My So-Called Indie Rock Blog #26

It was the fall of 2004 when I became the singer for another guy's band. The echo of my sameness reverberating in my head was driving me crazy and I was sick of my solo self. Making music by yourself is...lonely.So I started singing for the Brooklyn band, Emma La Reina. We practiced in this hulking warehouse on the lip of the East River and at night the Brooklyn Bridge glittered in our industrial-sized window like a Japanese paper lantern.There was a bodega not far from the practice space that wasn't supposed to sell you beer...but that would sell you beer if there weren't any cops around. They'd put your forty-ounce in a brown paper bag instead of the usual plastic and you'd walk down the street with this happy, illicit feeling. Another nice thing about the neighborhood was that it was dead deserted at night. You could be left alone with your own quiet thoughts and the chards of song ideas jangling in your head. Unlike Williamsburg, it wasn't the kind of place that would give you an identity crisis on the way to the subway.It was a really gorgeous, really 'New York' place to be in a band. Sometimes our drummer, Matt, would light bottle rockets and shoot them out the window and they would arch high before plunging into the river...I discovered soon enough the weird pressures that come with being a band in NYC. The bookers and the press are watching you and wondering (not just) 'is this a GOOD band?' but 'Is this a NOW band? Is this the next big thing?' And there's no small, town camaraderie here...if they think you suck, that you're derivative or passé, you will know it. And it will be Google-searchable forever. Scary.But what makes it exciting is that it feels a bit like you are on some grand stage; that for every show there are stakes involved. 'Someone' could be there. True, 'Someone' almost never is, but success felt more tangible there than anyplace else. It seemed to swirl around those storied venues like a toxic brew... I remember a remarkable girl who tried out to be the drummer for my first band. Though she was clearly super-talented, her style wasn't a good fit. A few months later I was walking underneath life-sized posters of her in Astor Place and she was playing live on Conan O'Brien. Her name is Kaki King.