Friends with the band

To play music or be played by it

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

Not the last time I tried forming a band was in Year 8. My best, then close, then former friends turned down my invitation so I had to settle for a wary clutch of maths class acquaintances, two in total, suggestible and/or similarly deluded to me. Roles were assigned not based on current musical instrument ability but more like ranks handed out when playing army. At least I, like all the great songwriters, knew my way around a keyboard. (This way goes lower, that way goes higher.) I just wasn’t the fastest; any tempo past andante and I’d start going clang clung cling like a horse playing the piano.

How fast, though, the transition from a kid who hears music to an adolescent who listens to then wants to make it. Although that’s not quite right. Making music didn’t matter as much as being in a band, as making it. Not that the music was purely theoretical either. I strung together the chords and lyrics for a ballad about unrequited love, this from a 12-year-old who was yet to do any requiting let alone being un-. (Then again, “Art is man’s teacher,” wrote Guy Davenport, “but art is art’s teacher.”) My lyrics for another song rhymed — and let’s see if I can type this out with fingers curled from embarrassment — “The world…