But fame never came. Instead came thirty-three years, a divorce, a mortgage, a child who thinks my guitar is “a weird decoration.” I stopped writing songs somewhere around the time I started writing performance reviews. The calluses on my fingers softened. The voice that once screamed about matches and rain now gently asks people to hold for the next available representative.
I found the dusty, unlabled CD-R at the bottom of a cardboard box marked “Evan – College,” which my mother had dropped off ten years too late. The plastic jewel case was cracked diagonally, and inside, someone had scrawled in fading Sharpie: RB Sngs 1 . Not even a date. Not even a band name. rock band songs 1
And that, I’ve learned, is more than most things ever do. But fame never came
The first song was called Cigarette Girls and Broken Sirens . It started with a feedback loop that went on too long because Marcus forgot to mute his amp. I came in a beat late, voice cracking on the word “asphalt.” But then—then the chorus hit, and for forty-five seconds, we weren't four broken kids in a closet. We were something that could hurt you beautifully. The voice that once screamed about matches and
I didn’t even own a CD player anymore. I had to dig an old laptop out of the trash pile—the one from 2012, with the cracked screen and the fan that sounded like a lawnmower. It booted up after three tries, wheezing like an emphysemic.
Some nights I still play it. Not often. Just when I need to remember that once, before spreadsheets and silence, I was a boy who screamed into a microphone like the world owed him an answer.