Q: "Hi Library, how long have you guys been a band for?"
A: This is a loaded question with a serpentine and slippery full-answer. The official position/deflection we're asserting right now is that The Library has existed for as long as the handle has: about one, wrinkle-inducing, hair-graying, brain-deteriorating, year; punctuated and made memorable by the coming and going of major label record deals, record amounts of coke and Jameson, encounters with Adrian Grenier, Mischa Barton, and the chick who got kicked off America's Next Top Model for "not having the face of a model. Not even a catalog model." (Thanks, Wikipedia) To celebrate the release of our EP (4 songs that took a year to make. Sheesh.) slightly longer, more convoluted answer to the query which details a 3-year personnel snowballing and collective evolution.
Matt.
Matt and I met as freshmen in college, a time where the inertia of fate propelled us in completely inverse academic/life trajectories. Freshmen year I seldom left my room, choosing to immerse myself in schoolboy studies and myriad musical pursuits. Matt rarely left his room as well, as there was a continuous, vacuous black hole of depraved, drug-addled social activity keeping him from attending class.
"Dude. Could you hot box a black hole?"
Oh I don't really know man. Maybe?
"That's some Stephen Hawkings shit."
Sophomore year things shifted. Matt, poisoned and insane, found himself unable to restrain tears brought on by the sight of trees. He, thus, actively sought to remedy his mania and quell his unholy appetites for contraband and freshman vagina by taking some time off of school and sorting these issues out. He had a lovely girl who helped him through it. Me, fed up with my present roommates tendency towards clogging our sink with vomit, and creating a thick Carl's Jr./Subway haze about our domicile, asked to be transplanted to Matt's old room. Matt's academically stable, but no less debaucherous partner in-crime Aditya, became my roomate.
A jovial/volitile Indian with a cockney swagger, a penchant for excess, and a talent for bending the wills of those who challenged his party agenda was, for Matt, the ultimate enabler and for me, a fucking nuisance. There was no number of tequila shots one could take to satisfy his peer pressure bloodlust, 60 second keg-stands were for "twats", and if one were to defy his mandate, you'd have an evening of jabbing, titty-twisting, course language and cock-blocking to enjoy, courtesy of the Indian. But his exploits and contagious enmity were only the catalyst of my metamorphosis.
Junior year, Matt and my respective trajectories intersected, and while Matt wasn't the deranged party gorilla he once was, and I had yet to reach my full potential as a drunken asshole, our combined pathos, weathered, downtrodden personas and general punk-rockness combined to form something far more fucked up than our individual characters would allow. Over the summer, Matt's lovely girlfriend who stood by his side during his convalescence had dumped him. I made the awful mistake of moving in with a girl I was completely in love with; she didn't love me back. During the school year we engaged in frequent ignorant, drunken dumb-shit behavior and starved for even the most superficial love and attention, we started a band.
That's really the long and short of how shit got underway.
Court comes next...
