So, there's this guy at work, right? And I've been working with him for probably a year or so by the time this story takes place. Same team and everything. Kindof elbow-to-elbow. Good guy.
The company would take us all out to lunch occasionally. And this one time, 15 or so of us are all sat down at the chain restaurant and shooting the shit about whatever.
And the music playing at the restaurant plays a song by Imagine Dragons. And then some other random song. And then another one by Imagine Dragons.
I don't remember specifically how many Imagine Dragons songs they played before we even got our food, but it was enough in a short enough period that someone commented "huh, they're playing a lot of Imagine Dragons today."
And this was in the period when it was in vogue to dunk on Imagine Dragons, right? And so I'm like "yeah, at least they're playing Imagine Dragons songs from back when Imagine Dragons was good."
And I expect folks to banter back at me and maybe some folks would defend Imagine Dragons, but probably more would agree, or even take the position that Imagine Dragons was never good. (Again, that was in vogue at the time.)
But everyone just kind of looks at me awkwardly.
And I have no idea what's going on until the guy next to me leans over and lets me in on it.
Apparently the guy directly across from me grew up with the Imagine Dragons band members and nearly ended up in the band at one point in his life.
And I worked with the guy for a year and never knew that. And I kindof looked like an asshole over it. What are the chances! I don't live anywhere near Las Vegas where Imagine Dragons came from or anything.
I appologised, of course. He kindof laughed it off, but I still felt bad about it.
In retrospect, a piece of me wonders if the boss hadn't called ahead and asked the restaurant to play a lot of Imagine Dragons just to make the guy across from me feel special or something. But then again, the vibe this chain restaurant gave off was that probably the restaurant didn't really control the playlist at all. Probably it was just some XM station or something. (It didn't have a DJ or any speaking between songs or anything. Just music. So maybe that gives some credence to the boss-called-ahead theory? Dunno. Dunno.)
Maybe some day I should call the restaurant and ask if they're able to take music requests or whatever just to get some closure. Lol.
If I was “almost in a band” I’m not sure that hearing that band would bring up positive feelings for me.
I don’t really follow why saying “they used to be good” when this guy would have been in the band and implying they got worse after that would make this guy feel bad.
Basically this guy was still friends with the band members and kept in touch with them and stuff and by implying they weren't (still) good, I was dissing his friends.
I don't think he was "almost in the band" in the sense that they rejected him. More like when they asked if he wanted to be involved, he decided to go into a different line of work than music performance/recording.
(And, actually, he is pretty successful in said other line of work from what I've heard.)