Six months ago at age 46, I started piano lessons. My son had started lessons about a year ago at six years old and I was inspired by watching him learn. Since then, I have stuck with it through 22 one-hour in-person lessons on Saturday afternoons (skipping just a few when out of town). I’ve been doing this consistently amidst a full life otherwise: trying to be a good husband/father, coaching a full roster of CEOs and CTOs, taking a 12-week Korean class this fall (안녕하세요!), active service on three non-profit boards, and preparing for the next iteration of the class I’m teaching at Cornell Tech this spring.

So I don’t really “have time” for piano, but I’m glad I’m making the time and I’m excited about the progress I’ve been making. Six months in, I’m comfortable at the piano and what was a mysterious object with random black and white keys in the beginning is now very familiar. I can read basic music intuitively, keep rhythm most of the time (and when not, I know how to use a metronome to get me on track), and I play harmony and melody using both hands. I’m still by no means a great piano player. I’m very much just getting started. (In fact, here’s some audio of me playing this week where I deliberately did one take with no editing so you could hear what someone who has only had six months of lessons sounds like.)

But I am better than I was six months ago when I couldn’t play at all and I feel confident that I’ll keep improving. I’ve learned some good life lessons in the process. Here they are:

Lesson #1: You have to be very vulnerable to learn when you are a true beginner at something.

In business contexts, when a person has experience, they tend to spend a lot of time saying things like, “yes, I get what you’re saying, but let’s get to the point.” An experienced person can certainly be an accelerator in many situations: been there, done that, don’t waste your time on that, here’s how it works. As much as the word “vulnerability” gets thrown around in business circles these days, though, experienced people are generally expected to be decisive and focused. “I don’t know” is frowned-upon.

Knowing is simply not possible when you are a true beginner as I am with piano. I actually don’t know. I take piano lessons on Saturdays in a shop in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. I get there a few minutes early and wait outside the small studio for the prior lesson to end. The student before me is about seven years old and I can faintly hear her playing as I wait. She is better than me and progressing faster than me. My teacher is considerably younger than me. In my work, I’ve been so accustomed to being the one with experience. In that piano studio, I am the equivalent of a toddler. Things that seem simple when I see others do them can be excruciating for me. I stumble. I get frustrated. I didn’t really look forward to the early lessons that much. A lot of the instruction was “try that again. <pause while I play> Try that again. <pause while I play> Do that again.” And that’s what I did (and what I needed). I had to embrace the not-knowing in order to begin to know.

Lesson #2: Progress is all about sustained effort over long periods supported by consistent practice.

There was some divine intervention involved in the form of a book that helped me get my mental game right to take piano lessons. My son’s progress in his own lessons had inspired me and one day I decided to take him to the Juilliard Store on W 66th Street to look for new sheet music (one of those amazing “I ❤️ NYC” experiences all by itself – what a store!) While he looked around, I happened upon a slim book called The Practicing Mind: Developing Focus and Discipline in Your Life (here’s a summary). It’s one of the most important books I’ve ever read. Learning piano is really just a framing device used by the author to lay out bigger life lessons. Here’s the basic summary using three sentences from the book (all emphasis is mine):

• “Real peace and contentment in our lives come from realizing that life is a process to engage in, a journey down a path that we can choose to experience as magical.”
• “When we subtly shift toward both focusing on and finding joy in the process of achieving instead of having the goal, we have gained a new skill. And once mastered, it is magical and incredibly empowering.”
• “With deliberate and repeated effort, progress is inevitable.”

In this spirit, I made a deal with myself when I started lessons that I was going to do the lessons for a year and practice diligently regardless of how I thought I was doing. I told myself that learning piano was a lifelong process and I hoped to stick with it and slowly improve for the rest of my life. I didn’t set any artificial goals for myself other than sticking with it for a year and practicing consistently. I did better some weeks than others but I kept to my commitment to just keep doing it. I don’t know how quickly I’ll get better and I don’t pay attention to it on a week-to-week basis. I just keep going, knowing that doing the work will make me better (“With deliberate and repeated effort, progress is inevitable.”)

The sometimes repetitive work of learning also has a meditative aspect to it. I’ve probably played a C Major scale a couple thousand times by now. Sitting down, gathering myself, and warming up by playing that simple scale a few times has the same effect on me that taking deep breaths does. When my teacher tells me to “try it again” in our lessons, I do just that without self-judgment. I just do it again and again until I get it right. When I remove the self-judgment, these repetitions become almost soothing and relaxing.

