I think we kicked into high gear when we became a 6-piece, and that was over 5 years ago. During that time we made a good record, made some money, some videos, got invited to play some amazing shows and got some songs on a TV show. All without trying very hard.
I considered myself lucky as hell to play alongside people who could write and perform beautifully, especially the vocalists. I've got a crude voice overall. It's unrefined and I've given up hope of being some kind of crooner or brilliant harmonizer. While I can grow a fine moustache, that's where my attractiveness to the members of a barbershop quartet ends. But over the years, I wrote songs and played them for myself and a few others, always feeling uneasy with the product.
Out of the band, like a demented carnival one-and-a-half, grew a side project; Sanguine and Shiny (my friend Tony and I.) We both wrote songs, and we started playing them for each other. We did a couple shows and always got a good response, but my nervousness about singing never left. I was unpracticed and I had too little conviction to follow through with the sentiment in some of the things that I had written.
Luckily, Tony has a fantastic voice and held it down beautifully in that regard, and he was very patient with my fumbling singing attempts. But it was only a side project. The real meat and potatoes was in Hang Dog. There was something magical in that group that kept our own writing and playing on the sidelines, and we were perfectly content with the arrangement.
That band was filled to the brim with talent and friendship, powered by an amazing and prolific songwriter and it was all so well above my pay grade.
Jump-cut to the last year, when my marriage crashed and burned and took the band down with it.
In that process, I saw more clearly my poor decisions. I came to terms with how I used the band to hide from the reality of my unhappiness and to generate thick layers of ego as insulation.
