The Setlist That Refused to Exist

Band practice starts at 7.
At 6:59, we still don’t know what we’re playing.

This is not for lack of songs. The problem is abundance. Too many riffs loitering around like unsupervised pets. Half-finished originals. Covers we “basically know.” Songs we used to know. Songs we swear are easy until someone counts off and the room fills with polite confusion.

Someone says, “Let’s warm up first.”
No one agrees on what warming up means.

The guitarist proposes something new. The bassist remembers a version from three practices ago that may or may not exist. The drummer asks, reasonably, whether the song has an ending. Silence answers. The keyboardist scrolls through patches like they’re flipping channels in a motel at midnight.

Beverages appear. Fireball, which everyone accepts without discussion. Malört, which almost everybody hates, but somehow keeps showing up anyway, like a bad idea that refuses to learn. Someone takes a shot to prove a point. No one is sure what the point was.

We try a song anyway. It collapses in the second verse, but not in a dramatic way. More like a chair quietly giving up. We stop. We discuss. We start again. This time we get further, which somehow feels worse.

Someone suggests a cover. The wrong key is chosen immediately. Someone else suggests a different cover. We all realize we’ve never actually played it together. Democracy fails. Consensus evaporates. Someone sips Fireball like it might explain things. Someone else regrets the Malört instantly.

And then, occasionally, something clicks.

A song comes together out of nowhere. Everyone lands on the same beat without negotiating it. The dynamics make sense. The ending actually arrives. No one stops. No one talks. We finish and just sit there for a second, suspicious of what just happened.

“That one was good,” someone says carefully, as if it might hear us.

We do not immediately play it again. That would be reckless.

At some point, we also play something accidentally good. No one knows what it was. No one wrote it down. It is gone now, living only in the faint ringing of ears, a lingering taste of regret, and the suspicious optimism that follows.

By the end of practice, we have:

• Not finalized a setlist
• Not abandoned any songs
• Added three new “maybes”
• Argued briefly about tempo
• Made one truly questionable beverage choice
• Agreed we sounded better last week

And yet, somehow, this counts as progress.

Because band practice isn’t really about playing songs. It’s about orbiting them. Circling ideas. Testing gravity. Discovering which ones pull everyone into the same direction and which ones scatter us into polite chaos.

Next practice will be different, we say.
Next practice, we’ll decide beforehand.

We will not.