By Justin Papp
It was supposed to be a celebration, the culmination of nearly a year’s work. The songs Zoe Clark began writing in summer 2019 were recorded in the fall and mixed during the winter. In February, she released her first single “Cave,” to some fanfare. The track received radio play and she performed it regularly on Nashville’s bar circuit, where she was finishing her final semester at Belmont University. The 21-year-old Greenwich native’s debut country-pop EP, “Lovers Mark,” was set for an April 17 release. Clark had a new record on the horizon and momentum.
And then came the pandemic.
Clark, who in late March was preparing to release her second single, faced a difficult decision with which, amid the outbreak of the COVID-19, many musicians, both established and ascendant, have had to grapple.
Should she defer the release, like so many others artists had chosen to do, or drop the EP as planned? What role did her songs he play in an unprecedented public health crisis?
“That was something I was really contemplating,” Clark said recently, from her childhood home in Greenwich, where she’s stayed since Nashville shut down in mid-March. “Do I release music, do I not? There are so many people who are like, ‘we’re going to wait.’ ”
The music industry has been hard-hit by the pandemic. Major artists, like Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga and Haim, have postponed releases. Tours and live shows have been uniformly canceled and uncertainty prevails for both major acts and those, like Clark, trying to make their way in what can be a cutthroat