The Ugliest Instrument I Ever Loved…

The hunger that had no name yet.

The disc came off an old grain drill, most likely — one of those dish-shaped, rust-freckled discs that spend their whole working life half-buried in dirt, turning up soil nobody ever looks at twice. It wasn't flat like a regular sheet of scrap steel would be. It had a slope to it, curving down toward the outer edge into a shallow, cone-like dish — close enough in shape to the bow of a real cymbal that my brothers took one look at it and thought, that could work. They probably found it leaning behind the equipment shed, rigged it up somehow to some sort of stand — I honestly don't remember what they used to make it hold, only that it did — and never once asked whether I wanted one. I remember only that I already had the sticks, and now, finally, I had somewhere legal to put them.

It didn't ring so much as clang — more warning bell than crash cymbal, though that curve in the blade gave it just enough shape to almost, almost sound like the real thing. I went after that dead piece of farm equipment like it owed me something, most afternoons, for what felt like hours (probably was), until somebody hollered across the yard that supper was getting cold.

I had a spot for it, too — a narrow gap against the wall between the piano and the end of a floor-to-ceiling built-in shelf, the kind that held a complete set of encyclopedias I genuinely liked to read sometimes, plus every other book in the house, a neat array of typical '70s-style knickknacks and art pieces, and — most importantly — the incredible stereo system: those powerful '70s speakers, a turntable, an 8-track player. That's where my brothers set up my snare drum and my cymbal, with a high stool for me to sit on, like they'd built me my own little corner of a recording studio without ever once calling it that.

And here's the part I want to be honest about, because it would be easy to tell this story wrong: I did not grow up starved for music and forced to build my own out of scrap metal. I grew up positively swimming in the stuff.

My mom had studied music at university before she was ever anyone's mom. Both of my brothers played and sang, and not just to be polite about it. Piano lessons weren't a fight in our house, or even really a decision — mom said we were doing it, so we did it, the same easy way you'd agree to Sunday dinner. There was no resentment in it. It was just what we did.

I started on John Thompson's Modern Course for Piano — some of the books brand new to me, others handed down from my brothers, already gone soft at the corners. The first two songs I ever learned came out of the preparatory book, Teaching Little Fingers to Play: "The Birthday Party" first, and then "Sandman's Near," which scared me a little if I'm honest. It was supposed to have a sleepy, lullaby kind of effect. To my ears, it always sounded more like the boogeyman was on his way — I didn't actually know what a sandman was, so I suppose the boogeyman was the only reference point I had. To this day, if I come across a piano, I still sit down and play those same two child's melodies, and I can still picture her piano and the living room it sat in, and feel my first piano teacher right there beside me, guiding my hands.

School layered its own version on top of all that — music running through every single grade, from primary through high school, choir and chorus included, building year over year. By sixth grade I could sit down with a theory textbook the way other kids sat down with comic books. (For the record, I did comic books too. I still have the whole collection.) I could write music, too, and more than once caught myself daydreaming about the great symphony I was going to write someday. By graduation I could make something recognizable happen on five completely different instruments — counting percussion as one of them, obviously the piano, plus a couple of brass instruments, and let's not forget the infamous tonette, that little beginner's instrument it seems like everyone in the world started on. Break the percussion family out into its individual pieces — xylophone, timpani, marimbas, all of it — and that number climbs a good deal further. On paper, I was about as thoroughly, deliberately raised into music as a kid could be.

And still. Underneath all that formal, well-taught, well-funded music education, there was a hunger that never quite matched the curriculum. It didn't start with piano lessons at five. It started before that — before I had words for much of anything, is how it's always been told to me, and I believe it, because I can still feel the shape of it today. It wasn't music in the broad sense I was after. It was rhythm, specifically and insistently and physically. Hand toddler-me a wooden spoon and a kitchen pot and I'd go to work on it like I'd been hired for the job.

We lived out where the fields did all the talking, the nearest thing to a skyline being a cluster of trees marking a neighbor's farm, about a mile off, catching the last of the evening light. I've always described it to people the way you'd describe standing on a shoreline looking out at the ocean — nothing but a straight line of horizon, maybe a few ships passing somewhere far off. That's what the plains were: one long, flat line, with some random farm popping up out of nowhere to break it. And I'll say this for those flat plains and that wide-open sky — they gave you the most beautiful sunsets you will ever see in your life.

I loved that place, and in the very same breath I was always half somewhere else in my head — somewhere louder, with a stage instead of a porch and a crowd instead of a screen door. As beautiful as those sunsets were, the older I got, the more they did the opposite of comfort me. They just showed me how far away everything else was. The cities felt like they were on the other side of the world — further than I could ever actually reach. That ugly-sounding, homemade cymbal became the exact spot where those two versions of me overlapped: a farm kid, hammering out a beat, who clearly had somewhere much bigger in mind.

I didn't get an answer for any of it until well into adulthood — until I learned that the man whose blood I happen to carry had spent his own life keeping time for a living, from behind a drum kit, in a band that still means something to people who know where to look. I'm not going to stand here and tell you biology explains everything. Nature and nurture had a long, complicated custody arrangement over me, and nurture showed up plenty — showed up in piano teachers, band practices, and a mother who handed me an instrument before I could ask for one. But I'd be lying if I said it didn't land like a key finally finding the lock it had been leaning against my whole life. The hunger had a source. It just took four decades for anyone to hand me its name.

I still think about my two brothers sometimes, creating that cymbal for me — rigging a piece of dead farm equipment to some sort of stand without asking a single question about why their little sister needed something to hit that badly. They didn't know what they were building toward. Neither did I. But every time I brought the stick down on that borrowed, beautiful scrap of steel, something in me that had been waiting a long time got to be a little less quiet. Turns out that's been the whole theme of my life. I'm just finally loud enough, and old enough, to say so out loud.

— Domino