After my parents lost our farm and we moved into town, I started attending an evangelical Quaker church with my friend Brad. I wasn’t sure I liked it at first, but as the months passed with my mom and dad rarely speaking, I did start to find something like peace when I prayed. Then Brad went away to a summer camp and came home fired up about the Lord and saying that heavy metal was the devil’s music. He was burning all his albums, he declared, and he kept pestering me to do the same. In his mind heavy metal glorified blood and gore and Satan. I had to choose between his friendship and the music I loved. So that fall, as I entered tenth grade, I found another friend who’d let me go to church with him.