Current Events > Need to vent about a band situation.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Wall of text but I'm pretty sure there's a valuable life lesson in here somewhere.

So I used to jam with a guy and I was the main guitarist and he was either rhythm or bass, but we didn't have a drummer. So I bought a drum set and learned to play. We ended up putting the first project (written almost entirely by me) on the back burner and started working on some punk songs with me on drums and him on guitar. I wanted to improve on drums so it was still a good deal for me. During this period I was the main person who would take the riffs and melodies and arrange them into full songs. We wrote about 15 songs together over maybe half a year. I was very meticulous (not strict or mean, I'm a pretty nice guy) about hammering out the details for every little part.

Then one day we have a talk and he says he feels like I'm dominating the creative process, which I probably was, though I think it was for the right reasons. So I agreed to give him the reigns for a while since I already had tons of other stuff I was working on by then. Over the next few years he only wrote two songs on his own since we had all but stopped practicing after the talk.

Eventually he asked me to play drums with him and some other guy. I joined up. After a few months I told them they weren't taking it seriously enough, and then they just stopped inviting me to practice. It was the usual deal with people getting high/wasted before practice and playing like shit and not showing up prepared (no picks, broken strings, etc). So I just said fuck it, I don't need them anyway. But a few months later they asked me to rejoin and I agreed, mainly because I wanted the practice. At this point I just wanted to improve my own playing.

So eventually even this project dissolved. Almost a full year passed where they kept planning and cancelling practice sessions. I decided on my own to learn more about recording so I could record my own songs, and honestly more for myself than for them I put together some backing tracks for the songs we used to play together and asked them if they wanted to record. I figured everything I learned would transfer over to my main project.

As an aside, though I think it's central to the whole life lesson thing, I believe that the best way to better oneself is to help other people. Lazy people never learn things for themselves, and so they're eternally dependent. Helping ungrateful people is a really tough pill to swallow, but if you come out better than you were before then you still kind of win.

Recently I had a talk with the first guy and the conversation came around to writing credits. He seemed to think that coming up with a basic riff is enough to warrant full credit. I subtly dropped some examples of bands where the "leader" got too big of an ego and the band fell apart and then the leader never wrote anything good again, and that people usually only leave because they don't feel their contributions are appreciated. He still disagreed and went one further and made it seem like he thought he deserved the writing credits on ALL of the songs we had up to then. The fuck...

So at this point I'm struggling with whether I should continue for my own growth or if I should just tell them they're on their own. I've already put in a lot of work on this.

tl;dr:
Lazy band mates, personal growth, time wasted(?)
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Whoa... that's way more text than I realized before I hit the post button.
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SpiralDrift posted...

just tell them they're on their own

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The way I'm trying to rationalize this to myself is that I'd like to be the kind of guy where people say "Everything that guy touched is gold." And I know I could make the album great. I almost feel stupid for even caring about the writing credits since I know my own contributions and don't really care what others think.
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Drop em. They're not on the same seriousness level that you are, and trying to work with them isn't gonna produce any good results.

And as much as it sucks, to avoid any bad feelings/legal issues it might be a good idea to just abandon any collaborative works you've done with them in the past. It seems like if you try to go ahead with recordings without giving them credit, deserved or no, it's going to become a thing and will probably be way more trouble than it'd be to just start fresh and make some new material on your own.
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Schwarz posted...

Drop em. They're not on the same seriousness level that you are, and trying to work with them isn't gonna produce any good results.

And as much as it sucks, to avoid any bad feelings/legal issues it might be a good idea to just abandon any collaborative works you've done with them in the past. It seems like if you try to go ahead with recordings without giving them credit, deserved or no, it's going to become a thing and will probably be way more trouble than it'd be to just start fresh and make some new material on your own.

I have tons of my own material and mainly wanted to use the recordings with them as a springboard to better things. I do feel an attachment to the songs, though. Imagine taking the most basic punk riffs imaginable and making them all stand out somehow anyway and then having to throw it away. Sucks.

To further complicate things they want to change the band name to a name that I thought up a long time ago. They were set on two names they thought up themselves, but then they asked around and everyone liked my idea better for whatever reason. I didn't even lobby for it. Thinking of taking it back.
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Schwarz posted...

Drop em.

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