Wasted Years

We've finally almost got the house back in order after trying out a different configuration for the rooms,  and even though it didn't work out, I'm actually quite glad to have gotten a real spring cleaning in for once. I'm taking a break, sitting on the couch, drinking yerba mate, and on the TV comes an Iron Maiden concert from Brazil in 2009.

The guitarist and fellow songwriter from my first real band post-high school, Chris Kaufmann, always used to say that, if I'd been exposed to Iron Maiden instead of Yes in my musically formative years, my whole life would have been vastly different.

I hear the opening riff of "Wasted Years" and realize how precisely my high school rock band (named, embarrassingly enough, "Harborcoat" after the R.E.M. song, even though our sound apparently owed more to the New Wave of British Metal than it did to the Athens scene) ripped it off as the intro for our first song, and I begin to suspect that I may have been more influenced by Maiden than I knew.