Dear Dirty America

In high school, a good friend and I would drive around in his car and listen to our favorite metal and rock music. Like many a high-schooler, we wanted to start our own metal band. It couldn’t be that hard, we reasoned. I knew how to play electric guitar, my friend knew how to play the drums. And how difficult could singing be? We’d both admitted that in our cars we’d sang along to our favorite metal songs, and hell, our voices had sounded pretty close to what the band’s singer was doing.

So in his car that night we thought we’d experiment once again with singing, except with each other, in the same car. He chose a song we both knew. I’ve forgotten which, but it may have been a poppier rock song that time, maybe one from the Juliani Theory.

With volume cranked, we freed our vocal chords for about thirty seconds. We knew the words. We knew the music well. Then, as we’d planned, my friend hit the shut-off button on his radio, and the car fell silent. We kept singing. We listened to ourselves singing. Our voices that had seemed soaring when tucked into the much louder studio recording now strained our ears and seemed to bounce unnaturally off the leather interior of the car.

That was a learning moment for us, as it probably would be for most people. With guitar or drums, there was hope. But how was our singing? Well, it sounded something like this:

We never did it again.

[photo by Joe Mabel]