July 3, 2020
One night a few weeks ago, I sat down at the piano in our apartment and started playing. I wasn’t playing anything in particular. Something just started coming to me. My fingers explored and began to find a sound that I liked.
When I was born, my fingers were so long that my mom swore I was meant to play piano. She couldn’t think of a better way to put those long digits to good use. But I could—I was dying to learn to play guitar. Mom and Dad held out on me for a little while, but when I was ten, they caved and gave me an electric guitar, one of my earliest prized possessions. I couldn’t wait to be in a band and shred like people I saw in movies. Piano didn’t interest me. What was the fun in playing sitting down? I wanted to play with my whole body. Guitar fit my vision. Plus, guitar was straight up cooler than piano. To me, at least.
Just before New Years, my roommate, Jo, found a way to get a piano into our second-story apartment. No elevator, either. She’d wanted to get back into playing and happened to strike up a deal with her boss to “babysit” his daughter’s piano for a while. She didn’t need it, and Jo had a hankering to start playing again. Alison also played piano in her youth, and I’m generally a musical person, so we agreed—we’d take the piano.
When I got back to the apartment after visiting my family in Louisiana for Christmas, I was astounded at how gorgeous it looked, standing there in our living space. It fit right in. It held a dignity in its dark wood that I found instantly enchanting. The piano transformed the space, and I was excited to hear my roommates take it for a spin.
I took guitar lessons for years. In all that time learning how to play, I discovered something about myself. I was capable of learning to read notes and maintaining the basic understanding needed to comprehend sheet music, but that wasn’t the part I liked. I honestly never enjoyed that part at all. My pleasure came from the emotion of it all. The feeling of my fingers on the frets. The twang of the strings when you struck them a certain way. The clarity of a chord played just right.
After a while, I started trying to play things by ear. I couldn’t play whole songs, but I could at times figure out a portion of a song. Or at least get pretty close. And the most fun? Inventing my own little tunes. I don’t even want to call them songs. They hardly ever became completed pieces. Most were like fragments instead of full sentences—the parts I strung together sounded nice, but they didn’t necessarily amount to anything.
The first song I started to learn on the apartment piano was “Versace on the Floor” by Bruno Mars. I adore that song. It’s sexy and smooth. Well balanced and recognizable. And it’s Bruno, so, of course it’s got a groove. For days, I played along with a YouTube tutorial of the song. I can’t really read music anymore, and piano music involves two hands, which is very confusing to me. Plus—I don’t even know what notes are located where on a piano. I’m clueless.
So I took to YouTube and learned about half of the song. I tried playing it faster, then slower. Choppier, then smoother. Louder, then softer. Eventually, I started combining all those techniques into one, playing it as dynamically as I could manage in one run.
It was thrilling. Tedious, but thrilling.
I used to get frustrated when I’d pull my guitar out with friends and they’d instantly start throwing song requests at me. “Do you know how to play this?” or “Can you play that?” Not only was it embarrassing when I didn’t know that particular song—I felt like I was playing guitar wrong. Like I was going about music the wrong way. And yes, I’m sure there are certain ways that are better than others when it comes to learning music, and I’m sure my parents thought if I could play a bunch of songs, that was proof they’d gotten their money’s worth out of all those lessons. But I hated feeling bad about not being able to play to please other people. I felt ashamed. Like I didn’t really know anything about guitar at all despite the hours I spent with it in my hands.
Eventually, I got to the point where I could Google the chords to a song and play quite a variety of things, but that feeling of being a disappointment never left. I didn’t fit the expected mold. My style of playing—my desire to invent little riffs and make up things that I liked—didn’t suit most of the people around me, and that always sat oddly in the bottom of my stomach. Why couldn’t I be what people wanted me to be?
After mastering half of “Versace on the Floor” and most of Coldplay’s “Clocks,” I had a newfound confidence in tinkering around on the keys. Sometimes I’d find myself breaking down a chord from one of those songs and hitting other combinations of notes until I found a sound that felt cool to me. Before I knew it, I was playing what I like to call “little diddles” and having a truly lovely time. I could throw random notes together, not even knowing what they were, and find ways to transition to other notes that I liked. I was making it up as I went, and I actually liked some of the sounds I came up with.
To my surprise, my roommates seemed to like some of them, too.
I was doing what I do best—creating. And the people who were around to listen found value in what I was doing. Miraculously, because I was having fun, it didn’t matter if anyone else liked it or not. I was playing for myself. They were background.
When I was beginning to learn to play guitar, I let myself fall into the idea that if I couldn’t play in a way that other people appreciated or recognized, it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t right or good or worth the effort. That was a limited vision. Because here’s the thing—not everything needs to be productive or useful. Hobbies are meant to bring pleasure. Maybe even to let off steam or decompress. That’s what music has become for me. I just didn’t recognize it when I was younger.
It’s a shame that all my efforts to create original sounds were set aside for the sake of learning songs. Nothing wrong with learning songs, of course, but it’s not what I wanted. It’s not what I needed.
We did not need that piano in our apartment. As wonderful of an addition as it was, it took a lot of effort to get it in here. Not my personal effort, but, you know, someone had to haul it up the stairs. And yet when I think of the delightful escape it’s been for us, I know it was worth it.
I was tinkering around with some sounds and notes when Jo, listening from the kitchen, said she loved what I was doing. I told her I made it up. It just started happening. It started flowing and I let it. It’s ridiculous to think about how naturally that flowed out of my being and through my fingers when compared to my past days of fighting to learn how to play certain songs on guitar for my friends. They never sounded all that great, either. Probably because I was forcing it. I was acting to please everyone but myself.
Now I understand that I’ve got to play the song that comes. Whatever it is. However strange or bizarre. I’ve got to follow the flow. Even Alison commented on how comfortable I looked on the keys when I shared my original tune with her. I’ve come a long way, and it wasn’t from forcing anything. It was from pleasure and excitement.
I can’t change who I am. I can’t play someone else’s song.
Maybe the most ironic part of it all is that my friends never seemed overly impressed with my guitar skills back in the day even though I played the songs they wanted to hear. Yet here I am making it up as I go on an entirely different instrument, staying true to the tunes that only I can come up with, playing for myself, and the people listening find pleasure in it, too.
Alexa Babin 
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