Hey!
David here, and this is part 3 of the series where I share the story of how I found my way into music.
In part 1 I talked about growing up singing Bollywood songs in the car with my mom, and in part 2 I talked about my first heartbreak, the first song I ever wrote, and the guy I met on the Staten Island bus who pulled me into my first band.
At the end of that one I said I would tell you about the second band. That was nine months ago. Better late than never 😅
☕ Coffee and Munchkins
I had just left the first band and I was looking for anyone I could work with. My old guitar player's ex girlfriend was the one who told me about a guy named Eric. He was great at bass and guitar.
We ended up meeting at a Dunkin about ten minutes from my house. We sat there over coffee and a box of Munchkins and just talked. He had been in a band too, and theirs ended when their singer moved away, so neither of us had anyone to play with at that point.
He was into much heavier stuff than I was. Knuckle Puck, The Story So Far, Capstan, Four Year Strong. I was a pop guy who thought a song had a job to do, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, and out. Eric did not think a song needed a chorus at all.
We argued about that constantly, and somewhere in the middle of all of it we became really close friends. That is the part I did not see coming. I had gone looking for someone to make songs with and I ended up with one of the closest friends I have ever had.
(A lot of that scene writes songs that never repeat a section. No hook coming back around, nothing you can predict. It sounds wrong the first time and then it is stuck in your head for a week anyway.)
Working with him really changed how I write. I had been so rigid about song structure that I never once stopped to ask why those rules were there in the first place. He asked all the time.
He also took me to my first Warped Tour out in Jersey, where I saw Mayday Parade, We The Kings, Bowling for Soup and a bunch of others. I was never really a live music person before that. Turns out I just had not been to the right show 🎧
🥁 The Hallway
We started off writing in our bedrooms and going back and forth on ideas. Then I bought a cheap drum kit and there was nowhere in the house to put it, so it ended up in the entrance. The actual entrance, where you walk in.
The walls in there were lavender purple and the floors were marble tile, which is honestly the worst possible room in America for a drum kit. Every hit came back at you twice, and electric guitars are loud enough on their own. My family was very patient with me 😂
That is where we wrote most of it. Sitting in the front hallway with the drums, a guitar and a bass, and sometimes a drummer we had managed to find that month. When we actually needed to hear ourselves properly, we would go over to Fenix Studios on Staten Island.
This was also around the time I started producing, still on that same pirated copy of Ableton from part 2, limping along on my laptop (please do not judge me 😭).
We called the project Vibrant.
(Below is a photo of Eric on the kit in that hallway. You can see the purple walls and the marble.)
🎧 Rooftops
We wrote a lot of songs together and we released exactly none of them.
There are two I still love, Rooftops and The Great Escape. I went looking for the files the other day and Rooftops is stamped September 2018, which is almost eight years ago now. It still sounds like that hallway to me.
💭 How it ended
It did not really end. It just got quieter.
I was in my last year of school, Eric picked up more work, and we started seeing each other less and less. We also wanted different things out of the music. I wanted pop songs with a chorus you could hold onto and he wanted the songs with no chorus at all. Neither of us was wrong, we just were not building the same thing.
What I felt like I was missing in my first band was one close friend inside it, one person who was my person in the room. With Eric I had exactly that, and it still did not work out, because being close with someone and wanting the same thing turned out to be two completely different questions.
No use crying over spilt milk though. I really like where I ended up 🙌🏽
And here is the timing that I only noticed years later. All of this was quietly fizzling out in September 2018, which is the exact month I met Hunter.
We hung out that December over the winter break before my last semester, and started writing together going into 2019. From the very first session I could tell we wanted the same thing, because we both just loved pop music. There was nothing to negotiate and nothing to argue about.
💬 Your turn
So here is what I actually want to know from you.
What is the thing you almost did with someone?
A band, a business, a trip, a move, a whole plan that the two of you built together, and then life quietly went a different way. Everyone I have ever asked has had one.
Hit reply and tell me about yours. And if you do, I will dig Rooftops and The Great Escape off my hard drive and send you the final demos of both, since we never recorded the full proper versions of them. Nobody outside that hallway has ever heard them.
Thanks so much for being here 🙌
David
PS: Next time I will tell you about the first day Hunter and I ever wrote together. It took us eight hours to get one verse and one chorus, we both had splitting headaches by the end of it, and it was still the most fun I had in years 👀
