The Dam-Breakers
I had little-to-no intention of being a musician until I heard the Decemberists’ third album, Picaresque, in 2005.
Bruce Springsteen, talking about hearing Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” for the first time, said that the opening snare shot was “like someone kicked open the door to your mind.” I buy this sort of transformative musical moment. When the shofar howled at the beginning of “The Infanta” (Picaresque’s opening track), a whole new world of music opened up to me. A world full of suicidal lovers, ghosts of drowned, wheelbarrow-pushing farm boys, vengeful mariners, and gay prostitutes immediately left me with one loud conclusion: I want to do that —write songs, not participate in homosexual prostitution. English is complicated.
Inside of a year, I owned a guitar. Within two years, I was rewriting melodies to old traditional songs — “The Golden Vanity,” “Lily of the West,” and “The Rose of Tralee.” I ruined each of them in their turn, dicing up their age-tested melodies and replacing them with the slow, plodding chord structures of a new guitar player. Listening to the recordings now is, to be frank, excruciating. To think that version of my musical self was the version I waltzed into the Rhythm Kitchen back in 2008 believing that I was On My Way might be the most ridiculous miscalculation of my life. If it's not, then yikes.
But I took so much pleasure in working with those songs. My method in those days was to visit a folk music database, find some lyrics that captivated me, and then without actually listening to anything, craft my own melody from what the lyrics inspired. In the hands of a more seasoned musician, such a strategy might have had really compelling results, as each of those songs could be reimagined without any influence from previous versions. In my hands, however, it was like unleashing disasters on a SimCity metropolis that someone else had built, “oohing” and “ahhing” as the tornado you summoned obliterates a fifty-story skyscraper.
For all the destruction, hearing “The Golden Vanity” come together behind a Dm-Am chord progression was so unbelievably thrilling. I played it for hours, circling back to those same two chords again and again. Songwriting suddenly felt doable, leading me to dream about all the other songs I could put through the same exercise.
That sort of youthful exuberance tends to work favorably in many different fields. It allows you to believe farcical ideology from a lack of antithesis. In short, you're too uninformed to know better —like climbing Mt. Everest but being unaware of its height. If the only thing you're worried about is the step you're currently taking, and aren't weighed down by all the steps ahead of you, you have a decided advantage.
Evidently, my advantage was my obliviousness to how unskilled I was. It isn't that you don't realize you’re a novice, it's that you don't realize how novice. In my bedroom with “The Golden Vanity,” I didn't ponder the immense musical mountain in front of me, or how unqualified I was to climb it. And within another year, I was writing my own songs and performing live.
I was eighteen at the time of “The Infanta” shofar moment. My hunch is that others —musicians or otherwise— have similar moments of transformation when they knew they wanted to do X. Do we all have “the moment” when this streak gets awakened, or is that an oversimplification? After all, I rocked out to Pearl Jam for years before the Decemberists, listened to Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy soundtracks on repeat, obsessed over “The Sign” by Ace of Base when I was six, and stared with slack-jawed wonder when the marching band came out with Fleetwood Mac for “Don't Stop” in 1997.
All of these moments are probably part of the same tapestry. I can't be the only one who, armed with air guitars and microphones, put on concerts in their bedroom. But the shofar transformed my desire for air instruments into real instruments, others’ songs into my own songs, and no audience into, well, maybe the audience size didn't change that much, but that's a therapy session for another day.