At the end of 2023, I was pretty sure my time in ZED was over.
We had lost Sean in October, and honestly, none of us were feeling up for anything musical. Losing your friend is one thing. Losing the guy you’ve spent years making music with is another kind of loss layered on top of it. Suddenly the thing that had always brought us together just didn’t feel the same.
We talked a few times about the six or seven new songs we had been writing with Sean. They were good songs, and part of us wanted to finish them. But we really didn’t know what we wanted to do—or even if we wanted to keep being a band.
Then one night in December, I had a dream.
I was at a show watching a band in a packed club. And I mean packed. Shoulder to shoulder, sweaty, loud, barely enough room to move.
Basically, the best possible way to see a rock band.
In the dream, I looked over to my left.
Sean was standing there.
He was just watching the band with me like we used to. Nothing weird about it. Nothing dramatic. It just felt completely normal that he was there.
Then he turned to me and said:
“It’s time to get the band back together.”
That was it.
I woke up and immediately texted Pete and Greg.
I’m not going to pretend I know what dreams mean. Maybe it was Sean. Maybe it was my brain trying to process losing him. Maybe somewhere inside me I already knew I wasn’t ready for ZED to be finished.
Whatever it was, I listened.
The three of us got together and decided we were going to move forward.
Which immediately created another problem:
We needed a drummer.
We know plenty of drummers. The problem is that all the good ones are already in seventeen bands. And just as importantly, we were really apprehensive about bringing the wrong person into ZED.
After everything we had been through, this couldn’t just be somebody who could play the songs. The personality had to be right.
Enter our old friend Dave.
Dave had sung in a local band we’d played with a bunch over the years. And in one of those weird twists life throws at you, Dave was also the person who called me that October to tell me Sean had passed.
One day we were talking and I mentioned that we were trying to figure out the drummer situation. I asked if he knew anybody.
He said:
“I was a drummer before I was a singer.”
Well… shit.
We started talking.
Then we met up.
Then we jammed.
And slowly—very slowly—we started putting ZED back together.
There wasn’t some big movie moment where we played one song and everybody looked at each other and knew the band was back. We had to figure out what ZED was going to be without Sean. We had to learn how to play together. We had to rebuild something that had been fundamentally changed.
And I think doing it slowly was exactly what we needed.
That was almost two years ago.
Our first show back as ZED was last December. Since then we’ve played a bunch of shows, written music, made some noise and even gotten ourselves back on a plane to Texas to play Ripplefest.
There were definitely moments at the end of 2023 when I thought none of that would ever happen again.
I still think about that dream.
I can still see the club. I can still remember what it felt like standing there in the crowd. And I can still see Sean standing next to me, turning and saying those words.
Maybe it was just a dream.
But we got the band back together.
And we’re still here.
ZED’s not dead.
