A musical journey

This started out much longer, but I decided I could really pare it down to this: four years ago last week, on June 7, 2018, I got on stage to perform music in front of other human beings for the first time.

I’d had brief flings with instruments that I never sustained – two years of violin, a hated year of tuba, two years of ukulele. Then, in high school, nothing really – a gift of a guitar that came with no further support, no real way to learn it. None of my friends were musical, there was no one to learn it from, and repeated efforts to teach myself proved that I didn’t know enough to teach myself anything. But it was always in the back of my mind that someday I would finally learn an instrument.

Our kids did get lessons and support and had some pretty great musical experiences, and then we had an electronic piano still in our house while one was finishing college, and a friend of ours was starting a music school, so I finally, at 57, took the plunge and started to play. Just piano. There would be no singing, I was certain. But I knew that someday I’d want to play in front of people, and so, in advance of a recital for the music school, I gathered up my courage and got on stage at the local open mic, where I already had many friends just from attending, and played just terribly. The recital was terrible, too, I went absolutely key blind, couldn’t find where I was supposed to be. But . . . I knew that was just part of the process, and I’d get better if I kept doing it. More accurately: I wouldn’t get better by not doing it. Little by little, I got better at performing, and all along the way, the folks at our local open mic have been amazingly supportive. It’s just that kind of community.

So I kept lumbering along, figuring out songs to play on piano with my very rudimentary skills, but still certain that I just could never sing in front of people. But I also realized that I would never be an amazing piano player, and just playing it on its own, it lacked interest. So slowly i started coming around to the idea of singing. I was convinced I had a bad voice (a concept I now know to abhor), but my teachers guided me and taught me how to exercise it. Hey, it turns out practice makes it better. So annoying when you have to work at things, but that’s how it is. And slowly I gained the confidence to sing, and from that, I got better, and before long, it wasn’t just confidence, it was a love of singing. When you can connect your voice to a song, to emotion (which doesn’t happen every time) – it’s just incredibly powerful.

As much as the pandemic lockdown sucked, it gave me a lot of time to continue practicing, forced me to get a microphone and a mixing board. Singing into a microphone, and hearing it through the headphones, really unlocked something for me – I could really hear how I sounded, refine my voice. I’m not going to say that I’ve gotten good, but I’ll vote myself “most improved,” and sometimes I can use my voice and the keys to convey exactly what I want to convey. (Other times, it can still go horribly wrong.)

Two more keyboards later, last summer I decided to give the ukulele a go again, as a friend was teaching some workshops, so I did that and liked it but found the fingering challenging. Then I momentarily lusted after a bass ukulele, the Kala U-Bass, that I saw in a Mona Lisa Twins video and my wife went to great lengths to get me one for my birthday . . . and all of a sudden I was taking bass lessons. And then a few weeks ago I took the plunge to a “normal” bass, a 1987 Yamaha that is just a delight to play, and now I’m singing while playing bass, which is just nuts.

So, it’s been an incredible journey, and I just keep doing more and more (even learning to record with Ableton Live), and having more and more fun. It’s remarkable.

Then, this weekend, in the midst of writing this entry, my brain said: how about the regular ol’ ukulele again? Next thing I know, I’m playing it again, about 100 times better than last summer, and decided I had to go to open mic and just get up there and do it, so that’s what I did last night – Ukulele Anthem, which I can’t really sing but just croaked out, and Bus Station, which I love to sing – and the great supportive crowd was into it.

I really never thought this was going to happen, and I can’t thank enough the dozens of people who have supported me, taught me, inspired me, whether they knew it or not.

As Warren Miller used to say: If you don’t do it this year, you’ll just be one year older when you do.