When starting a band, it’s necessary to ask two important questions:
1. Why?
2. Specifically, why a band?
These questions are not jokes. Music is good. Music is fun. Music is perhaps the oldest human art form and the most accessible. Despite what they’ll tell you, everyone can sing. Our culture often treats being a musician as something you do as a route to getting rich and famous, but that is, at best, an exciting potential side effect. Art is worthwhile, both for what it does for the soul and for a viable society. And making it with other people can multiply those effects.
In recent years we’ve faced unprecedented changes to the simple ways we interact with each other. We’ve watched local, real world communities flounder even as digital ones flourish. As it becomes easier to live behind screens, assuming that everyone is living in a bubble except us, it’s good to remember the enormous value of square but super important notions like civic involvement, participating in the world around us, and engaging with one’s fellow bags of bones. Getting involved in a local music scene—DIY punk, country, jam, wedding cover band, whatever—builds community, the bedrock of civic life, and it happens to also be a good way to kill time before we all die in nuclear hellfire, in addition to being pretty fun. Even if you’re not very good at it. Some people will tell you “it’s all about the music, man” but, like, why? And who made them the “what really matters” cops anyhow? Play music. Make friends or at least enemies worth your time.
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