“Your husband’s a guitarist, right? Does he want to play in the Dad Band for the Spring Faire?” That’s verbatim what a father from our preschool asked my wife. She and I shared a big, long laugh. Until I noticed she wasn’t laughing. In fact, she seemed hurt. “You wouldn’t even do that for your own kids,” she said, “would you?”

It’s just that I had sworn I wouldn’t be one of those parents. The kind who dress their kids in AC/DC onesies. The kind who send their kids to rock schools. But, as my wife pointed out, maybe I took it all too far the other way. You see, I’d never told my kids about my music life. Ever.

I was in two definitively obscure bands. The first was Bullet LaVolta. But in the second one — Chavez — I really found my vibe. I started it in New York in 1992 with Matt Sweeney, who sang and played guitar, and then later we added James Lo on drums and Scott Marshall on bass. We put out two albums on Matador Records that we’re still really proud of.

For me, Chavez was this perfect creative beast. We had all these annoyingly strong ideas about what we wanted to do, and we did them. We did them exactly. But eventually, life pulled us apart. I found work as a screenwriter, married and had kids. Scott had kids, too. James returned to composing for modern-dance pieces. Matt kept making great music with other people.