Tag Archives: piano

Monday Music Notes

4 Replies

I have been listening to music almost nonstop for the past two days! A weekend full of music.

And not just casually. Like, not pleasant humming in the background while I go about my life. I mean listening listening. Headphones on. Volume up. Songs on repeat because apparently five times isn’t enough when some particular chord change, drum beat, guitar line, or voice has found its way into that mysterious place inside me that doesn’t speak in words.

This weekend, it happens to be mostly Turnstile: NEVER ENOUGH: Versions and GLOW ON; also Evanescence’s Fallen and Kalandra’s 2014 song, “Rest Your Soul,” which I just discovered.

Turnstile has quickly become my favorite band. I’m in love with them. There’s something about the energy in their music and performances that feels like fire, aliveness, vibrancy. And they’re just fun as hell. But underneath all that energy is music that hits me emotionally, too. Their lyrics can be vulnerable, aching, even existential, wrapped inside this amazing musicality and explosive physical energy. Somehow, they make me want to move and feel everything at the same time.

It’s so weird, but something about music feels different to me.

Or maybe I feel different.

Sound seems to be hitting deeper than usual, stirring something restless and alive inside. I’ve found myself missing having a piano nearby.

It’s like I don’t want to merely consume music. I want to enter into it. Sit at the keyboard, hunt for the chords, discover the voicings, sing against them, make the song physical through my hands.

And, I’m longing to connect with other music people, someone I can say, “Hey, listen to what happens right here,” and they immediately understand why those four seconds matter. Someone who wants to go hear a band, trade songs, sit around figuring out chords, argue affectionately about a bridge, discover some obscure artist at 11:30 at night.

The whole experience of being met inside something that matters so enormously, well, at least to me.

And underneath all of this is another feeling, one considerably less welcome.

Though music is making me feel intensely alive, that aliveness is simultaneously reminding me that time is passing. So damn quickly.

I watch musicians I love performing with astonishing physicality and abandon. I see photographs and videos filled with beautiful young faces. I scroll through social media, where youth appears to be everywhere, endlessly preserved in perfect lighting. And I feel that pang: I don’t get to be young anymore.

God, I fucking hate that!

But here’s the strange part.

At precisely the moment I am grieving my youth, I’m also feeling extraordinarily alive.

I want to hear more music. I want to make music. I want to go to concerts. I want a piano beneath my hands again. I want to find my way back to my guitar. I want to find other people who understand why a song can matter so much that you need to hear it again immediately after it ends.

It appears that getting older and becoming more alive are somehow happening at the same time, my love and passion for music, intensifying. What an almost cruel and unfamiliar paradox.

So I’m listening harder. I’m working with sound professionally. I’m thinking about making music again and teaching piano. I’m craving people with whom I can share it. There’s certainly something bigger than me banging at the door asking for more life.

For so many years, I sacrificed music, art, creativity to please others, living a life that became increasingly contained. I lost the essence of who I was. I cannot get those years back. Of course, I was also mothering, and that was an important and crucial part of my life. In many ways, it was the thing that kept me alive.

Perhaps that’s where the cruel and unfamiliar paradox lives. I’m finally reclaiming parts of myself that I shuttered away, while becoming increasingly aware that time is not infinite.

I want the remaining decades of my life to contain the things that make me feel unmistakably alive.

And music seems to be shouting that message particularly loudly right now.

What can I do but listen?

And go for it…

“Birds” by Turnstile 🫶🤘🙌 🎶

“Rest Your Soul” by Kalandra – Such powerful lyrics

Photo by Evgeniy Smersh on Unsplash

Piano One

1 Reply

I’m slowly recovering from three years of burnout. Resting feels a bit like that maddening smoke alarm chirp — You know the batteries need changing, but you can’t figure out which damn alarm is sounding! Even rest feels strangely effortful — my nervous system translates stillness into threat. I used to tell my trauma clients that chronic restlessness and hypervigilance come from a hyperaroused nervous system, and any sound, interruption, or shift in the environment can register danger. Now, I’m living inside the very thing I taught others.

Yesterday morning, I had a doctor’s appointment. Actually, I’ve had multiple back-to-back medical appointments lately — all the things I’ve been putting off forever and am finally tending to. Not exactly a fun, restful time. The whole ordeal seemed to throw my day off, and I found it impossible to reconnect with my body afterward. So I forced, yes forced my way to the keyboard, and I sat and played for a couple of hours.

