Mondays with Mark and Maggie
Online Show Series featuring Mark & Maggie O’Connor
2020-2021
What happened next was an uninterrupted series of 70 live "Mondays" shows online for a ticketed audience. Something we could have never dreamed we had to do. I opened every show with: "Welcome to Mondays with Mark and Maggie! We are coming to you live from our living room in North Carolina."
The place to watch our show was imbedded right into my website page. Produced by Our Concerts Live, we had all kinds of great musical guests for this nearly year-and-a-half series streaming into our show from their own living rooms. Maggie and I had something to practice regularly for, and we prepared new material for the hour-long shows. It was like real performing for us, we got the endorphins humming and everything. We dug deeper as a duo than we had before. We had all of our glorious violin duos, but we had to unearth old tunes of mine reworking them into duos, too. Most importantly, we needed to write new songs. We workshopped them in front of our live online audiences, something we probably would never have done the same way in regular concerts. Maggie had been singing in the band, but I had to step up on the singing now myself. I was co-writing with folks like Joe Henry online and bringing those songs to the shows. Maggie and I wrote songs together. All of this led us to a new Mark and Maggie musical life.
We turned the dreaded isolation from the world-wide pandemic into a music workshop in every way. We brought interested fans into our process—in fact into our living rooms via our three-camera setup.
When things finally started getting back to normal and we got a couple doses of the new vaccine in our arms, we played our final 70th "Mondays" show the Fall of 2021. We had subscribers by then who had seen nearly all of the concerts. We met many of them through our post-concert Zoom parties. They told us that we kept them sane through this difficult period for them too.
We had lost our booking agency through all of this, and we still had no in-person gigs on the schedule. So we took the first half of 2022 to record our new Duo album of songs we had worked up "Mondays" instead.
The impact of Covid-19 on the world doesn't need to be articulated any further here, but what transpired during our isolation surprised us both. We had new music that not only reshaped how we thought about ourselves as a duo during one of the most important periods in our lifetimes, but the musical progress and development we experienced will stay with us forever. We are excited about our next musical chapter, bringing our reimagined musical duo to live audiences and onto our new recordings! We call it: Life After Life.
-Mark O'Connor
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, mine and Maggie's musical word turned upside down within a short couple of months. All of our concerts over the next year were cancelled. My Grammy-winning family band broke up for good and those gigs could not be rescheduled. Musically, we were in dire straits in every way. I noticed many colleagues playing live on their social networks with bad sound, not to mention bad lighting too. Just to stay busy, reaching out to their fans. Maggie and I play violins, and the sound has to be good or we are not interested.
I spent a couple of months putting together an audio-video system in our house so we could stream concerts. The equipment and its applications was a brand new area for me. Once we were finally set up for the test drive, one of our management partners said our shows should be weekly. And if we put it on Mondays, it can be called "Mondays With Mark and Maggie." Good.
Featured Episodes
Goodbye 2020: How We Made it Through
This weekly "Mondays" show has really saved me in so man ways. It not only has brought in some income, but it keeps me motivated to practice and prepare for shows. And it has compelled us into dipping further into the well of O’Connor repertoire that I don’t typically perform. For instance, each show I do a Texas Fiddle breakdown on the old white fiddle, the music I grew up playing in the fiddle contests that I won all over the country. This new musical format has allowed me to try out new songs and tunes that we would not have done otherwise with our standard live concert touring. Maggie has gotten into more cello playing and can really accompany me on the breakdown fiddling, and it really sounds good. Something we would have never figured out pre-pandemic. Also singing, I am actually adding more vocal harmonies, and sussing out a range and tone in my voice where it sounds more compatible to Maggie’s leads. That is also something I would not have thought to work on much as there were so many singers in our band, but it has come in really handy in these duo shows. We have even debuted some original vocal songs on the shows and I really love to perform them. “Mondays” has been a lifeline for me.
Now that we have the “Mondays” set up in the house, we leave it up – the cameras the light stands and the mics. The instruments are out and on the wall behind us on the staging area or in instrument stands and it is this constant idea of practicing and preparing for shows. We also have teamed with “Our Concerts Live” who some old and new friends have configured to create music concerts online. It is much easier for us to have musical guests this way, so every other week we bring in a guest to stream in from their home. We have had so many friends come into the show and we have a discussion segment in each show where I can talk about some stories from the many projects and lifetime events that have built my career. People have really enjoyed it and it has built a loyal following with new folks coming to the show each week. As I have said, we have completed 27 shows by the end of this month.
As we head into the New Year (2021), I have some musical things to take with me from the hardships of 2020 and that makes me feel that as an artist, that all was not lost. But the rest of 2020 though, I want to take the biggest, swiftest kick I have, and boot it out of here! We can do so much better folks. We did learn a positive thing in 2020 though, it is that we are not alone here in this country, that we can’t do any of what we want to do on our own, no matter how much freedom we think we deserve while others look on. We actually need each other to survive in this country, and the rest of the world, and we need to work together to make it better for all.
-Mark O'Connor