The Story of Are Seven

A work task last week took me YouTube, where I found out that I didn't have a username yet. "No problem," I thought as I always do when prompted to create a username. "areseven is never taken." Only this time, it was. Some guy in Turkey. I was devastated. What could "areseven" possibly mean to this guy?! Doesn't he know that it's been part of my life for 20 years? Didn't he research and find that I had the areseven.com domain and areseven@ all of the major email providers?! Apparently not.

Then it realized that, not only does this YouTube owner not realize these things, you, my readers may not know it. So here, after four years of blogging, settle in for the unnecessarily long story of the origin of Are Seven:

It begins in Houston, where everything is both exactly like and nothing like it's Texan stereotypes. Football's a big deal. It's hot. It's boring. You can only get around in a car. People say "y'all", but there's not much in the way of accents. Boys wear cowboy boots and jeans with tuxedo jackets and cummerbunds to the formals (aka, "The Texas Tux"). It's an unfortunate place, I never liked it, and now I'm cursed to care about a town I hate.

The high school's architecture was made for warm weather: mostly open with a big courtyard and lots of steel and plexiglass. It was also clearly made in the '60's. It had seven wings of classrooms, which were differentiated by color: blue, orange, green, aqua (where the tough kids went outside to smoke), and red. The classrooms then had numbers with a letter to designate the color of the wing: B-9, O-14, G-17, etc. It sounded like a game of Battleship.

I had almost no friends or social life to speak of through most of high school (I know everyone says this, but I really didn't), until I started doing journalism in my junior year. Extracurricular activities were a big deal (and extremely competitive) at this high school, and the yearbook and newspaper staffs had pretty close-knit communities. It was starting my junior year and into my senior year when I made my first group of close friends in high school. We spent many late-night hours in the classroom that was the journalism headquarters: red wing, room seven. R-7, one of the few numbers in the school that carried a weight of meaning.

A year after I graduated, a line in a Michelle Shocked song—"Texas always seemed so big, but you know you're in the largest state in the Union when you're anchored down in Anchorage"—took on personal meaning when I moved with my parents to Alaska, taking a year off before I went back to college. It was an intentionally lonely year for me, marked by a switch of musical interests from drums to songwriting. I bought two guitars, a bass, and a 4-track and took to writing and recording in my bedroom.

My first stabs at songwriting had lyrics and virtually no understanding of song structure. They were terrible songs. But luckily, this was a time when I became strangely fascinated with surf instrumentals, and I abandoned attempts to write lyrics and just stuck to the sounds, and it started sounding pretty good.

The songs I was constructing started forming into a project: I would write an instrumental for each of the friends I had left back in Houston, giving it a sound that I thought suited the person and then an in-joke title. I finished the songs, mocked up a cover for this "band" called The Mome Raths, after my favorite part in Alice in Wonderland, and copied tapes to send to these friends, none of whom would know about the project until the tape arrived in the mail.

It's kind of amazing to think that, in this grand execution of the album, I almost forgot an important piece: the record label. In one final in-joke, I took a cue from the fact that almost all the friends this tape was going to I had known from the journalism staff, and I decided to nod to the room where we spent so much time. But I spelled it out: Are Seven. In spite of its now-blush-worthy immaturity and clueless recording, that tape was one of the proudest achievements of my life, and the name Are Seven gained an even greater meaning in my life.

The Mome Raths, "The Penguin Spy Theme"


Years passed and I found myself in college and in a real band, with actual other human beings. We called ourselves Touk, and we loved us, which, in retrospect, was both justified and ridiculous. We wanted to conquer the world, and didn't quite understand why it didn't happen. Turns out we made a lot of mistakes, but I'm glad that we gave it a try, and I'm glad that on our releases (an EP cassette, a full-length CD and a 7" single), we attached the Are Seven record label on those self-released tunes.

Touk, "Ten Overrun"


The Touk days changed the way I thought of Are Seven: it turned from a respectful nod to my old high school friends to a goal of my own record label. Laziness and cluelessness kept me from ever making this reality, though, which you may have guessed, since it's fairly well known that, among the many things that I am, one thing I am not is the proprietor of a record label.

The rise of the internet brought on a need for usernames and email addresses, but it was an embarrassingly long time before I realized I could use areseven. But it was perfect once I stumbled on it. It was a pseudonym that I could use almost anywhere, since it was never taken.

Until last week.