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No More Musical Masturbation!

June 2, 2008 12:32 AM

really, really like music. It would be really hard for me to choose between being deaf and being blind. On the one hand, not being able to see would suck. But on the other, life would seem so empty without music. I mean, if a picture's worth a thousand words, then the right song is worth a million. Some songs are just perfect expressions of sadness or anger or frustration or excitedeness or whatever. And I can't really think of anything that would be worse than that. Well, yeah, I guess I can: being blind would suck worse. But it would be close.

Anyway, listening to music is great. But making it is better. And by that I mean that, while it's awesome to write music and arrange different parts and record it, playing music with someone else is pretty much the funnest thing there is. There's something about the interplay between two or more musicians that I really can't describe.

In high school, I got together with some friends of mine and played some chords occasionally. But the problem was that we weren't very good at our instruments yet, so it made it sort of difficult to, you know, play. In college, I tried a few different times to play with people, but people always had these ridiculous ideas about what they wanted to do. Look, yeah, there's a place for stupid delay-pedal wankery or guitar-synth nonsense, but all I wanted to do was rock. The most fun I had playing guitar in college was stumbling my way through improv things with Hannis at The House, which was fun but which was also sad because I was severely outclassed. And then law school happened and I barely even played the guitar myself, let alone with people.

But fuck that. I was driving to the office the other day and thought to myself: "Dude, you've got the time, the talent, and the motivation. It's time to start a band!" So that's what I did. Or started talking about doing. So I called up the only other guitarist with similar interests I know--tRJ--and proposed that we put up an ad on Craigslist. And we did. And now we've got a few bassists and drummers we might play with, which I'm ridiculously excited about.

But I'm also excited about this past Saturday. tRJ and I sat down and worked on that still-untitled song and came up with the makings of something really, really awesome. We recorded a rough little demo and sent it out to the people that had responded to our ads. We heard back from one of the drummers that responded right away, and he demonstrated himself to be an idiot. He suggested that we go in a funk direction with that song. We immediately dismissed him. But we're still waiting to hear back from some other people, and I don't think they'll think it sucked. I hope, anyway.

That's what I did this weekend.


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