Who among us doesn't have musical trauma of some sort? If you didn't cry through piano lessons as a child, maybe you stared longingly at the student band at high school football games, wishing your parents could have paid for a clarinet rental so you could be out there too. Or maybe you were a teenage girl who was called a poser for fiddling around with a guitar without being able to name all four members of Led Zeppelin. (Am I speaking from experience on all of these? None of your business!)
I might be overstating the ubiquity of musical trauma, and that's probably why I was so amped to have this conversation with Rax King for the latest episode of Try Hard. Rax is the author of Tacky, and her latest book Sloppy; Or: Doing It All Wrong came out this summer. She is also the host of the podcast Low Culture Boil. Rax took guitar lessons when she was in middle school and spent years reluctantly strumming the chords for "Crash" and "Good Riddance" before a boyfriend ran off to Denver with her guitar, ending her musical career.
A few years ago, she decided to dip a toe back in—this time, with the banjo. On this episode, we talk about coming back to a thing you tried (and kind of failed) to do in the past. There's also a fair amount of nerdy conversation about the commonalities between folk and punk music, and the everlasting pedagogical debate: to tab, or not to tab?
A transcript of the episode can be found here.
You can listen to Try Hard wherever you get your podcasts: RSS here, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify (if you must). Send me voice memos of the things you're trying at podcasts@defector.com or message me on Instagram @alexlaughs.
