Matti Puccio Jr. started teaching music again with Cascade School of Music, first virtually and now in-person. And in March she released a full-length album, “JOIN, or DIE.”

Matti Puccio Jr., this week’s featured artist in the Central Oregon Creative Artists Relief Effort, quit her job as a music teacher at Camp Tamarack in 2019 to focus on a full-time music career.

When the pandemic shut down live music across the country, Puccio was in the process of setting up a 50-show West Coast tour with her band. After March, the band stopped practicing, and Puccio was left with a lot of time on her hands.

“As far as my health and well-being, physically, OK; mentally, it’s been real rough,” she said. “I’ve had some pretty intense breakdowns. … You go your whole life saying, ‘Ah, you know what, I could do that. If I just put the time and effort into it, I could do that.’ So all the fall and winter of 2019, I was cold-calling and writing up books and planning out places and building relationships.”

Because Puccio only made about $1,000 playing live music in 2019, she wasn’t able to collect unemployment or many of the grants that were made available to working musicians and artists. “As much as I could be like, ‘Look, I did, I was, I am,’ it didn’t really matter,” they said.

Fortunately, Puccio was already used to a do-it-yourself lifestyle, having lived in a self-converted school bus for a while. She planned to release an EP to tour on, and while the tour was canceled, the five-song, acoustic “Wild Spaces” dropped in late May.

Like many, Puccio was deeply disgusted by the systemic racism and police brutality brought to the forefront of American culture after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others. She released another stripped-down solo EP, “A Heart is a Heavy Burden,” in August in response.

“You realize that you do care and then you can’t turn it off, so what do you do?” Puccio said.

More recently, Puccio started teaching music again with Cascade School of Music, starting out virtually and moving to in-person as the school implemented new safety measures. And in March she released a full-length album, “JOIN, or DIE.”

She is hopeful that CO CAREs can help them and other musicians get back on their feet.

“It fills my heart to know that there are people in positions of capital that are interested in keeping the musical development of this area going because it is so clutch for the city,” she said.