Smells Like Team Spirit
3 guys walk into a rehearsal room. Pasi, Thomas and Kay are about to rock!
by Arem Kay
The room is small, less spacious than the one we had at Ritterstraße, but it’ll do. Everything is set in place. Thomas points me to the guitar and shows me a selection of picks in a can placed on top of an amplifier. He suggests one that is just right. Pasi lends me his bass strap so I can stand up while playing the guitar and singing into the mic. He’s sitting on the second amp closer to the drum set with his bass guitar and looks up. With a smile on his face, he nods as if to say „ready when you are, guys“. Thomas quickly grabs his drum sticks, checks his pedal and adjusts his cymbals. With focus and a sense of ease he gets into what I can only describe as “drummer mode”. We are all in position now and ready to rock.
I start playing “Geek Stink Breath” by Green Day. We are all 90's punk rock fans and this particular song is an easy one to play. At first, we’re just feeling each other out. The tempo is not perfect, my guitar sounds slightly out of tune, the bass is trying to find the right rhythm, just like the drums slowing down and speeding up aiming to keep the beat. I can’t really hear myself sing. We struggle until we’re about one minute into the song. But as we hit the second verse, something happens. Synergy. We start getting into a flow. Each of us is playing his part while, at the same time, adjusting to the sound of the group. We play songs all the way through, but we fail with some. We fail hard. We can’t get the ending right or I forget the lyrics completely and reply “My bad”. Our mistakes help us adapt to each other’s styles. We start to listen and communicate with no words needed, intuitively picking up each other’s cues and understanding where we are all going. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Oasis. You name it, we play it. Lyrics and melodies just keep on coming up and we are having the best time remembering tunes we used to listen to when we were in our teens. Now, the past blasts out of our amps and thunders out from Thomas’ drums.
It’s funny when you think about it. Up to this day we had never played together, but somehow we simply knew what to do. We spoke the same language even though we are three guys born in three different countries who grew up in three different cultures. On paper our backgrounds are nothing alike, yet we found ourselves connecting through music as we all used to listen to the same songs and identified with them from different parts of the world.
Having found this common ground and our sound as a group, we start improvising. Two and a half hours have gone by with few breaks in between. The air in the small rehearsal room has become heavy as we’re breathing and sweating, completely immersed in the present moment. You can sense the team spirit as we’re all aligned and playing in total synchronisation.
We were a team that day. We all wanted to make music so we came together, understanding that by combining everybody’s individual talent we would come up with much more than any of us could do on their own. Just like when we put together a team here at idealo. We knew our instruments just like each member of an idealo team knows the unique skills and knowledge they bring to the table when joining on a project. We didn’t immediately start off in sync, just like any idealo team needs time to get into a groove. We quickly found our rhythm and created something amazing, just like we do at idealo when we persist and empathise with each other on our way to reach a common goal, not despite but because of our individual differences.
I’ve known this of course, but it’s something else to experience it first hand, like the three of us did that day we rocked. We came together because we know how to read music and play instruments. All we had to do was find a space, get together and jam. We started out playing covers. Music that was written by others. At some point, we will write our own. Just like we use programming language and technology at idealo to connect on common knowledge, develop together and write our future.
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