Everyone should start a band.
You’ll begin by gathering some friends to meet in a dingy classroom and start practice on a drum set with busted heads and an amp with crunchy outputs.
You’ll be bad at first. Or maybe not terrible, but awkward and too loud. But it will be fun to make noise and write songs that aren’t so serious, and maybe a few that are. You’ll laugh harder than you have in years. You’ll leave practice looking forward to the next one.
You’ll play a show – maybe for a couple people, maybe for a couple hundred if you’re really lucky. You’ll get a chance to do it again, and you’ll take it. You’ll keep taking chances.
You’ll grow a lot – musically, professionally, personally. You’ll see bandmates’ lives race by in a whirlwind between gigs and hours logged in a van. You’ll watch people graduate, get married, start jobs, quit jobs, have kids, raise families. You’ll grow up together.
All at once, you will feel overwhelmed with gratitude for the gift of time and mournful for how quickly it passes. You’ll hope you can hold onto this moment forever, with these people. Then you’ll realize moments don’t last, but maybe these people can carry you through whatever is next.
You will love your band more than you ever thought possible. Your heart, shriveled and cold from years of people telling you this business is hard, will thaw and grow three sizes. Through the years you’ll walk each other through doubt, death, pain, and change. You’ll learn most of it is guaranteed to be hard, but you’ll do the hardest things together.
Most of all, you’ll look around and wonder how you got so lucky. You’ll kiss the ground of the stages you play and hug the necks of your bandmates and wonder what cosmic trick you pulled to deserve all of this.
Everyone should start a band.
