NOT FAR, SOUTH BOSTON. 2010.

It was a nondescript, post-war colonial with two mailboxes, just beyond of the sprawl of prefab Campanelli slab ranches that surround the abandoned South Weymouth airbase. Every Monday morning, I’d pull up with a wad of cash and drop it in the second of two mailboxes, marked “Educational Consultants.” My guitarist and I were the last master’s candidates afforded this privilege, which was probably fair, things considered.

The cycle actually began on Tuesday, when — after a day of teaching freshman English — my buddy (the aforementioned guitarist) and I would leave school at the earliest contractually acceptable time for a string of graduate education classes above a local package store. It was the kind of satellite-campus-by-route-of-every-teacher-needs-a-masters program that requires a location waiver acknowledging that you will not consume alcohol during class time to preserve educational integrity. This arrangement ensured profits for a campus I graduated from but never once visited; it was a veritable teacher’s mill. We’d sit in class and listen to what amounted to a three-hour bitch session by stressed out teachers, eat snacks from the packy downstairs and file obligatory reflections on the process.

Then, we’d hustle out with the last of the Mackie 808s and a pair of 50 pound JBLs and play acoustic music for disinterested patrons for three hours. We had a Tuesday bar, I had a Wednesday bar, I’d play Plymouth on Friday afternoons -- once the weather broke -- and then there was a Sunday bar.

People were polite. I could sing. Sometimes, folks would get excited, but mostly, it was just wash-rinse-repeat. I had a one-year-old at home and a second son on the way. I mostly remember it for the exhausted haze through which it transpired.

But, I paid for my Master’s Degree in cash. And, as I mentioned earlier, the director never again allowed anyone to do so again, having grown tired of mailboxes of cash and the crunching of a rusted F-150 on Monday mornings.

And that was it. That’s all it was meant to be. I had already done the music thing back in the early 2000s. I had grown my hair out and quit my “dream” job as a reporter for the Boston Bruins to be in a really bad band, a fact that many people never really understood. That was back in 2004 when nu-metal and Maroon 5 conspired to move popular music so far from what I played and sang like so as to render my choice - in retrospect - an act of self-destruction. It’s cliche to say that someone stood beside me, but literally, that’s what my wife did. She stood beside me and stood up for me despite the withering looks of disapproval from relatives who weren’t quite clear how a kid who had earned a full ride to Boston University could end up so lost.

And they were right, to a degree. I was lost. I did it all myself. I built a band with the only folks who would be in a band with me. I learned to make bad records. I played every Tuesday night at Harpers Ferry for seven months and then watched the band die a quiet death when my month-long residency on Monday nights at the Paradise Lounge was buried under a weekly barrage of late February snowstorms.

I found the Boston scene to be unwelcoming. I wasn’t cool enough to get the Shreds of the world to listen. “I still remember his email responding to my Boston Emissions submission, “Hey man, listened to your record. The last song is the only one I could consider putting on the radio. I’ll see if I have a spot at some point. -Shred” I remember going to PA’s Lounge and realizing I was not all that interested in making friends with the scensters (and they weren’t really all that interested in being friends with me).

I’ve never been one to follow rules, so I relied on my brothers' teammates on the Harvard and Bentley football teams to fill up my clubs. And I played the music that I play today. I played all the time. I pissed off Shred for forgoing his tithe at O’Brien’s Pub and booking the Harper’s residency. When The Noise sarcastically reviewed our album as “This is the best CD I have ever listened to in my life. It’s like nine flamingoes descended to grace me with their presence” I took out a full page ad in the same publication with the band posing around nine flamingo lawn ornaments.

And then the snow came, and the Paradise stopped returning my calls and I cut my hair and took a job as a paraprofessional teacher while I tried to get my teaching license.

But this is really a story about Southie. Not the Southie of Whitey Bulger, but the Southie metamorphosed by crushing rents and traffic in Brighton. To wit, my high school classmate’s parents sold their triple decker for around $300,000 in the early 90s, when heroin was rampant. It’s now worth a couple of million dollars.

This story begins in those early days when a bunch of South Shore kids, whose grandparents would take them to Castle Island on Sundays for an ice cream at Sullivan’s, decided to start renting the cheap apartments around L Street. What occurred next, I’m convinced, was a two-square mile block of innovation worthy of a future sociologist’s doctorate, where a mass of Ivy League and Irish Ivy League kids spent four post-grad years planting the seeds of gentrification and drinking at the same two bars. The amount of businesses and trends — and by result an entire neon neighborhood — that sprang from these bars are innumerable. And the social scene largely centered on the one night where these budding executives were free to their own devices: Sunday nights. Every other night was a night of obligation; they worked late, or entertained clients. But Sunday Funday became a thing, and that’s where the story of Dalton truly begins.

A booking manager named Christina placed an ad on Craigslist, back when that was an actual thing folks did. She was looking for a solo country singer for her boyfriend’s bar on Sunday nights. My brothers had just gotten me into country music, which their football playing teammates from the South had brought with them to campus. It fit the time. These kids were living good lives: close to the city, making enough money to blow $100 bucks at the bars on a Sunday night. Kenny Chesney fit a helluva lot better than Drowning Pool.

So, I replied and she came to see me. And while her boyfriend, to this day, takes credit for popularizing country music and Sunday Funday in Southie, I can crack a smile and remember that Christina had to drag him to a pub to see me play and he left disinterested halfway through. She stayed though, and I started playing.

