I Am Once Again Asking You If I Can Be In Your Band

My Resume:

Back before my name was Kate and my whole idea of the world hung on the words of John Keats, I went to music school to become a composer. I used to play the violin passably for twenty years and after four I could play the viola about as good as John Cale but then my hands succumbed to a series of small accidents dating back to kindergarden and now I only sing. I sing the same songs at karaoke that I sang at middle school talent shows. I have a voice like Fiona Apple (topical) but I try for Beyonce. I have a handful of microphones and I once used them as metaphors for someone I loved.

I worked as a recording engineer for four years and then I worked at a speaker company, and then I went to graduate school to study how noise bounces off walls. I've spent my whole life learning how to listen even though I'm not very good at it when it comes to conversational subtext but when it comes to what's going on with the walls of the Berlin Phil I can't be beat. I used to have tons of cool music software such as Logic 9 and a bunch of mastering plug-ins that let you delete people tapping their foot in the concert hall from a recording on a MacBook Pro 13" (2012) that had an accident with a 40oz of High Life but then came back from the dead two years later and my dad had to take me to Radio Shack to buy a new charger for it because I gave my old one to my ex-boyfriend's roommate's ex-girlfriend who had a mental breakdown two days prior. The computer finally succumbed in 2017.

I wanted to take voice lessons as a child but singing was my sister's thing and my mom pulled a good ol' Harrison Bergeron and oppressed my talents by evening the scale and saying no. I was once the lead in Guys and Dolls in the 8th grade and it didn't make me popular. I used to think that the violin was a metaphor for sadness, which it is. I tried to play after taking the recommended years off and it felt like holding a stranger in a vice grip. I have an expensive acoustic guitar that my parents bought me in high school thinking I was going to make something of it. My favorite chord is GMM7 in open position, which I never progressed beyond. They're all under my bed like car wreck bodies under sheets on the side of the road. I'm a writer now, and I promise I'm better at it when I'm not talking about myself, however it's worth acknowledging that despite these times I'm still employed even though I have to do my own taxes.

I don't have enough exes to make up songs about and I got married at 26, thus putting an end to the peril of seeking the extended company of people you turn into paper idols of attributes you yourself want. I promise I can make up for this shortcoming because I'm a ready-made songwriter: if I've learned one thing, it's that it's easy to merge two lives in one body. I sing in the shower and I sing to the dog (to the tune of songs by Electric Light Orchestra) and sometimes when the sewing machine really gets going on one I match its pace and sing along to the thread as it comes. I know the difference between Can and Neu, both of which are good but neither of which is my favorite band.

I met Philip Glass once and he pat my head and told me the best way to be successful was to make music with your friends. I did not tell Philip Glass that I wasn't talking to my friends because they were still friends with someone who came to my house in the middle of the night a few weeks after we broke up and – well – and, well, anyways, they didn't want to make music with me anyway. That's why I decided to take up the analog synthesizer and made music by myself with no need for violins or companionship. I once made a theremin out of an Arduino and thought it was science. I lost access to the analog synthesizer after graduating and knew when I walked across the stage to accept my music degree cum laude that it was all over and I was glad it had all ended like the whole four years was a bad opera written by an over-ambitious sophomore. In retrospect, the opera was okay, but the orchestration was a little clunky. I can read music even though I have fever dreams I wake up from in a cold sweat where I can't anymore.

I'm looking for:

Other people who have the cool software because I no longer do. Folks who like big words that feel good on the tongue and thickly veiled mystical and romantic metaphors involving architecture. I'm seeking someone who learned how to play the guitar beyond open chords and is okay if I do the singing and the lyrics, which is a normal role for people who play in bands to take on, even though my ex-boyfriend's roommate said I needed to at least know how to play the piano (my arch nemesis) and that nobody just sings in a band. If you live in DC and like ethereal voices from small people, shoot me a message on Twitter. After social distancing, I'd be down to jam.

EDIT: If you think we'd be compatible, feel free to send me some tracks to sing over at kate@mcmansionhell.com and I'll return something back recorded using the built in MacBook Pro microphone (because my microphones are still in Baltimore)