Snake Eyes

I was 7 years old the first time I told my parents I wanted to play the bells.

I did not want to play the bells. No kid has ever, in the history of organized youth music education, wanted to play the bells. They exist because a school district buys a single percussion starter pack and distributes it to every kid who raised their hand for drums, on the theory that drummers must also learn the bells. They cannot. They will not. They refuse. I threw mine in the corner of my bedroom and genuinely do not know what happened to it after that.

What I wanted — what I had always wanted, before I had the language to say it — was the drum set. I was going to spend the next 30 years figuring out exactly what that meant.

The CD Collection

My parents came of age in the golden era of popular music without being particularly musical themselves. The Beatles. Led Zeppelin. U2. Madonna. Ace of Base, which I will defend to my dying breath. And in a category by himself: Michael Jackson.

I single him out because that music — specifically "Thriller," specifically the way a Michael Jackson song hits your body before it hits your brain — blew the top clean off my dome at age four. For a kid already obsessing over his parents' CD collection, that was the discovery that changed everything: music isn't just sound. It's rhythm. It's pulse. It's a physical thing your body understands before your mind catches up.

Blink-182 Was Our New Testament

It was 1999. I was 13. Enema of the State was not a music album, exactly. It was a permission slip. Be loud, be fast, be kind of gross, don't take yourself too seriously, and for God's sake make sure the drums are doing something. Travis Barker was my saint — a quiet guy in a band of loudmouths, discipline dressed up to look like chaos. That's the hardest thing you can do.

Our freshman band won the high school battle of the bands. We closed with "Dammit." An upperclassman who was probably the best guitarist in the school came up after to compliment my playing. At 14, that was equivalent to Paul McCartney handing me a Grammy. What it told me was that the thing I heard in my head when I played — that specific feeling of precision inside the noise — was real and audible to someone else. That's all any musician actually wants to know.

Then Life Happened

Then college happened, and dorm rooms don't fit drum sets. The economy fell apart in 2008. You grind to establish yourself professionally. You get married, you move across the country twice, and suddenly you look up and it's been years since you actually played anything.

Listening to music: always. Making it: gone. Quietly, without a dramatic exit. This is the specific grief of anyone who came of age as a musician in a world that made being a professional musician feel like a fantasy. The implicit contract was: you can have music as a passion, but not as a career. I internalized that so thoroughly I didn't even notice when I stopped fighting it. It wasn't a decision. It was an erosion.

Before you know it, you're 38. Two kids. A mortgage. A dog-eared list of things you used to want to do. Somewhere on that list, barely visible under everything else: play in a band.

The Night Everything Changed

About six months ago, I was lying in bed, phone in hand, and stumbled onto a CBS Sunday Morning segment about AI music. I'd been using AI tools heavily in my day job. But music? Hadn't crossed my mind. Felt gimmicky.

I downloaded Suno, pulled up a guitar riff I'd been noodling for weeks, fed it a prompt and waited. About 30 seconds later a track came back. Full production. Vocals, bass, a drum fill that landed exactly where I'd always heard one landing in my head. It was maybe 80% of the thing I'd been imagining. But 80% of the thing you've been imagining, when you've spent 15 years imagining it in silence, is genuinely stunning.

I recognized that feeling. I'd felt it last at 15, in my parents' basement, convinced that if I just nailed the intro fill one more time, everything would be perfect. It wasn't a new feeling. It was an old one that had been sitting in a corner, waiting, the same way a 7-year-old's bells gather dust under a pile of Bulls gear.

Hypersonic Heartline

The band is called Hypersonic Heartline. I came up with the name watching the opening scene of Top Gun: Maverick. The band has a female lead singer and a female bassist because I've always loved the sound of punk fronted by women, and if I'm building this thing from scratch I'm going to build it how I want it. I invented backstories. Built out their visual identity. Wrote and produced — Suno on production, me on guitar demos and lyrics — 47 songs across four albums' worth of material.

I cannot stop. I don't mean that in the inspirational-poster sense. I mean it clinically. It's 11:30 on a Wednesday night. I have a 4-year-old who wakes up at 6 a.m. and a 6-month-old who wakes up whenever he feels like it. And I am still sitting here in the dark tweaking a bridge on a song that, by any rational accounting of my life, I absolutely do not have time to be tweaking.

The Honest Part

Some people hear "AI-assisted concept album" and their eyes light up. Those are my people. Others smile in the specific way that means they're trying hard to be supportive of something they privately believe is unhinged. I respect the effort.

I will never play a sold-out show. I will never have the thing that happens in a room when a real band locks in — that physical, communal electricity that no algorithm has figured out how to fake. I cannot tour. I cannot session. Hypersonic Heartline is a laptop project made by a guy with a day job and two kids who goes to bed at 10:30 on a good night. The market for what I do and the market for what professional musicians do are not the same market.

The debut is called Snake Eyes. Twelve tracks. Fast, melodic, occasionally dark. The first time I played the finished opener — alone, headphones on, sitting at the same kitchen table where I answer work emails and pay bills — I felt something I hadn't felt about my own music since I was a freshman walking offstage after "Dammit." The specific feeling that the thing in your head made it out into the world intact. That's not nothing. That's actually the whole thing.

The kid in my parents' basement with the four-piece kit and the Blink-182 CDs? He's been waiting around a long time. Turns out he just needed a laptop, a few guitars, and an AI that doesn't judge you for staying up past midnight on a Wednesday chasing the version of the song that lives in your head.

I still don't know what happened to the bells. I'm pretty sure I never will. And I'm pretty sure that's fine, because it turns out the thing I wanted all along wasn't the bells. It was never the bells. It was always just the next song.