Map of July (Part 1)

Late November/early December of this year would have been the tenth anniversary of Map of July had it survived. We came a lot closer to celebrating a decade than we would have imagined when we first got together. In honor of this almost anniversary (and some of the people who altered my life forever), I will be doing a series of posts about the history of the band, and some of the memories that stick out for me. The artwork which accompanies these posts are all elements used by Map of July at one time or another, and created either by Marc Ludena or myself, or by both of us when we weren't bickering.

Marc helped me move from Denver back to Chicagoland in September of 1996. In exchange, he asked only that I go with him to see a band he loved called Over the Rhine in October. The day of the show I tried to get out of it, citing a headache, but he wouldn't hear of it. He pretty much forced me to go.

The concert was incredible. Intimate, passionate music performed expertly by a wonderful group of folks on the stage. I snuck over and bought every record they had recorded at that time whilst I was supposed to be out smoking. I didn't want Marc to know how much I had enjoyed the thing I had tried to evade.

Driving home, I said again (it was always in the back of my mind) that it would be great to start a band that could capture some portion of what we had seen that night. He agreed, and I mentioned that I knew a guitar player (Marc was already a bassist) we could call and see where things might go. I, of course, would sing, since I didn't know how to play anything. Marc surprised me by saying this was a great idea.

Marc was one of the only musicians I had known who had heard me sing and thought I sounded good enough to play music with. My friend Ian was another, an old friend from high school with whom I had recently rekindled communication. I called Ian to gauge his interest. He seemed enthusiastic, and came over to my house on a Sunday afternoon to play around and see what we thought. I remember thinking afterward that we had both probably sounded terrible, but I really wanted to be in a band, so I told Marc it had gone swimmingly and told both of them to come the following Sunday.

We goofed around for a month or two. Marc was a really solid bassist, but I had never sung much into a microphone, and Ian came from a folk music background where he had never been required to match anyone's timing but his own. So both of us were pretty self-conscious around Marc at first.

When Marc had to take some time off from rehearsing in January, Ian and I decided to spend that time writing some original music. The first time we tried to write, we wrote a couple of songs, and the next week a couple more, and we discovered that we worked well together. I tended to like his guitar lines and he tended to like my lyrics and melodies, and that became more or less what we did for a month solid: marry his output to mine.

When Marc returned, we had more than a few new songs to play for him, and we were a bit nervous that he would tell us they were crap. After all, he was the first person to hear any of the songs who hadn't written them. I think we were both relieved when he started to play along with some of them, clearly having ideas and liking the songs.

When we started working on our own music, suggesting things to one another and creating something together instead of simply playing someone else's songs, that was the moment we really became a band.