Last night I had the pleasure of hosting my old friends who are now in a band called Bowerbirds. They played at the 400 Bar and then crashed on my floor. It’s always bittersweet to be reunited with people who used to be such an integral a part of my life and at such a formative time—Mark and Phil and I (and Wes, too) were pretty much inseparable throughout most of junior high and high school (which is when it’s arguably most crucial to have friends from whom you’re pretty much inseparable)—I say bittersweet because I only see them a couple times a year, at best, since we went our separate ways a few years ago. Fortunately, they are the sort of friends with whom I can fall right back into the sort of jocular camaraderie that we perfected in eighth grade and which has served us so well ever since that it hasn’t changed a great deal, much to the delight and then immediately subsequent annoyance of any friends, acquaintances, girlfriends, etc. who’ve come along in the intervening two decades.

The other huge, obvious dimension to this is that Mark and Phil and I (and Wes, too) formed a band together in high school and another one later on, and any of the music we’ve made since then with other people in other permutations is inevitably entrenched in and informed by the embarrassingly naive but, again, incalculably crucial and formative initial musical excursions the four of us made in our parents’ attics, basements, and living rooms, excursions which were—fortunately for posterity and probably unfortunately for our credibilty—exhaustively documented and subsequently digitized and now housed in my iTunes library so that, when I wanted to wake the band up this morning, I simply had to turn up my stereo and begin playing a recording of a show we played in Gardner Lounge at Grinnell College in May 1994, when we opened with a cover of “New Day Rising” by Husker Dü. Their heads came off the pillows with a quickness.

And, while none of us knew back in 1991 what trajectory our musical lives would take, I don’t think we could have possibly imagined just how wildly unpredictable they’d be. We drafted Phil into the band in eighth grade and ordered him to be our lead singer. “Just make up some lyrics,” we told him. “It doesn’t matter.” At the time he couldn’t play guitar, and pretty much taught himself over the next few years. That he is now a formidable songwriter whose songs are almost frighteningly, autistically brilliant, and to have those talents duly recognized and ratified, is a surprise of the best kind, though of course it now seems inevitable. But that Mark and Phil—who probably, more than any other factor, informed my (incredibly forceful, incredibly loud) drumming style by forcing me to compete with the volume wars they’d wage with their guitar amps in my parents’ basement—would eventually land in and make their name with a rustic, romantic folk trio born in North Carolina (touring with the much-beloved Mountain Goats, whose principal player’s wife [in a quintessential small-world coincidence] attended Grinnell and was in the audience of the aforementioned 5/94 show) is, of course, an outcome none of us could have foreseen.

So naturally it was also bittersweet to see them playing at the 400 last night, in front of a large, appreciative crowd, most of whose constituents ventured over to the merch table afterward to pay their respects and buy CDs and ask for autographs—and to miss the days when Wes and I were right there with them, playing louder music to smaller crowds in smaller rooms. Bittersweet, but inspiring—it makes me want to play my drums more often and in a greater variety of contexts; to compose music; to join new bands and continue playing with the ones I’m in; to try my best not to succumb to a 9-to-5 after I get my degree in May and instead fight tooth and nail to make a living with my writing and music, as improbable and elusive as such a lifestyle always seems, has always seemed. It is not easy, and rarely glamorous, but all the more rewarding for being so hard-won.