No Shame 4: Music

MUSIC

I suppose that I play an instrument. No, I play an instrument. I suppose that I play it well enough. Okay, before I slip into too much of an attempt at humility amidst braggadacio, (though the use of that phrase may have already defeated the purpose) let me just say that I play guitar, often, and know a lot of songs, and think that it sounds pretty good. I also have little to no idea what I'm doing when I play. I have very little technical knowledge about the instrument, or music in general. I can't read sheet music, I don't know what a sustained note is really doing, and I thought the last Radiohead album was dumb.
That came out of nowhere, but seriously, I don't need math music or whatever the fuck that was supposed to be. I'll come back to this. Or not, fuck it.
I had a friend in 5th grade who played guitar, and I thought it was really cool, and to make this part of the story quite short I'll say that I'm pretty sure my dad bought my brother and I guitars to distract us from his affair with his next wife. I went with said cool friend (fuck it, I'll name-check him: Woody Rosen) to the mall one day, and we found books of guitar tablature at Sam Goody (yeah, not just the mall you motherfuckers, but Sam fuckin' Goody). For every single one of the twenty dollars that I possessed, I purchased the complete Beatles songbook, consisting of nearly every Beatles song transcribed in the simplest of chords. And then I put it on a shelf and got way into my boners for a few years.
Then somewhere around 15 I became obsessed with Beatles b-sides, and dug back into the book. I learned them all, and discovered an unknown thirst for this particular sect of knowledge. If I liked a song, and it had a discernible melody, I wanted to know it, to master it.
Maybe not master. I just wanted to strum along. I always had an acoustic guitar, so rhythm was really my go-to sound. Besides, my fingers don't Flamenco.
I kept a notebook of every song I figured out. I still have one, an updated version, and I'm quite proud to say that it stretches from A-ha to Zevon.
Let me also say that I consciously avoided the 'sensitive guy playing guitar' thing as much as possible. I didn't even tell people. Was it because I was a fat teenager? Yeah, probably.
When I got older I used to joke that I had a guitar because I lived in a house with 3 other dudes in Denton, and by law one of us was required to be at the very least able to strum 3 or 4 90's songs for the purposes of drunken sing-alongs. The truth is that I still thoroughly enjoy it. It's therapeutic, and it's something I do for myself more than anyone else. Unless I'm drunk. Then we can play and sing and fuck and stuff.
While guitar has been fun and is a consistent source of various catharsis when need be, the instrument I have really always wanted to play is piano. Not fucking keyboards. Piano.
A piano is an orchestra at your fingertips. It plunges below the depths of a bassoon and soars higher than the flight of a piccolo. Here's a piece of music I've listened to at least 80 times in the past year -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDI5bDdspc0

I don't think this is necessarily the kind of piano music I wish to play, but it's the style that I've been sinking into. The entire Midnight in Paris soundtrack has been dominating my life for the past 9 months or so. That's probably more of a statement on my life and mindset lately, that I consistently indulge Woody Allen walking around music.

Woody Allen plays jazz clarinet every Monday that he can at The Carlyle on Madison Avenue in New York.