Pen to paper. Empty lines run across the page like hazard lights on a highway. They stare, beckoning you to write. You are doe eyed and still.
 
The process of writing a song isn’t always seamless. There is the anxiety of the emotion you’re feeling. The fear to fully open up a gash inside by carving out the core of your heart with ink. So, you put it off. Put off the cementing, but the thought inside you only continues to growl until it can no longer be ignored.

​Mikaela Straus’ career path as a musician was apparent from an early age, however, it wasn’t until her EP, Make My Bed, that she would be publicly introduced to the world as ‘King Princess’ (KP) and begin her success in the music industry.

To say that performance, in general, has changed is the understatement of the year. Let alone all the other challenges artists face on a daily basis without a pandemic; the current set of circumstances simply leave the original difficulties to be desired. After the influx of challenge and modification created by a global pandemic it's safe to say the arts community got the short straw, and all the while many of those with newspaper qualified 'essential occupations' continue to share the view that we shouldn't have chosen a non-viable career path.

Correction: You can't call the arts a non-viable career path and then spend all of your free time consuming Art.
​
Simply put the arts are not a glorified hobby!

A stroke is mightier than a slash,
Ink built our world, and can crumble it faster than it dries,
It holds our memories, thoughts, and our stories,
It also banishes the pain, the heartbreak, and the ache,
They are commonplace, come on with a tap, dot dot; commonly when needed they are gone,
In their loss we’re granted courage, no hesitation to search when in need of help,
If lucky, on the way, you find what otherwise passes by,
Held in one hand, disposable,
Held in the other, you never want to let go,
Devilishly intricate, yet simple in its form,
But at the end of the day, it was just a pen.

Lately, I've been quite nostalgic. I guess that's normal considering all that has taken place. Clearly, the higher power had no 2020 vision for the year that marks yet another decade. Maybe it only had constant and never-ending change as a priority, to test my newfound sense of worth after graduating university; but still not attending any formal ceremony. Nevertheless, I have become a tad wistful for what used to be, and it seems that writing has helped me escape, even only for an hour, into the past; where things were simpler, and I used to dream…much more than I do now.

​It stars with a choice
The perfect cart
Choose wrong? Shaky, bumpy, a rough patch
Choose right? It’s the one

Parked in a fast-food drive through, the synthetic keys of The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’ hummed through the car’s radio. My mind was taken back to early March ­– pre-Covid Life –when I covered ‘Blinding Lights’ at my last live show. I said to my dad, ‘It doesn’t feel like my gig was just this year.’
A poster was taped in the drive through window; ‘We will not serve you without a mask,’ it read.  
‘Life is not going to go back to that kind of normal for a long, long time Liaden,’ my dad said.
 
So, here we are in our bubble of ‘Covid Normal’. But where does the world of music sit in this bubble?