(Note: Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Musician Within by Kenny Werner is very much in the same spirit as The Practicing Mind and is also supported by the Effortless Mastery Institute. Definitely check it out.)

Lesson #3: Learning something difficult feels like (and is) real work.

The default response from adults I tell about this is, “Oh, that sounds fun!” Ahem. I would say it’s rewarding but I wouldn’t always call it “fun” at this stage. I’ve observed that learning an instrument can be a fantasy for many people, in the same vein as “one day I’ll write a book.” It certainly was for me. When you hear “piano lessons,” it is tempting to fast-forward to some glamorous point in your future where you’re at a holiday party and people gather around to sing songs at the piano as you take requests, all of which you know how to play, of course. The problem with this fantasy is that getting to such a point takes years and hundreds of hours of practice (if not thousands). The only thing that will get you there is doing the real work day after day.

Lesson #4: Focus on fundamentals and really learn them.

I’ve been hacking around on guitar for almost thirty years and I have never progressed beyond playing chords. I would describe my skill level as “campfire guitarist” —  there have been times where people were drunk around a campfire and I could play a song just well enough to be recognizable and the chorus of voices was just loud enough to cover my mistakes. But I’ve never been a good guitarist.

Looking back, I have been stuck at this level because I never really focused on playing guitar as a practice. You know, I just wanted to rock. I was impatient, unfocused, and undisciplined. I would listen to a Led Zeppelin song, download the tablature from the Internet, then try to contort my fingers into holding the right notes. I always failed and put the guitar away for a while after that. (Aside: part of the magic of Led Zeppelin is the crazy rhythms they used — check out “What Makes John Bonham Such a Good Drummer.” No wonder I struggled!)

What I didn’t understand when I was downloading Led Zeppelin tabs and failing to play them is that music isn’t just a paint-by-number put-your-fingers-on-the-right-strings exercise. You have to understand core concepts like rhythm, harmony, and melody. Putting all of those things together at the same time makes great music, not just hitting the right notes in order. Some people pick these concepts up more easily than others or through trial and error. I accidentally learned some of this along the way with guitar but it wasn’t purposeful. But whether or not you play “by ear” or you know how to read music, you have to learn all of this somehow, and that requires discipline and lots of hours. There is no shortcut.

With piano, this means getting your basic fingering right and that means doing “boring” things like practicing scales. It’s not just hitting the right notes, it’s about hitting the right notes with the right fingers. It’s about how your hand moves up and down the keyboard so you can hit the next right note as the scale progresses. It’s about doing rhythm drills to make sure you can play at accelerating tempos and keep consistent rhythm. In the past six months, I’ve spent 20x the time on this type of work on piano that I spent on guitar in the past 30 years. By the end of my first year really focusing on piano, I’m pretty sure I will be objectively better on piano than I ever was at guitar (and when I go back to guitar, I already feel like I’m better from the work with piano).

All systems revolve around interrelated concepts and the more you study and integrate all of those concepts into your practice, the higher quality the output will be. In my time as an operating executive, I often heard people starting their careers tell me they wanted to go straight to doing “strategic” work with the implication that they wanted to skip over the boring “tactical” stuff. In music as in business (and life), knowing how the tactical stuff works (rhythm, harmony, melody) is the base that gets you to strategic work (playing great songs). Otherwise, you’re just me skipping straight to trying (and failing) to play “Kashmir” without knowing that the drums are in 4/4 time and the guitar is 3/4 and they only meet up every 12th beat (see this video explanation). Take the time to learn the fundamentals. Skipping ahead leads to falling behind.

Lesson #5: Pure intrinsic motivation and the absence of external validation are liberating.

To keep going you need a ton of intrinsic motivation to make it through learning the very basics in the beginning. When you’ve done a few lessons and all you can do is tap out a simple version of “Yankee Doodle,” you’re nowhere close to wowing the mythical people gathered around the piano at the mythical holiday party you were dreaming of when you started. No one really cares that you’re learning piano as an adult. Kids learning piano are cute but an adult man just isn’t. In fact, a 47-year-old man asking you to listen to him play a rough version of “Yankee Doodle” can only be described in one word: annoying. You are going to suck for a while and the songs you learn to play will be so simple that they may seem boring.

Just keep going. When I made that commitment to try lessons for a year, it took me about three months of learning basic stuff to come anywhere close to what I would call “fun.” I have no idea how long it will take for other people to actually want to hear me play, if ever, and that’s ok because I enjoy it in the absence of that. In life, seeking external validation leads to all kinds of inner and outer dysfunction. Learning piano at my age has gotten me to focus on something in a pure way that is independent of external affirmation.

