I meet TJ’s eyes in the crowd, spotting him instantly.
He smiles back, arms crossed, and nods.
I peer back at my bandmates. Fiona’s eyes are on me, smirking like she’s ready to take on the beast. Wily, too, looking steady. Raj brandishes his drumsticks like weapons, bottom lip sucked in, eyes vibrant and excited.
I nod.
The light on the camera turns red.
There’s no opening speech. This isn’t about what I’ve got to say. Never was.
It’s about the music.
The moment I hit that first chord, Wily and Raj and Fiona all attack with me, all at once, our unified front, the four of us against the unseen monster that stares us all down from the other side of that camera.
We open with “Hate Me For a Reason”.
The hit song that started everything.
The seed of our whole hit albumHate Me.
It’s a funny story, actually. Fiona, Wily, and our first drummer Cam were getting heated. Nothing was working. Everything we threw at the higher-ups, they threw right back atus. I was chasing a sound I knew lived inside me, but nothing I did seemed to draw it out.
And we were starved for that big hit everyone dreamed of. We were biting and clawing and hissing for it—even at each other.
And it all came to a head. Fiona was fed up. Wily kept going off about how bands fall apart because of ego, he’d seen it before, his first band’s lead singer, blah, blah. Cam took his anger out on his drums and broke one of his snares.
I went into the booth, just me and Glorious. Eyes shut. Anger and resentment and bitter longing for a dream I felt was always out of reach. I’d never have it. No one would let me. Not my family who never really rooted for me when I pursued music. Not my label, who kept seeing us as numbers and upticks and statistics. Ian was even on my shit list, the guy who sold me the dream, who was with me at all those bars, at the Saltshaker, building up what would soon become this band.
I stared down the room of producers through the glass of that recording booth. “You’re gonna hate me anyway,” I said to their smug faces, “might as well hate me for a reason.”
Then I banged out some nasty chords on my guitar.
And those bitter words became lyrics.
And by the time I was through, the whole room was silent. All of them. Even my bandmates. No one knew what just happened, only that it’s exactly what every last person in that room wanted.
That’s how it happened. Just like that.
One burst of pure, honest rage, and our hit was born.
But it isn’t the same hit I’m singing now. Five years later, I’m a different man. My band is different, too—literally, Raj considered. And I’m no longer the boy chasing that dream of stardom. I found a new dream. A better one. And he’s out there in that audience.
And just like in that cold recording booth, he’s one brave and terrifying step away, just out of reach.
That’s how the lyric changes.
I’m gonna love him anyway.
So you might as well love me for a reason.
Yeah, I hear what you want, you hear what you want…
No one ever listened to words anyway.
Might as well love me for a reason, yeah…
And that reason is you.