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The Hard Problem of Cover Bands
Paperback
Series: The Bands That Never Were
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Mar 5 2026
Pages: 446
Weight: 1.31
Height: 0.99 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Are you conscious right now?
Are you sure?
Garrett plays piano in a cover band. He's competent, professional, and increasingly uncertain whether he's actually conscious during performances. This would be concerning if he were alone in his crisis, but his entire band is having the same realization.
They're not creating. They're reproducing. Playing songs written by other people, arrangements they've performed a thousand times, for audiences who mostly aren't listening. Somewhere along the way, they've stopped being present for their own lives. Or maybe they were never present to begin with.
What follows is a tour through the varieties of consciousness-or lack thereof:
- Dennis, who reorganizes overhead bins because bags stored on their sides create more overhead (he's very literal)
- A flight attendant who deliberately pretends not to understand stevia for 83 minutes
- Kyle, a 3 AM waiter who takes perfect orders while apparently asleep
- Madison, who takes 23 photos of a spontaneous moment and argues this makes her MORE authentic
- A smart speaker who may or may not be conscious and definitely can't tell
- A GPS that knows their life trajectory better than they do
- Dominic, a hotel breakfast attendant who tells the same family trauma story to every guest and remembers none of them
- Martin, who resets every ten minutes and asks am I conscious? repeatedly without remembering the answer
- Vic's unconscious alter-ego who plays bass brilliantly while sleepwalking and speaks in fortune-cookie profundities
- Thomas the mime, who performs the same routines for twenty-two years and is genuinely present maybe once a month
As the band accumulates examples of questionable consciousness-including their own-they're forced to confront an uncomfortable possibility: maybe consciousness isn't what makes us human. Maybe it's barely there at all. And maybe that's okay.
THE HARD PROBLEM OF COVER BANDS is a novel about mimicry, presence, and the suspicion that we're all just cover bands performing learned behaviors while wondering if anyone's actually home.
Perfect for readers who enjoy:
- Literary fiction with humor and heart
- Philosophical questions wrapped in absurd comedy
- Ensemble casts of lovably neurotic characters
- Books that make you laugh and then make you think (and then make you laugh about thinking)
- Stories about artists, performers, and creative crises
- Explorations of consciousness that don't require a philosophy degree
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