It was a small bar. But in the beginning, it was more of the same. It was my only all country gig. And it was right when Kenny Chesney’s annual trip to Gillette Stadium was about all the country Boston could handle. But one day, this kid Pat lumbered into the bar off of Carson Beach just as I was playing some Darius Rucker. He texted his friends and they rolled in, much in the same state.

There were seven in total, to my memory. Pat, his brother Connor. James and Brian. Bobby Levels, another kid name Connor and Ray. Eventually, their buddy Brendan would join, though his teaching gig kept him away on most school nights. And I can trace almost everything good that has happened to our band to those days in that bar with those kids.

Ray — easily the most inebriated — began shouting out requests. When I played a song he loved he would come up directly in front of me and scream all the words in my face in the otherwise empty bar.

Honestly, for the first month, people were there to see Ray, wearing the only cowboy hat in Southie (which he apparently stole from a teenager at Country Fest), act like a crazy kid.

But these kids weren’t drunk assholes. They really weren’t there for the girls. They were there to relive the parts of their life at Trinity and Providence and Bentley and BC that had been their whole lives just a few years before.

It became a spectacle. And then the girls showed up. Ray was the center of attention and that group of seven guys were so loud and having so much fun that it took the pressure off. Folks started meeting there. And within a month there was a line to the Southie library a block down by 5 p.m. for the 8 p.m. start.

Brendan’s sister was a rep for Bud Light in Boston and she took us along with her as she ascended the ranks. Pat was a de facto promoter making sure that none of the original seven took a night off. Folks began coming down to figure out why there was a line. The college hockey players showed up.

Randy, a Southie firefighter with a propensity for removing his shirt and dancing on the bar, got us our first real gigs. I had to build a band, which I did by stealing my friend's childhood band. We went from nothing to opening for Thomas Rhett at the House of Blues in six months, propelled there by Country Sundays.

But all along the way, a culture was building. A ton of folks met significant others on Sundays. People came to sing along. And I was singing songs I wrote about my wife in between the cover tunes, so there was this community vibe that developed around the culture of the night. Kids who didn’t act the right way were thrown out of the bar, often by the original seven.

These kids never changed. They liked the way I played and I liked the way they sang. It was like when I would play around a campfire as a kid. It wasn’t about being cool. It was a weird shared humanity.

On the night of our first big show opening for Thomas Rhett (people didn’t know who he was yet, he was just Jason Aldean’s opener at Fenway still), I invited the guys down to hang out backstage with us. Ray and Brendan took me up on the offer.

Ray was especially drunk this night. We were hanging out on the small room that looks out onto the stage from the second floor. Thomas Rhett began to play Round Here, which was recorded by Florida-Georgia Line and happened to be Ray’s jam. He implored the crowd to sing the song if they knew it and Ray happily obliged.

It was me, my wife, Ray and Brendan in this tiny room with our friends Laura and Liane. Ray was screaming the words and dancing like a fool and I was thinking, "how the hell did we get here."

And then two major country musicians walked in. Ray turned to them and sang every word in their faces, as if it was Country Sunday. I thought my career was over. It was a level of awkward I will probably never reach again. They just smiled (they might have been drunker than him) and the song ended after what seemed to be an eternity. They left and stumbled onto the stage to play the single worst live version of one of their famous songs that I’ve ever heard. And we got a story for life.

At the same time, for reasons that vary depending on your vantage point, school wasn’t working out. I had been pushed to become an administrator when I won a bunch of federal grant money for an after-school program designed to target kids that we knew, from data, were destined to not graduate. The program was called Mission: Possible and it gave kids paying jobs working for the town and school district in the summer and paid their tuition to catch up on courses they failed during the school year. During the actual school year, it created an extra English class for struggling readers and writers and funded a one-to-one laptop program for the most at-risk kids while providing after school tutoring. But it led me down a series of jobs from Dean of Students in Randolph, to a charter school in East Boston, and finally to being a Vice Principal in Norwood.

I loved the problem solving. I loved communicating with kids and parents. I didn't like the adults who didn't like working to help kids learn (it was a sizable population). I left midway through my second year and we took the leap into music full time (we had been offered touring support by Bud Light), so I could be home with the kids during the day (again, my wife is a saint).

But, back to the band. My wife — who writes most of the songs with me — and I decided that if we were going to chase down this band thing and have employees we weren’t interested in seeing if we could just hang in there. It was sort of like, let’s push the envelope until this band meets an obstacle it can’t overcome. I was fine being my generation's Jim Plunkett and — quite honestly — I’d be making more money.

So we pushed. Brendan's sister lined us up a slot on the Bud Light Down South tour and we drove in our new Bud Light van to a different SEC football game every Saturday for the fall. We kicked it off in a real tour bus opening for Jon Pardi and Sam Hunt at the Battle at Bristol. We invited the original Southie guys to come (only Brendan could make it).

For the next year, we played big shows opening for big acts all over the country and would drive back to Boston to play our regular gigs each week. The list of folks we were lucky enough to open for the during those days is insane: Lee Brice in Charleston, S.C.; A Thousand Horses outside Nissan Stadium before a Titans game; Rock the South; and, a bunch of others. It looked great on Instagram, but it was a loser money-wise. We learned a lot of lessons (like joining Marriott Rewards is crucial because hotels.com sucks).

It's a community. It’s an identity. These kids gave me a career when there was no obvious career to be had.

No one in their correct mind would looked at me and say this was a good idea.

But these guys did, for some reason, and that's why this band is as much theirs as it is ours.