Change Your Life. Start a Band.

Mr. Lindgren is the editor of the zine Let’s Start a Band.

In the spring of 1982, six friends got together in an East Village apartment to start a country-punk band. They had a guitar, a bass and some sticks and spoons to bang on. “We tried Hank Williams and Tammy Wynette songs and our voices wrapped around each other as everybody found their natural level,” wrote Amy Rigby in “Girl to City,” her 2019 memoir. “We wailed through a version of ‘Hey Good Lookin’ that lasted long enough to cook an entire spaghetti dinner. It was the most fun I’d had in my life.”

That band was called Last Roundup. You’re forgiven for not knowing the name. Though the group had a relatively brief existence and never had anything close to a hit, Ms. Rigby’s memoir — a lucid, unguarded account of band life — is one of the best I’ve read. And I’ve read tons.

In fact, I’ve spent the last year plundering music biographies, memoirs, magazine profiles, documentaries and podcasts for stories of start-up bands. I did this after Chris Scianni, an old friend who got in touch and asked for my help in writing about his decades of hustling in the music business. In high school, Chris and I had both been in bands — we shared a drummer — but mine was a bunch of goofballs burdened with too many opinions and too little patience for rehearsing. He was truly talented and dedicated, the best guitar player any of us knew, obsessed with Buddy Guy, Keith Richards and Joe Strummer.

As we caught up over lunch, I recognized that Chris has another exceptional gift: He is a band builder. That thing we both did as kids? He kept doing it — he’s had a band that was signed to Sony; he played in the tennis star John McEnroe’s band; and he has jammed with Bruce Springsteen at the Stone Pony. He has also spent his adult life keeping an eye out for collaborators to help him go places he wouldn’t be able to reach on his own.

The more we talked about it, the more I came to understand that Chris’s band-joining impulse is the perfect resistance to these stupefying times. Chris and I decided to create a zine about starting a band, dedicated to a simple message: Life problems, big and small, recede when you get in a room and play music with a few friends or friends of friends or, why not, complete strangers.

Make it up as you go along. If nobody else wants to sing, you sing. Be a zealot about keeping your instrument in tune but nothing else. Force yourself to write one new song a week, no matter how dreadful the first ones come out. Reach out across the divide of awkwardness to the closet geniuses in your life, like that ex-co-worker who has a thing for modular synths. Be especially kind to your drummer, if you have one, because drummers are impossible to find. Or maybe you’ll have to learn the drums. Book a gig. Make stickers and hand them out on the subway. Stop chasing what everybody else is chasing. Create your own center of gravity.

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