sat down for my second practice, eager to keep building on what I had started — only to realize I had forgotten everything once again. I looked at my notebook. All I had written down were the numbers 012 with a circle around them. Was it a chord? A sound? A tempo? I couldn't help but laugh at myself.

So, during my second practice, I told myself to write everything down and try not to let myself get lost in a sweeping sea of music. The next day, when I looked at my notebook, I didn't just see one sad number. Instead I saw a chaotic page full of numbers with words like "COOL!" and "NICE SOUND!" next to them. Any new parent can tell you that having kids turns your brain into a sieve, but this was ridiculous. I had to figure out how to maintain my progress without going back to zero every day.

When I sat down for my third practice, I found a neat grid with everything properly labelled. I played something from the grid. It worked! I had broken the curse!

Over the next few weeks, I slowly managed to build my live show from the tattered scraps of life before motherhood and the pandemic. I was starting to get my confidence back.

Then, the night before the show, I had a kafkaesque nightmare where everything went wrong. I stood on that porch and tried to play my synth but none of the keys worked — until they all started to play on their own and I couldn't stop the music. Nobody was in the audience except for two enormous, human-sized insects that started to hiss at my performance until my husband captured them in a pillowcase and gently released them down the road.

When I woke up on the big day, my nightmare dissipated in the morning light and I felt ready. I had spent the last several evenings practising in our living room in front of the toughest audience in the universe: a toddler who was much more interested in her Paw Patrol toys. But after a few days of pelting Cheerios at her mom while she sang, that toddler finally started to enjoy the show, dancing and smiling.

As I sound checked on my porch, the enchanting sound of a harp and the lilting voices of an all-women quartet travelled through the air from down the street. After my show, a roots band was set to perform a few doors down. The weather was perfect and the leaves were just starting to turn.

A crowd of about 30 people of all ages gathered in a perfect semicircle around my porch when I played my first song. Once upon a time, I toured Europe and performed for hundreds of people. However, I was more nervous during this set than I had been in a very long time. After a few songs, I could see that everyone — especially my mom — was enjoying themselves, and I loosened up.

"Who here has recently complained about how expensive everything is?" I asked the crowd. Every single person raised their hand.

"This song is for all of you!" I said and launched into my upbeat song, I'm Broke.

After all the rebuilding, rehearsing and technical hiccups, the show went off without a hitch. It felt great to be back on stage — even if it was just my porch. It felt great to see everyone happy, busting moves on the sidewalk, singing along, clapping and cheering. It felt great to give back to the community. It also, admittedly, felt great to be showered with compliments after the show.

After live music was necessarily deemed non-essential for so long, it feels wonderfully validating to have it back in my life again — and to know it's still a part of who I am.

CBC Quebec welcomes your pitches for First Person essays. Please email povquebec@cbc.ca for details.