Ravinia 2022, Issue 1

Neal Francis at the Brooklyn Bowl, December 2019 Music was just an obsession at an early age, listening to the opera Carmen over and over, broadway , rock , funk , everything in between. insisted,” Francis recalls. Before long, playing for church services “became really important to me. It really im- proved my relationship with notated music, and I got myself into a much more consistent practice routine.” By the autumn of 2019, his first al- bum had been released to acclaim and he was touring the country, opening for the Black Pumas. But professional success crashed up against personal loss when he and his girlfriend broke up. Francis ended up couch-surf- ing, and “at a point of desperation, I asked if I could stay short-term in the parsonage. During the entire time I’d been working at St. Peter’s, it had been vacant. I didn’t expect them to agree, but within a week, I was moving in there.” Amid the whirlwind of that year, Francis suddenly had sanctuary, both physical and spiritual. Fast forward a few months to the dreaded March 2020. “We were supposed to be touring our asses off that year, but of course, the pandemic struck,” Francis says. As everyone does, he remembers exactly the day his life pivoted in the face of COVID: on March 11, as he and the band drove back to Chicago after the last show on their abruptly ended tour. And he re- calls getting a message of inspiration at that very moment: “My bass player, Mike Starr, was like, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen. But whatever the Universe has planned for us is much better than what we can think of for ourselves.’ And that ended up coming true.” Francis had a benefactor at St. Peter’s, a church council member named Lil Asbury. “We moved church services to Zoom for a while, and I had an open invitation to stay at the parsonage. I had a roof over my head. Lil also agreed to let my drummer, Collin [O’Brien], stay there. In this time when we were both facing extreme financial uncertainty, she provided us a place to stay and work. We had this insanely abundant space.” Francis made great use of their suddenly abundant free time. Not only could he practice at will on the pipe organ and various pianos, but he and his bandmates—Starr, O’Brien, and guitarist Kellen Boersma—had an enormous space to play in. They expanded from Francis’s setup in the parsonage basement into the church’s large fellowship hall and began mak- ing demos, all of which led to the nine tracks that became In Plain Sight . While the world reeled from vari- ous degrees of anxiety and lockdown, “We were stuck in the best place you could possibly be stuck in,” Francis says. “We kept bringing over all this equipment. We had an acoustic piano; we had a harpsichord; we had all of our recording equipment, two turnta- bles, vintage synthesizers. Every other space was full of equipment. The first floor dining-room/living-room area got converted into a control room, with consoles and tape machines. We ran a snake for cables down the laun- dry chute into the basement. It was a pretty singular space in my life.” Looking back on that time, Francis chuckles. “It’s so funny. Before the pandemic hit, I was terrified,” he says. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, I have this amazing space at my disposal, but I’m going to be touring all year and I won’t be able to do anything here.’ Then the pandemic struck and it’s like, ‘Here’s your opportunity. Go for it!’ It was something I never could’ve planned for myself in my wildest dreams.” Everything leads to everything. Native Chicagoan Web Behrens has spent most of his journalism career covering arts and culture. His work has appeared in the pages of the Chicago Tribune , Time Out Chicago and New York , Crain’s Chicago Business , Advocate magazine, and Mobil Travel Guides. PREVIOUS SPREAD AND TOP: LIINA RAUD; LEFT: ALYSSA KRINER RAVINIA MAGAZINE • JUNE 15 – JULY 3, 2022 8