I purchased a used Korg D1 digital keyboard last weekend. Yesterday was the first day I played her since then. She’s absurdly heavy and currently occupies half my tiny kitchen. It felt a little heartbreaking to play, as I haven’t touched a piano in a long time. I started learning Human Nature by Michael Jackson and A Groovy Kind of Love by Phil Collins. The chord progressions were fairly easy to pick up.

I’m still waiting for an amp to arrive, since the only audio output right now is via headphones, which makes it difficult to listen closely to songs while figuring out chords. Still, it felt really good to sit at the keyboard again and improvise for a while. I tried not to be too self-critical. Eventually, I settled on learning Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence by Ryuichi Sakamoto. I have the sheet music. The piece is full of lush chords, sevenths, ninths, etc., larger than an octave that barely fit beneath my small hands, but I managed. It definitely needs practice; I’ll make a recording once the music feels more embodied.

I first heard Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence on the 1985 album, Piano One (Private Music-Japan) in college. The album quickly became a favorite that I listened to repeatedly. You must give it a listen! My favorite piece is The Housewife’s Song. I wasn’t able to find the album on Spotify, but came across it on YouTube, which I’ve linked below. As I write this post coffee in hand, I’m listening to it again. It brings me back to a younger version of myself — that dreamy, distant, always somewhere in the clouds girl.

While my digital keyboard is no baby grand, which I’m sadly trying to sell due to lack of space, it has a surprisingly rich sound for a digi instrument. It’ll have to do for now. I have two medical appointments today, inconveniently planted right in the middle of the freakin’ day, but I’ll find my way back to the keyboard after.

I’m trying to give myself permission to be exactly where I am — to slow down and enjoy playing simply for the sake of playing. It’s so easy for me to slip back into that performance mindset, obsessing over every phrase, nuance, breath, wanting each note polished, perfect. Jeez, it’s really hard not to be a perfectionist…

Held by Sound

4 Replies

Have you ever been so moved by a piece of music that it brought you to tears? I have. I still am.

For days, I’ve felt drawn to listen to On the Nature of Daylight by Max Richter. Are you familiar with it? It’s easily one of my favorite contemporary classical works. I love all of Richter’s music, but this piece feels especially transcendent.

I wanted to give it my full attention, and the quiet of this morning felt like the perfect time. I sat with headphones on, hands crossed over my heart, and let the music hold space. I literally shed tears, so completely was I captured by it.

So many thoughts and emotions moved through me that I began listing them in my journal: ecstasy, sorrow, despair, sadness, transcendence, love, intimacy, desire, longing, yearning, hope, bliss, magick, forgiveness, tenderness, tolerance, caress, breath, movement, darkness, light, expression, expansion, transformation, warmth, belief, faith, embrace, connection, grief, loss, truth…

And yet words still feel insufficient to describe this kind of magick.

I kept the piece on repeat as I moved through my morning tarot reading. The first card I drew was Art — Temperance in the Rider–Waite–Smith system — a card of integration and alchemy: making whatever you do a work of art; friendship between mind and heart; rest and activity; light and dark; self and others; approaching life creatively, with an artist’s eye.

It felt deeply aligned with the experience itself — as though the music and the card were speaking the same language.

Music saves and meets me exactly where I am. My first love — and likely my last.

I remember spending hours alone in a tiny practice room at Centenary College (of Louisiana), just me and Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Debussy, Mozart…There was no fear or judgment there. No pressure to please an audience or play perfectly. Only connection — to the keyboard, to sound, to frequency and vibration. It felt sublime.

In today’s heavy world, music still holds the power to uplift, to ground, and to offer a kind of safe communion unlike anything else.

I recently discovered an artist who was new to me: Yannic Lowack, a German composer. The piece featured below, Leuer, is another composition I’ve completely fallen in love with. He also shared a short preview of an orchestral version — without piano — on Instagram. You can find him on both YouTube and Instagram.

I miss those days of studying music and practicing piano every day. They remind me of who I was — and still am, despite the years away — a musician, drawn to the expressive arts. May the days ahead bring new opportunities to return to the keyboard and reconnect with that musical inheritance!