Column: You don’t have to be good at something to enjoy it

​​Music has always been an important part of my life.

Hearing a song can completely change my mood.

It can take me to another place or time. It can make me laugh, cry or rage.

It can cause me to reflect on my past, plan for my future or help drown out the noise of the day.

Catching the right song can cause me to spend an entire night listening to music. It can cause me to reach out to an old friend. It can even lead to a dance party with my kids.

Art is an amazingly powerful thing, but no art form seems to hit me like music does.

I’ve written before that many of the friendships I enjoy today were formed due to common interests in music.

Unfortunately, I’ve never mastered or even learned the basics of playing an instrument. Though I’ve put some effort into it over the years, I’ve only ever learned a few chords. I’ve still got time to fix that I suppose. I own a couple of cheap guitars and a bass I picked up from a thrift store years back. I have a drum kit I inherited for free. It’s not great but it works.

I’m a pretty terrible singer as well, but I’m comfortable with that and it’s never stopped me from belting out some lyrics.

The majority of my friends are competent musicians. Some are amazingly talented.

Since my youth, I always wanted to be in a band and somewhere around 2011, I was able to do that thanks to a few of my friends who were willing to let me sing for them. In a strange situation, my friends and I had been playing a lot of RockBand on Playstation 3. Amusingly, one of my friends who played guitar on RockBand, was a guitarist. Another of my friends who played drums in the game was a drummer. I usually did the vocals when we played and one day we realized we could just be doing this with real instruments. So we did.

In the ensuing months, we rented a small space in Ogdensburg and added a few more friends to the mix to form a band.

We spent weeks passing around a large variety of funny and incredibly inappropriate names, but…