I’m in a band. Being in a band is a lot like being married to three people and raising a kid—you all work together to raise a baby, but you all have different ideas on how to go about doing it (pro tip: Don’t let the drummer near anything).
Now, obviously in this case I’m not talking about a literal baby (I feel I have to include that proviso because the world makes me weep some days); in a band, your babies are your songs, and it takes a lot of work to get them to turn out right.
First, you have to start out with a riff of some sort. Usually myself or my guitarist will come in with a little melody we think is catchy and play it for everyone to get feedback. Most of the time, we all agree that this is something we can work with, and we’ll start building the structure of a song.
For whoever brought in the riff, this means playing it over and over and over until his fingers feel like bloody sausages while everyone else tries to figure out a part. It’s a lot like changing diapers. There’s screaming, and there’s jarring noises popping out every now and then, and sometimes the walls get sprayed with dark substances (our singer drinks a lot of coffee and leaves his cups lying everywhere).
Eventually, though, everyone has a part he thinks he likes, and now we can focus on listening to how the parts interact with one another to make a whole. Our band philosophy, and I think it’s a good life philosophy as well, is that everyone has to be happy with every part in the song because otherwise someone’s not going to want to play the song. Compromise and cooperation are the main rules.
Naturally, we tell our drummer to change everything he does. Usually, it goes something like this: “Hey, Matt, can you add, you know, more toms?”
“I’m already playing the toms. I play the toms on every song. All you guys ever do is tell me, Play more toms.”
“Yeah, but if you could do”—vague hand-waving gesture meant to signify brilliant musical drum instruction—“then I think it would really pop.” (Note: Pop is a technical term denoting a nebulous concept of awesomeness that no one’s ever able to specifically define.)
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll do that.”
Our concerns about the drums thus satisfied, we move on to the bass. I play the bass, and it’s always perfect, so there’s not a lot of work to be done there. Let’s be honest, no one really listens to the bass anyways. The bass is like your kid’s pants—unless you know what you’re looking for, no one has any idea he just crapped himself. He’ll keep smiling and running around like an idiot, leaving people with vaguely puzzled frowns and a general sense of brown notes (that’s a mythical chord that can make someone literally poop his pants if he hears it).
After the bass, we start dealing with guitars. One of our guitarists likes to play notes in a register that only cats can hear, so we just kind of assume he’s in tune with the rest of the song. It’s basically like when your kid goes off to school—you hope he’s doing the right thing, but you know, deep down, there’s some shenanigans going on that will make you wince when you actually hear about them. That’s okay, though, you love him anyway (except for when he insists on turning the volume up each practice until the only noise in the space is a dental drill for Titans).
Our other guitarist plays mainly rhythm stuff, so he’s basically the day-to-day chores no one notices unless they’re not done. Things like cooking breakfast, picking the kid up from school, making sure bedtime is obeyed—everything that goes into a normal day. We tended to take him for granted until his wife actually had a baby and there was a chance he would miss a show, and everyone was stressed waaaaaaay the fuck out with no idea how to fill in the missing parts. We started practicing “Seven Nation Army” at one point! Madness.
At this juncture, we’ve been working on our baby for two or three hours. This is the functional equivalent of the time it takes for your kid to go from infant to college grad—he’s close to being out of your hair forever and you can finally relax and maybe pass out on the couch, but it’s still just not quite coming together, and the finish line keeps receding farther into the distance (i.e., the eight-year college plan). Tempers are frayed, passive-aggressive insults exchanged, and everyone pretty much feels like shit, but you have to keep grinding away because you want this labor of love to be the best you can possibly make it.
Finally, after all the pain and misery and self-loathing, after all the hard work and effort, someone plays a completely unrelated riff out of nowhere, you write a totally kick-ass song in five minutes, and you all call it a day. It’s nothing at all like you expected it to be, but congratulations. Your baby’s all grown up. And, goddamn, does it rock.