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These Music Nerds Are What The World Needs Now
And why being cultured — finally — has mass-market appeal
When it comes to music, I have a split personality: I am a lead singer for a blues band and a closet classical pianist. The former could have been a by-product of the latter, while the latter stayed despite a long hiatus from formal training that ended at age 12. It just sat there, somewhere in my subconscious, the fruit of years of endless frustration during my childhood. Both paths remain divergent from one another but are deep personal passions nevertheless. They never crossed for one reason: singing and playing the piano is hard. It requires total commitment normally reserved for professionals which I am not, and hours of practice I could never have.
That is, until the pandemic struck.
The widespread clamor for self-care brought me back to my musical roots — the piano. It would seem unthinkable to my 5-year old self, who detested playing, but I didn’t know any better then. And in the 80s, there was no YouTube. No free masterclasses. No Spotify. Heck, even the G. Schirmer sheet music had to be imported. So practicing, as you can imagine, was terrifying. Now that I owe much of my professional success to my musical upbringing, I had to use this quarantine well, and devote most, if not all, of my newfound free time to music.
