When I was younger, I never liked music. Friends and family would ask me what my favorite songs and artists were, but I would simply respond with, “I don’t know. I don’t like music.” I didn’t realize it then, but I must have been a really boring kid. My father would always play songs out loud on the TV – Green Day, Bob Dylan, U2, to name a few. Some of it appealed to me, but overall, I didn’t feel like wasting my time or energy on music. For the most part, my older brothers felt the same way, and we all kind of lived in our own bubble of a musicless existence.

As time went on, nothing changed, and my middle school years showed no sign of growth. That was until, seemingly randomly, when I was around 12-13 years old, my brothers decided to invert everything. They sat me down and played some music they liked, mainly artists our dad played. I’m not sure if I was just a droid liking and doing whatever they liked and did, but something was different this time. It was like a caveman discovering fire. I immediately became obsessed with music, listening to it any chance I got and discovering new bands I loved, like The Strokes, Black Country, New Road, and Neutral Milk Hotel.

Around a year after this new discovery, my brothers picked up playing guitar. They encouraged me to pick up an instrument as well, the bass guitar, since they were already going to become guitarists. I was a bit skeptical at first because although I loved music, learning an instrument takes a lot of dedication. Eventually, I caved and bought my first bass, a black Sterling Music Man Stingray 4, from my local Guitar Center for $299.99. Straight away, I got to learning, practicing, and playing some songs that I loved, so I tried looking up tabs for songs like ‘When I Come Around,' ‘Santeria,’ and ‘Is This It,’ but I quickly learned that bass was going to be harder than expected. These songs seemed impossible to learn at the time—weird fingerings, hammer-ons and pull-offs, fast tempos, using my pinkie? I thought I could go my whole music career without using any of these simple techniques, but I learned the hard way that I couldn’t avoid the basics, so I played until my fingers hurt. Looking back on some old recordings of us playing, good God were we complete garbage, but we were having fun.

After a couple of years of improving as a band, it was yet again that my brothers had another idea: We should make an album. I immediately loved the idea of making music, and we got right to work. We sat around in their room for several hours a day, trying our best to make something good. Looking back on some of these old songs we wrote, I realize now that we had next to no clue what we were doing, and we were cooking up some true abominations, but everyone starts somewhere. Although we weren’t great, we were still having the time of our lives. I had never felt so much passion for something, and I knew that this was what I needed to do for the rest of my life. Eventually, we needed a name for our band, and we agreed on Milk Shack. A bit odd, but we were happy with it.

After trial and error, fixing up our sound, getting better at the songwriting process, and spending up to 8 hours a day doing what we love, we have now made a lot of music that we’re actually proud of. We’re still working towards releasing our music, but it’s still cool to see how far we’ve come and how our dreams have come to fruition, even if they are the exact opposite of what I thought they’d be not too long ago.

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