Lesson #6: You have time.

I’ve heard many people say: “I want to learn piano but I don’t have time!” If your experience is anything like mine, you could make consistent progress with piano by taking a one-hour lesson each week and practicing 30 minutes 5x/week**. This probably sounds like a major commitment but take a look at how much time you spend on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Think about all the time you spend watching TV shows. I’ve noticed that I spend significantly less time on social media and watching TV since I started learning piano. There’s something about practicing that gives me a sense of focus that makes those activities less appealing. Social media platforms thrive on conflict, envy, making you want things you don’t need, and constant “breaking news” that is often a re-hash of what you heard an hour ago. Focusing on piano is about focusing on the mastery of an exercise or a piece of music. It feels liberating to focus intently on one thing you’ve chosen (like a piece of music) instead of a barrage of algorithmic garbage intended to manipulate you in some way. I know this not because I’m too pure to participate in social media — I certainly do — but I’ve become increasingly mindful of how cluttered my mind feels when I’m reading Twitter versus practicing piano. The more I shift my attention from the addled social media mind to the practicing mind, the happier I am.

(**Of course, if you practice more you’ll move faster. Practice less than that and you’ll probably stay in place. You can skip a lesson now and then and be fine. Just keep going, don’t quit, and you’ll make progress.)

Lesson #7: Learning something with someone creates the ultimate sense of presence.  

I mentioned that my son has been learning, too. He has been playing for a year and I have been playing for six months. He is at least 10x better than me, and I’m not exaggerating at all. I had already embraced the vulnerability of learning so instead of feeling inferior, I ask him if he’ll help me practice by playing the accompanying teacher parts in my book while I play the student parts. On any given night, I’ll say, “hey, want to play some duets?” and a few minutes later we’re both on the piano bench — he on the bass end of the keyboard and me on the higher end.

This first happened in my early weeks of lessons way back in April when I was trying to play “Yankee Doodle” and asked him to accompany me. I recorded us that night. You can hear him count me in (“1-2-3-4”) and hear me mess up repeatedly while he gives me encouragement. It takes a few tries but eventually I get it right.

In that moment, there’s the joy of personal accomplishment but there’s the sense that we are fusing our individual practices together, that the sense of focus we have both been developing as we’ve learned music at our vastly different paces has given us a powerful new way to focus our attention intently on each other. It’s a joyous and magical thing. I’m not practicing so that I can play for the mythical people at the mythical holiday party in the uncertain future. I’m practicing to enjoy the right now with my son — and that’s the most important lesson of all.

Recently, I got an email with the subject, “We have the same name,” and it was signed (as you might guess) “Chad Dickerson.” This was my “Google Me” moment.

The other Chad Dickerson lives in Lexington, Kentucky and has a band called Switchmen. Chad handles guitar and vocals. You can find out all about them here:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• Twitter
• SoundCloud

As those bards from Australia once sang, It’s a long way to the top / if you wanna rock and roll.

Here’s wishing the Switchmen success, from one Chad Dickerson to another.

By total accident, I happened upon the documentary film Moog recently — what a pleasant surprise! I had missed its 2004 release entirely. The subject of the film is Bob Moog, the inventor of the modern synthesizer. The way Moog and his compatriots talk about his work with music and synthesizers will seem very familiar to software developers or anyone who lives “close to the machine” (that phrase being the title of an excellent Ellen Ullman book). The description of the film on the Plexifilm site reads in part:

. . . a portrait of the legendary figure in music and technology and his ideas about creativity, design, interactivity, spirituality and his collaborations with musicians over the years.

In the film, Moog explained that he “can feel what’s going on in a piece of electronic equipment… it’s something between discovering and witnessing.” [I love this phrasing. – CD] And he was convinced that many musicians come to “feel” a circuit in a similar way. In fact, musicians make such strong emotional connections with the electronics inside a Moog synthesiser that the inventor himself reached cult hero status.

Permanently changing the face of music, the Moog synthesiser went from being the centerpiece of a late-60s craze — appearing on records with such titles as Spotlight on the Moog, Moog Power, Music to Moog By, Country Moog, Moog Indigo, Exotic Moog and countless others — to an indispendable instrument for progressive rock bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes to predating the electronic dance music movement of today.

In the film (which is an eminently watchable 75 minutes), Moog and his colleagues and admirers speak to each other like the geeks that they are, talking shop about the various parts of the synthesizers, their modularity and tuneability, and the difficulty they had explaining the early models to musicians and others as they attempted to commercialize their work. While the filmmakers don’t position it this way at all, the discussion of Moog Music sounds very much like the tale of any technology startup, only the startup was founded in 1953, predating even the first known uses of the term “hacker.”

