Playing eight hours of video games. Recording songs about your boyfriend who’s sitting in the room next door. Fixing wigs. This is what your favorite artists have been up to during quarantine.
During Billboard video interviews and feature stories, artists from Chance the Rapper to Rita Wilson, who recently recovered from coronavirus after she and her husband Tom Hanks‘ diagnoses went public in early March, let us know what’s going on in their homes and how they’ve been feeling if they were previously under the weather.
Read up on their routines and conditions below.
“It’s incredibly easy and I don’t feel like I’m suffering in any kind of way. My friends come over and look in the window so I can see them. One of my kids [son Elijah, 43] lives here with his wife, and I talk to my mom on the phone or go see her through her back window.”
“Life is good. It’s obviously very trying and different in terms of being parents with two kids and not having a lot of infrastructure that we have, with the school and nanny and night nurse for the youngest. When all that went away, it was different for sure — definitely a little difficult — but it’s something that we learned to really appreciate, just because we’ve never had this much time with our kids and never been as close as we are now. So it’s an awesome thing, we’re doing good.”
“I have a studio at home, I love to invent. I cook in the afternoon and at night I watch a Netflix series or read a book.”
“I set a course, I’ve been practicing my drifting, Call of Duty. A lot of Animal Crossing. I’m on [Nintendo] Switch at night, so you know, I’m going crazy.”
“When it comes to writing songs about someone who’s literally sat in the next room, that is a new experience and it’s a little weird. I do feel kind of nervous sometimes to yell out a line, but luckily the songs have all been pretty positive, so I’m not singing anything too brutal at the moment.”
“I’m working on new material and music. Resetting wigs and fixing costumes. All the little bits you don’t get chance to do normally.”
“I’m just trying to keep busy, to stay sane, stay creative.”
“I’m great and blessed to have come through it. If I was to get sick, I’m happy I got sick early. I’ve had a chance to recover and practice social distancing…. I used an analogy talking to a friend that it’s like there was a lion that has been released to the world and is killing people and causing all kinds of mayhem, to the point that the government was like, ‘Go inside until we capture the lion.’ Two months later, it’s like, ‘Okay, you guys can come outside now.’ Now I’m like, ‘Did you guys catch him? I haven’t heard that you guys caught him.’ Don’t tell me to come back outside when the lion is still wreaking havoc. You still haven’t fixed the issue. I want this to be over with, but this is going to be here for a while.”
“I’m really glad I had it early on before so many people died, because I think it would have been even more terrifying to understand, truly, the depth of the severity. I also truly felt the support, the prayers and good wishes of people that were reaching out, whether friends or strangers you hear from on social media. That really helped.”
