Well good news today. I managed to join the death/thrash metal band Recorruptor!
It's been a ride. Mostly of practicing my ass off for the audition. I tried super hard to post as much as possible for it, not in a “I'm so special look at me” kind of way but more of a “I'm trying to hold myself accountable and these riffs are sick” way. Funnily enough I knew I was in about a few months before the announcement. I met up with the guys as a vibe check between everyone and we hit it off super well, and at that point I already posted like 3 songs being complete with proof so it was a shoe in. To show it off too we ended up doing a playthrough video of me and the new drummer playing “Within the Vault” (shameless plug go check it out on YouTube).
It's been really fun challenging myself again. The last time I really had to lock in I think was either S.o.t.T.'s album tracking or my T8P audition. Which is a nice segway into what I really wanted to get into. As you can probably gather from the title I wanted to talk about the nature of leaving and joining bands, particularly how it affects friendships.
What a sober topic to cover on a blog called “Raw Beef”. To which I say, “Whatever, I'm the one who pays for the website…”. It may behoove you to know that I had a pretty weird experience leaving my first band. Not in a bad way just in a more naive way. I could tell S.o.t.T. was heading in a direction that I didn't want to go on my musical journey. My tastes were evolving, my skills improving, and unfortunately in the effort to chase the challenge of difficult music and my deepening fascination with blast beats it meant that I had to go my own separate way. I could feel it coming a mile away but as with everybody's first you just don't want to break it off. It's tough after all, like a high school breakup (but with 20 year old dudes). No matter how you put it I knew it was time to part ways.
Problem was, however, the drummer was the best man in my upcoming wedding and the band members were also invited. They were my close friends! My confidants, my first friends and comrades in the wonderful world of music outside of high school band. I wanted them to still come to my wedding and not have it be awkward. So what genius solution did I come up with? I cold turkey-d it, and really cold at that. I walked into practice, we did our thing, and when it was almost over I broke the news that I had decided to leave pretty bluntly.
No fluff, no filler, no discussions on how we could accommodate each other, just “Here's how it is”. Horrendous move on my end. I wont get into the specifics of how that conversation went but it was about as bad as you can imagine. I thought, though, that things would smooth over and because it was very cut and dry things would heal quick. Yeah, no. To this day I still am trying to get back to the way things were on a friendship level. It's not easy and I can still tell there's some lingering feelings but I'm trying nonetheless.
Personal anecdote aside, what am I getting at here? Well, I ended up learning that sometimes as much as we would like it to be a band is not solely a business and you cant treat your band mates like work colleagues and have it go super well.
Music is inherently a feeling driven field. Most of all creative work is, you pour your heart into it and hedge a lot of emotional bets on it as well. You and your band mates form a pretty massive bond over that (depending on if they're assholes or not) and it tends to form quickly. It can be a beautiful thing, you'll end up relating pretty heavily to people twice your age, you'll become friends with people way faster than you could imagine, the whole nine yards.
Really where the problem comes in (at least for me) is that sometimes it's hard to remember that even though your band is at times operating on a business level, it doesn't mean that you can pull the same shit you would at a corporate job. You can leave a coworker you were friends with behind cold turkey and have it be relatively fine between you two, you can leave a job and Karen in HR who you were cordial with but didn't really hang outside of work wont even bat an eye. But because of the way creative industries are, and especially how tight nit a band can and will get, you need to still treat your band mates as brothers and sisters, not bosses and coworkers.
So please for the love of god don't do what I did if you're thinking about leaving a band!