Brave New World

2025 was a rough year in many respects. I suspect further elaboration is not required, but needless to say such a year was ornamented with tragedy in a way many will be eager to move beyond. Velvet Velvet released an album last spring entitled "All Falls Apart," which was met with local enthusiasm at its release show at Omaha's Slowdown. A midwest tour soon followed, during which Velvet played with friends old and new, to people many and few, and amid times painful and true.

(Pictured: Velvet Velvet, 5/24/25 at Slowdown, Omaha, NE. Photo credit: Marco Flores)

In a year that was tinted with the colors of loss, how can one continue? Making art about loss can only perpetuate it further if left unchecked and uninterrupted. Although our jobs as artists are to feel this negative momentum and project it in proactive glittering light, what toll can this take on one's mind and body? How can a world so insistently divisive be funneled into a vehicle for unification? The answer wades through my thoughts aimlessly, unsure of itself. My only certainty is this: art needs to be made. It needs to be made about injustices and turmoil, about beauty and celebration, about being human. Only this fact has the power to overcome any adversity and will outlast the plastic in our oceans and the phones invisibly tethered to our brains. If there is nothing left but iron and stones, dust and bones, humans will still create. It's how we got ourselves into this mess, but it is the breath of civilization that will persist through all.

Also Velvet played a cover set of Allman Brothers tunes to round out the year December 28th. It was sick. Keep making and we might survive better than we ever have before. To a hopeful new year! See y'all around.

(Pictured: Velvet Velvet, 12/28/25 at B-Bar, Omaha, NE. Photo credit: Malia Fortun)