James had just been walking the floor of the Anaheim Convention Center for hours — past walls of amplifiers, rows of gleaming guitars, and enough new gear to fill a warehouse — when he stopped, sat down, and sang about a girl who went sailing without him.
The NAMM Show draws roughly 60,000 musicians every January to Southern California. They come to test instruments, catch performances, and collect business cards. What they do not generally come to do is sing an unreleased original song into a microphone while a stranger with a guitar listens and plays along. But that is exactly what a rotating cast of attendees agreed to do at a quiet corner setup tucked away from the convention floor noise, where guitarist and host Reggie Dara asked each person a single question: choose a song that means something to you, and tell him why.
The Fork in the Road James Did Not Take
James had never performed the song publicly before. It was still unfinished in a technical sense — he asked Reggie to pull up the chord chart on email before they could even begin. The song was about a breakup rooted in a choice: James had just arrived in London to pursue music when the woman he loved invited him to sail around the world with her. He said no. She eventually went with someone else. Multiple songs came out of that decision, he said, though she has no idea any of them exist.
Reggie found the changes and they played it through — a warm, unhurried song about physical memory, summer nights in a park, a leopard-print dress, and the particular cruelty of knowing you made the right call and still losing something irreplaceable. When it ended, James said he felt ‘a little bit shaky.’ He said singing it brings everything flooding back every time, which is both the problem and the point. ‘I think that’s partly why I wrote it,’ he said.
Bella From the Hills of North Carolina Sings to the Earth
The next person to sit down was Bella, who arrived at the convention from North Carolina and said the pace of Los Angeles had already unsettled her. She chose Bill Withers’ ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ — not as a song about a person, but as a song about the planet. When she hears the word ‘she’ in that song, she said, she hears the earth. She wanted to dedicate it there, at a music industry convention in the middle of a sprawling California city, as a kind of offering.
She delivered it slowly, with the kind of restraint that makes the ‘I know, I know’ section land harder. When Reggie asked how she felt afterward, she said she felt ‘opened up’ — and that she had actually needed that moment without realizing it before she sat down.
Steven came next with an original called ‘Hateful Thinking,’ built on a two-chord loop between A minor and D minor. He had written it about self-doubt — about the internal noise that second-guesses every decision, every feature in the mirror, every career move. He was visibly nervous performing it. The song begins with a list of self-criticisms, delivered plainly and without self-pity, before turning somewhere warmer by the final verse. By the end, the line had flipped: ‘I love the sound of my voice, but now I’m singing in your way.’ After the last chord, he said he felt ‘way better.’
The final group was four young musicians from San Diego — siblings who picked up instruments and vocal harmonies during the 2020 beach closures and chose to perform the Beach Boys’ ‘In My Room,’ a song about finding refuge in private space. They explained the logic simply: they had been locked in their rooms, and the song is called ‘In My Room.’ Their dad filmed from the side. Their mom watched from a few feet away. When the harmonies settled, the small crowd that had gathered applauded.
The Dad Filming From the Side After the Harmonies Settle
He kept the phone steady through the whole thing, tracking the four of them across the frame. When the last note landed and the room responded, he did not lower the camera right away.
Back at the quiet corner of the convention floor where James had stood and felt everything come flooding back, the crowd had already moved on — back toward the amplifiers, the business cards, the next product launch. The unreleased song about a girl on a sailboat was still technically unfinished. But it had been played, and heard, and that was something he had not expected to do today.
