Exposé: Girls in Bands

I think the topic of girls in bands deserves some further examination. Also, it's midnight on a Monday (technically a Tuesday) and I'm still crushing on Bjorn something fierce.

The truth is, I've never been in a band or other musical project that I felt really satisfied with. I'm somewhat bad with money (though I've gotten a lot better about it) and most of the technique and tactile skills required to play music are Greek to me, and I'm also the kind of person that gets easily bored with creative projects if I can't produce the results I want in a short amount of time (I'm also getting better about this). When I was talking to Bjorn the other day, I pretended to myself that I was in a really cool band so that I'd be more confident. It worked pretty well.

Maybe my lacking band resumé is a blessing in disguise, because I find 'band girlfriend' relationships abominable. I don't want to be in a relationship with someone who lacks passions of her own and adopts whatever the guy she's with as her interests. It's fine if your partner turns you on to a good band or whatever, but I've seen so many women who begin to live vicariously through their boyfriend's band, and that's neither healthy or rewarding for either person in that relationship. It's really not.

I bring this up, because while I know this format for a relationship is cursed at best, the world we live in is set up where men are supposed to impress women with something. If a girl is cute, and fun to be around, and in an awesome band, how the heck am I supposed to impress her? I noticed that after I saw Kawaiietly Please's set at the NoiseFest, I immediately was flooded with self hate. 'If I could just be in a band that was equal or greater to the awesome of Bjorn's band, then maybe she'd want to talk to me more. If I could just act more charming and charismatic. If I could just loose thirty pounds and grow at least six inches taller...'

This sort of reaction certainly isn't unique to women in awesome bands, but it happens a lot. I think I was able to collect myself rather well with Bjorn. I was going to tell her straight up that I'd really like to get to know her better, but I didn't, and it's because I chickened out, but it's also because by the time I was chatting with her she was drunk. Also, if I lay myself at her feet like that and she laughed in my face, that would make the long drive back to the bay area a really unpleasant one. My car doesn't have a working radio, so I wouldn't even have that to distract me from the rejection blues.

So that was a long-winded way of saying that cute girls in bands are very intimidating.

There's two cute girls in bands that I got crushes on in my life that really stand out to me.

The first is Keely from The Gay Science. They jumped onto a show at The Broken Glass House right after I'd changed the name to The Langolier. The show had a bunch of high school metal bands on it and about two hundred people showed up. The Gay Science and the other bands they were touring with and I really hit it off, because while we appreciated high school metal, none of us were really of that scene. I'm listening to that YouTube video I linked to right now, and it's a really poor example of The Gay Science's music. I still listen to their album pretty regularly, and I love it to death. Keely and co. were just super cool and she was really damn cute.

The second is Kia from Mixel Pixel. They played at a bar and I think I was the only one who showed up who knew who they were. They put on a really awesome show and I offered to let them crash at my place. We all went back to my house and one of my roommates was still up and everyone smoked pot except me because I was Straight Edge at the time. Kia was really nice. I don't think we really saw eye-to-eye, because she was excited to do the Chico thing (i.e. She was hoping to go to a frat party.) and at the time (and to this day) I viewed the Chico party scene as detrimental to what is great about the town, and I hated it for this reason. Still, she was a very high-on-life individual, who was genuinely happy to have a place to stay and excited to meet someone who was into what her band was doing. She gave me some soap and lip balm that she made herself ('and it's vegan!' she exclaimed when she presented it to me) and I still have the lip balm. I actually just took it out to give it a sniff and describe the scent, and I think it's gone bad. I didn't know lip balm could do that.

I should stress that Kia and Keely are far from the only women in bands who I've had crushes on. They're just the two most quintessential examples of such.