Introducing At The Door
A blog about being a particular kind of stubborn creator, from the Aversions Guy
Hello! It’s Sammy from the band Aversions. If this newsletter is in your inbox, you probably signed up for our mailing list at some point. If I added anyone by mistake, I sincerely apologize as we all hate getting unsolicited mail. But I hope you’ll stick around for a few words over the coming weeks and months to talk music-makin’. And with that…
In the course of self-advocating for the band, I am constantly confronted with the need to “tell our story.”
The idea being, of course, that the world is full of bands, and if my band is to get the benefit of the magazine feature/blog post/playlist add/whatever, then I must conjure up a compelling narrative that “sets us apart.”
She inherited a small island in the Strait of Juan De Fuca, so she constructed a miniature amphitheater out of driftwood, and began self-training herself to throat-sing…
They were struck by a car at the age of nineteen en route to the skatepark, and spent their entire 13 bedridden months composing a nine-album musical history of the n’er-completed Baltimore Subway…
After coming out of nowhere to top the charts with his first release, his sophomore album was universally panned, so he retreated to the Algarve for 13 years and founded a vineyard, only to return with a genre-defying new album recorded using only the mic of a JVC boombox…
There’s nothing wrong with these stories. They’re great! I like reading about them as much as the next person. And for an editor or critic with 3,000 unread invitations in their inbox and ten ledes to write, it certainly helps to have the lede written for you.
Only problem: we don’t have a story like this. Not even close. Our story’s boring. Want to hear it anyway? Too bad:
In 2018, after meeting at a trade college in 2016, friends Sammy C and Joe R decided to start a band, because they both liked the same kind of music and wanted to make some of their own. A little while later, after a pretty long and frustrating search for a bassist, they found Chad D on craigslist.
Woof, I can almost feel the grant money evaporating just reading that. Even Radiohead’s relatively milquetoast origin story (some friends getting together after school and jamming out) seems like a cosmic meet-cute by comparison.
Too bad, I want to talk about my feelings
What about the rest of us? The boring, humdrum, workaday creators who grew up in the suburbs, watch sports, drink Miller High Life and love the sound of a flat-5 power chord?
Call me a homer, but I think these narratives have value. Not to say that it’s unbroken ground—many musicians have made entire careers out of chronicling this type of mundanity.
But I don’t want this to be some kind of glorification of persisting in the face of The Struggle, or The Grind, or whatever you want to call it.
I want this to be a space for just talking about the most ordinary aspects of creation, because all three of us in the band (and to some extent our respective domestic partners) have carved off a chunk of our lives in service of This Thing. And that’s not some kind of noble sacrifice, but it is a (mostly) active decision that we’ve made, and that millions of others make every day, and there’s value in talking about all of the stuff that goes along with that.
A blog about people who frolic in failure
The Jim Jarmusch movie “Paterson” is really lovely (and also kind of stupid, but mostly really lovely) in the way that it explores a certain kind of stubborn creation.
Agendaless. Quotidian. Navel-gazing by design.
Relative to all the hustle lore of people who signed with Atlantic on the strength of their Tiktoks, or who played 1,000 shows before being discovered by the bass player of their favourite band and invited on a world tour, or whatever, there’s been relatively little ink spilled on the middle-of-the-roaders, the people for whom pursuit of a wider audience and adherence to creative ideals are not mutually exclusive.
Call us the Little-Winners.
We fumble along, and we try and fail, we fuck up, and some people think we’re a joke, if they’re even aware of us at all, but every so often…
Every so often we get little wins!
And not just, like, moral-victory type little wins where you invent an imaginary narrative and then move goalposts around until you can buy yourself a beer. No, I’m talking about real-world, tangible, minute victories that almost everyone on a similar level would agree are worthy of that Pabst.
You get featured on a noteworthy blog. You get to open for a bigger touring band. Someone in the Black Forest buys five of your records on Bandcamp.
This is failure frolicking. It’s not broad audience or financial success, but it’s also not the abject, staring-into-the-void nothingness of pissing your songs unheard into the ocean of music that defines being a musician in the 21st century.
It’s what we live for.
This could all end badly
I guess I’m not scared of showing people my voice. I’ve already quite literally done a fair share of that. (I’ve got the SubmitHub rejections to prove it.)
It’s still nerve-wracking to pick at this particular taboo-scab within the rock music space. We’re supposed to be aloof and mysterious, and above the stale, practical concerns of the industry.
But we all enter this arena for different reasons, and I’ve learned recently that one of the most important reasons for me personally is community-building.
Some of the most satisfying relationships I’ve formed in my life have come from meeting the various people who occupy the music world. Not just other musicians, but people who make records, run sound at a club, or even just listen to music and enjoy it meaningfully. And I know that there are many more opportunities in store to meet yet other interesting, dynamic people.
This is my attempt at starting or enriching the conversations that predicate such relationships. And it could end badly in all the ways that putting words into the world always can.
But I’m motivated to try. Hopefully it brings value to you as a listener or a fellow creator. And if it does, then I truly can’t wait to have those conversations with you.
See you on the b-side.