My first introductions to music were, in a way, the worst possible introductions. It started in first grade with a class xylophone that had a single mallet (the other long since lost), continued in fifth grade with the recorder (!), and culminated in middle school with hand bells.

Hand bells! You get a bell that is a single note and become a cog in a musical machine. You wait until the point in the music when it is time for that note to sound, and then... you ring the bell.

In my opinion, if you were to assemble the world's top minds and ask them to spend a year designing a curriculum intended to permanently stymie or destroy any child's natural desire or curiosity to learn anything about music, I don't think they could do better than making a class of middle school kids play hand bells once a week for a year.

Somehow, for me, it didn't quite stick. In my early 20s, I managed to overcome the spectre of my musical education, and started to think that playing music might actually be fun. I had some friends who were interested in music at the same time, so we decided to try something together.

This eventually became a tradition known as "hat band."

This is how it came to work: we'd have a party, and at the party everyone would put their name in a hat. Then we'd draw names from the hat in groups of 3 or 4. Those were bands. Right then and there, just seconds after their creation, we scheduled a show for two weeks in the future. Everyone had two weeks to learn a new instrument, write songs, rehearse, and then... they would be on stage. We'd make flyers and invite as many people as possible; there was no turning back.

The results were unexpectedly amazing. All of the songs were amateurish, but they were about each-other and our lives. Bands would often make and pass out lyric sheets so that everyone else could sing along. People who came to the show to watch would want in on the next one, and the intensity of being in a band with someone for two weeks was a great way to get closer to friends of friends. Even years later, I still have some of those early songs stuck in my head.

By some miracle, I have a recording — made on a tape recorder left in the corner of the room — from the very first song to ever be played at the very first hat band show. It goes like this: