Photo courtesy of Jamie Brennan

I never had “the dream” of becoming a musician growing up. I was quiet and reserved, and lacked any sort of musical knowledge other than the four chords I learned on my sister’s discarded Toys-R-Us keyboard.

It wasn’t until my third year of high school that I, and many others, had enough of hearing me play “My Heart Will Go On”. I began spending hours with that keyboard, slowly teaching myself other songs using YouTube tutorials, and developing an understanding of how the piano worked. Attending Etobicoke School of the Arts (ESA) meant I was surrounded not only by immensely talented people, but also a piano at every corner of the building. Rather than going to class, I would sit at whichever piano was furthest away from the hall monitor and make songs until I was apprehended.

By grade 12, our drummer Wyeth and I, along with our friends Jamie and Nick, would make impromptu songs in one of our basements - me on the piano, Wyeth on a guitar (playing it either normally or providing percussion on the back of it), Jamie on the harmonica he found at the bottom of his bag and Nick on vocals (not singing, but passionately encouraging us). It was the ideal band… at the time. We officially recorded our first song (on our phones) and called it “Mess of Me”.

It wasn’t until October that we learned of Tristan’s jam room. For some reason, I was now set on creating a band of people who were willing to learn music and grow together. But I never imagined it would become anything more than something to do after school. The first thing we needed was a singer, because although none of us explicitly said it, we all knew I wasn’t going to make the cut. Then I found a YouTube video. Tristan, who was famous around school for his appearance on The Next Star, had posted a video of himself playing the guitar and singing - and I was sold.

Surprisingly, Tristan immediately bought into our “project”, and explained to us that he had a room in his house filled with band equipment and instruments. That same day, we went there after school for a few hours. We spent around 20 minutes coming up with simple chord progressions, hit record on our phones, and improvised two songs.

From that day on, we never looked back. We had this connection that allowed us to completely improvise songs. We would post our audio clips on Soundcloud and celebrate like children when we saw that 100 people had listened. Then when we would go to school, we learned that it was our friends who were listening and enjoying our music. So, for the rest of high school, we made music for them. After high school, we just kept going because we loved it so much and wanted to see how far we could take it.

Our first album did better than we would have ever dreamed, with some songs getting millions of streams. Everything we did was supposed to be our last, but each time, we were reminded that we had something special - even if it wasn’t necessarily due to our talent or musical knowledge. There wasn’t a single moment that we realized we wanted to make music, but a series of events that kept us believing in ourselves and motivating us to continue growing.

To this day, we still don’t know how to make music without each other - and to me, there’s a unique beauty in that.