How to start a band when you’re a real adult with a real life
How to start a band when you’re a real adult with a real life
I moved to Los Angeles from Sudbury, Ontario 10 years ago. In the time since I landed squarely in my career, got married, became a father. I also hadn’t put out any music in years, which is the kind of thing that stops feeling urgent and starts feeling permanent. You could say I had the itch and no community. Didn’t even know where to start.
The idea that had been sitting in the back of my head was simple and kind of ridiculous: what would it sound like if a monk started a hardcore band? I was working at Headspace for 6 years and yearning for something I could really sink my teeth into.
Here’s how I actually did it. The practical stuff nobody tells you. Going from dad-mode into mid-life-crisis need-to-start-a-band was a little weird, but here we are. Vince Soliveri’s podcast, “Build Your Own Band” has tons of killer tips and tricks on how to navigate this as well. I’m a big fan of some other music creators like Magic Nothing and Bacon’s Bits.
The old model doesn’t work
When I was younger, starting a band meant finding people in your city, jamming in your parents basement, arguing about influences, eventually making something. That model assumes you have time, geographic luck, access to a soundproof space, and friends who play music and have similarly flexible schedules. Yeah. No. That doesn’t happen anymore.
I had none of those things. I’m in LA, which sounds like it should be easy for finding musicians but is actually enormous and everyone is busy doing their own thing and everyone has main-character energy. I hadn’t jammed with anyone in years. With a kid and a career, the idea of committing to rehearsals felt impossible before it even started. So I stopped waiting for the conditions that would never come and figured out what conditions I actually had.
Start with the feeling
Before thinking about who or how, I asked a different question: what do we want people to feel after listening to this? What would it be like in a room?
The answer was that I wanted people to feel like something had been shaken loose but also held, heavy but not nihilistic.
Write that down before you do anything else. Not the genre, not the influences, not the production style. The feeling. It’s all about storytelling, something humans do better than anything (even AI!).
Find the right collaborators
This is where most adult band projects die. You work with whoever is nearby and willing. Your band buds. Can’t convince your drummer friend? Project’s dead.
Ian Romano was doing remote drum tracking during the pandemic. Ian and his brother Dan are two of the most talented musicians I know, rooted in the same Welland/TOHC world I came up in: Career Suicide, Attack in Black, Cancer Bats, Alexisonfire, Deranged Records, etc. Same reference points, same instincts about what hardcore should feel like even though we’re unc now.
I sent a dm. He was in. Dan too. Let’s go.
The right collaborators are worth waiting for and worth asking even if you’re not sure they’ll say yes. Dan and Ian have Camera Varda, their own studio. Dan writes songs in 15 minutes. The project moved fast because the people were right, not because we were in the same city. We started with playlists and voice memos. It was the middle of COVID and we were being productive as hell! I loved that I could support my music buds from afar and make something cool out of it. The distance actually helped in some ways, because everyone was bringing finished ideas rather than half-formed jams that take hours to go nowhere. I honestly don’t like jamming, truly.
Get back in a room with yourself first
I hadn’t recorded vocals in years. Before going anywhere near a real session, I needed to find out if I could still do this. I’ll admit I was worried and a bit nervous.
Pirate Studios in West Adams, a few blocks from my house, became the spot. $40/hr whatever… it’s fine. I gave it everything I had over two days. Some of it worked. Some of it was rough. The point was to find out where I actually was, not where I remembered being. I brought my daughter to hang out because it was hard to justify to my wife that I was taking on this ridiculous new hobby.
Name it honestly
I had a list on my phone called “cool names for future bands” that I’d been adding to for years. Some were good, some were embarrassing. We went through them looking for something that felt like the project rather than something that just sounded okay.
Then it clicked. We’re making monk rock. It’s monk, it’s punk. We laughed and agreed. The best band names are obvious in retrospect and slightly funny when you first say them out loud. If you have to explain it, keep looking.
Build an identity, not a brand
The sun became the central symbol. I’m a believer in spending at least ten minutes outside every day. The sun is the one constant, the thing that shows up regardless of how the night went. It felt right for a project built around mindfulness and persistence.
I’m a design guy, I love the visual aspect. That usually comes first before anything else. Is it unorthodox? Yeah, sure. But I don’t care. It’s me.
Get your music to the right ears, not all the ears
Mixing with Scott Sorenson in Venice. A last-minute vocal addition from Liam Cormier of Cancer Bats on Monk Stomp, because he’s a friend and I thought he’d make it better and he did. Dan adding a vocal part to Cool and Collected at the end. What a fucking legendary crew. I can’t believe we pulled it off, honestly.
For promotion I reconnected with Scott Gubb, a college roommate who’d been writing music reviews for years, someone who understood the music and cared about independent artists. He eventually started his own PR company, Plot, and has been the key piece of getting the record heard. We compiled a huge list of zines, publications, IG accounts, podcasts, anything we might get to cover the project and hit them all up individually. Some told us to fuck off, some were stoked to hear from us. DIY ALL DAY!
Let the universe do some of the work
We’d been talking to Get Better Records, whose commitment to underrepresented artists felt aligned with everything we were trying to do. The timing wasn’t right. We stayed in touch. I love them and all that they do, but it just didn’t work out with timing.
Then an old friend, Justin Ellsworth, a designer at Dine Alone Records, reached out out of nowhere to hear the songs. Dine Alone had almost worked with my old band Vicious Cycle years earlier, a deal that fell through because we were breaking up and I horribly fumbled it. Here it was again, full circle, full blue dot. What started as a casual conversation became a worldwide release on a label with Alexisonfire, FIDLAR, and Jimmy Eat World on its roster. Absolute legendary lineup. LFG.
I can’t tell you how to engineer that part. But it doesn’t happen to people who aren’t actively making the thing. Sometimes luck lands and you get a cool opportunity and you take it.
What the project teaches you
While shooting the Nothing Matters video in South Central, we bumped into Minister Dr. Jean Perez on the street. She talked about her connection to spirit and her work with Smokey Robinson. She gave us $100 for the project. I tried to decline. She was adamant. She called me offensive names until I accepted the donation lol.
That moment ended up in the DNA of the record somehow. The openness to what shows up. The willingness to let strangers into the thing you’re making. That day of shooting the video with Connor was a blur and a total failure, but it led us to the next step. That’s the part of building a band nobody puts in the guide.
If you’re sitting on a project that hasn’t started yet: start with the feeling, not the genre. Find collaborators who share your references, not just your geography. Book a room alone before you book one with anyone else. Name it. Build something that feels like something rather than communicates something. Find people who can offer skills you’re not great at.
The gap between “I want to start a band” and “I am in a band” is almost entirely made up of waiting for conditions that will maybe never arrive. Instead just be the band. The conditions you have are the ones you build with. That’s what I call DIY.
Follow along @monk.losangeles and see what we believe in.