There wasn’t much left to work with. His freedom had been restricted, his pockets were empty and whatever plans he had made for the future seemed to have collapsed along with everything else. But the desire to make music had survived.

He had an electric guitar, a cheap amplifier and a couple of cousins willing to share an unlikely ambition. They wanted to form a rock band. It sounded simple enough, until they began to play.

With no bass guitar available, he tried to make his own instrument do the job, forcing its sound through a battered amplifier that had never been particularly impressive to begin with. Behind the drums, one of his cousins struggled to maintain anything resembling a steady rhythm. It was hardly the beginning of a musical revolution.

Yet there was something strangely satisfying about it. For the first time, the idea of belonging to a band was no longer confined to his imagination. There were instruments, there were people and there was noise. Plenty of it. They had no money, no experience and little reason to believe that anything would come of their efforts. Perhaps that was part of the beauty of it. They were young enough to attempt something without first calculating the odds of failure.

The music wasn’t particularly good. It didn’t have to be.

For a little while, the world that had nearly swallowed him whole seemed willing to give something back. And somewhere beneath all that terrible noise, a dream was learning how to make itself heard.

Record Sealed.