"Bands are like people. They're born and then they die"

A band begins as a fragile organism: a handful of people discovering a shared pulse. First songs form like embryonic limbs, thrilling, as practice rooms become wombs where a collective self develops. Early shows are childhood, defined by energy, missteps, and a hunger to be seen. With time, the group learns its gait, hardens its bones, and becomes legible to itself. The audience becomes a mirror; the industry, an ecosystem; a tour, a circulatory system shuttling lifeblood across cities.

Eventually, adolescence strains the body. Tastes diverge, ambitions pull at ligaments, success adds weight. Some bands survive by evolving; others calcify around a formula. Peak years feel like adulthood: authority, resource, consistency, a sound that can carry rooms. Yet every organism has limits. Exhaustion, injury, lives, or cultural shifts erode resilience. The end can be sudden like an accident, or a fading pulse between records. Breakups resemble deaths because they leave a shape in memory a living presence used to fill.

Recordings become fossils and heirlooms, posters relics, influences children who carry fragments into new bodies. Reunions haunt: familiar voices return, but the timekeeping has changed, and the old rooms no longer fit. The name may persist through lineup changes, but identity is not immortal; the shell survives while the soul moves on.

Mortality clarifies value. Knowing the life of a band is finite encourages risk, deepens commitment, and sanctifies unrepeatable night when everything aligns. Scenes regenerate because endings free space for beginnings. Musicians shed skins and reassemble elsewhere, proof creative energy migrates even as entities dissolve. To love bands is to practice elegy and celebration: to show up while they breathe, to honor the work after silence arrives, and to accept that the birth-death arc is not a failure of art but its most human truth for listeners and players.