We Rolled Before It Was Cool

This song came directly out of remembering what it felt like to discover Dungeons & Dragons as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s. My older brother was already playing, so I ended up at tables with older players before I probably would have found the game on my own. There were sessions at a local toy store, games at the library, games with cousins and friends, and plenty of time spent inside rulebooks that felt enormous when I was young.

One part of the memory that stayed with me was the cultural panic around D&D. I went to Catholic school, and there were people around the church who treated the game as something sinister. My mother defended us. What she saw was a kid reading complicated books, learning new words, using his imagination, and having fun with other people. That memory matters to me because it captures how strange the gap can be between what outsiders fear and what the people actually doing something know it to be.

The song also came from watching D&D become culturally cool again. Stranger Things helped introduce a lot of people to the game, which made me laugh because my generation had already spent years around those tables before that nostalgia existed. I wanted the song to have some fun with that without turning into gatekeeping. The important part is that the game survived, changed, and kept finding new players. Hearing my own son and his friends laughing, arguing, and running a game gave the whole idea a second life for me.