The Hi-Hat That Changed My Mind.

The first time I heard "Freak on a Leash," I turned it off.

I had been playing drums for most of my life by then. I grew up on rock and metal, the kind of music where the singer sings, the guitars hit hard, and the song makes sense from the first verse to the last chorus. I knew what I liked, and I thought I knew what good music was supposed to sound like.

Then this song came on, and somewhere in the middle the singer stopped using words. He was making noises. Sounds that went fast and rough and strange, like he was talking in some language nobody else knew. I remember sitting there thinking, what is this? It felt weird to me. It didn't feel like music. It felt like somebody messing around in the studio and calling it a song.

So I wrote it off. And I didn't stop at the song. I wrote off the whole band. Korn was not for me. That was my decision, and I stuck to it for a long time.

The funny thing about being a drummer is that you don't always hear a song the way everybody else does. Most people hear the voice first. They hear the words, the melody, the chorus they can sing along to. A drummer hears the floor of the song. You hear what the kick is doing, where the snare lands, and what the hi-hat is saying in between. Sometimes that is the part that grabs you before anything else does.

That is exactly what happened with "Got the Life."

I didn't go looking for it. It was just around. I heard it a few times without really paying attention, and then one time I caught it. The hi-hat and snare were locked together in this combination that just pulled me in. It was tight. It bounced. It had a groove that made my hands want to move. I caught myself tapping it out on whatever was in front of me, and I realized I was enjoying a Korn song.

That bothered me a little at first. I had already decided this band was not for me. But I couldn't argue with that groove. As a drummer, you know when something is right. You can feel it. And that beat was right.

So I did something I should have done from the start. I actually listened.

I went back and gave Korn a real chance. Not just one song on the radio, but the music itself. The deeper I went, the more I heard. The rhythm section was doing things I hadn't given them credit for. The guitars were tuned low and heavy in a way that filled up the whole room. And the singer, the guy I thought was just making noises, was pouring something real into every song. The more I understood where that came from, the less weird it sounded and the more honest it sounded.

Then I went back to "Freak on a Leash."

It was the same song. Nothing about it had changed. But I had changed. This time I heard the build. I heard how the song pulls back and then explodes. And when that part came where he stops using words, I didn't hear nonsense anymore. I heard a man letting go of something that words could not hold. It was raw and it was on purpose. It was the whole point.

The song I turned off became one of my favorites. Today I would put "Freak on a Leash" up there as one of the best songs Korn ever made.

I think about that a lot now, because it taught me something about myself. I was quick to decide what I liked and what I didn't. I judged a whole band by one moment that confused me. If I hadn't heard that hi-hat and snare a few times on another song, I might have kept that wall up forever and missed out on music that means a lot to me now.

Sometimes the thing that sounds wrong the first time is just something you are not ready to hear yet. You need a way in. For some people, it's a lyric. For some people, it's a memory. For me, it was the drums. It usually is.

I still remember turning that song off. Now I turn it up.