After I enjoyed the film so much, I checked Metacritic and saw that it got a surprisingly low score of 51. I dug deeper into the individual reviews and I think this Austin Chronicle review nails it:

Moog is a laudatory ovation to the man whose technical work has proved essential to numerous artists working today. As such, it provides only a smattering of social context for the electronic music explosion. Moog is an inventor’s movie all the way. . . There are things to be learned here, but it would take a real aficionado to geek out on all the knobs and circuit boards on display.

I’m not a hard-core music gear aficionado, but watching Moog was a sheer pleasure, even when I didn’t understand the specific technical aspects of the discussion. Set your Tivo for Moog, or buy it here. It’s a really, really delightful film for geeks (and Moog’s enthusiasm and joy of creation is enough for me to forgive his role in the rise of prog-rock — just had to say that!)

(Trailer below)

http://stream.qtv.apple.com/qtv/plexifilm/moogtrailer3_ref.mov

Whenever I come to NY, I step off the plane, grab a copy of TimeOut New York, and flip through the pages on the cab ride to my hotel to see if there are any good shows while I’m in town. More often than not, I’m handsomely rewarded (this is NY, right?) Every time I’ve thumbed through TimeOut in the past seven years, I’ve been looking for one name that has consistently eluded me: Laura Cantrell. Finally, after years of this ritual, I discovered when I landed last night that Laura Cantrell was playing TONIGHT at Joe’s Pub in Greenwich Village. I bought tickets and could barely sleep last night.

I first became aware of Laura Cantrell via her appearance on John Peel’s Peel Sessions in January 2001. If you’re not familiar with John Peel and the Peel Sessions, Peel (who died in 2004) was a legendary DJ and man of taste. His Peel Sessions ran from the 60s until his death and have included Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Pavement, White Stripes, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley. . . so it means a lot when someone like John Peel says this about an artist (referring to her first record, When the Roses Bloom Again):

My favourite record of the last ten years and possibly my life is an LP by a New York woman born in Nashville called Laura Cantrell. It’s country, and I don’t know why I like it, but it has the same sort of effect on me as Roy Orbison had in the ’60s.

Her Peel Sessions appearance again in April 2001 made the top 125 all-time list of Peel Sessions, right there between Joy Division and Led Zeppelin (yeah, the list is in alphabetical order, but JOY DIVISION and LED ZEPPELIN!)

Like John Peel, I have a hard time explaining the effect that Laura Cantrell’s music has on me. Her voice is beautifully smooth and classic (note: just avoided temptation to use whiskey metaphor), with hints of Kitty Wells. In fact, Elvis Costello said of her: “If Kitty Wells made Rubber Soul, it would sound like Laura Cantrell.” The lyrics drip with authenticity but without a trace of the cloying self-consciousness that you often find in country music made by city-dwellers who are long-disconnected from the places and scenes they sing about. Her music is very real and very simple and utterly remarkable if you like real country music (if you don’t, please move along. . . nothing to see here).

Her new digital-only album Trains and Boats and Planes (available on Amazon, iTunes, and eMusic) is described on her site as “travel-themed, based on the Burt Bacharach-Hal David title track, along with thoughtfully-chosen songs by Roger Miller, Merle Haggard, John Hartford, Gordon Lightfoot, New Order, and three previously-released tracks.” Tonight, the standouts from the new album for me were Roger Miller’s “Train of Life” and Merle Haggard’s “Silver Wings,” but the whole show was wonderful. I embedded a couple of snippets below from my Flip camera using Flickr Video:

There are lots of Laura Cantrell songs from this album and past albums available online, many as mp3 downloads:

• Almost 20 downloads on her site. My favorites are “Churches off the Interstate” and “When the Roses Bloom Again”.
• “Love Vigilantes” (New Order cover!) and “Roll Truck Roll” (both mp3s from Download.com)
• Her MySpace page

I don’t know when or where Laura Cantrell is playing again (the show I saw tonight is the only one listed on her gigs page), but be sure to keep an eye out. I waited seven years, but it was worth it!

(If you can’t catch her live, be sure to catch her radio show on WFMU, Radio Thrift Shop, where she plays other people’s good country music.)

I had been planning to write something really profound about my impending nuptials on Friday (and it is definitely profound in so many ways), but a moment last night really brought it all home. After a late night of doing some last-minute wedding preparations and errands in which copy machines played a critical role, we were driving when I cued up a Silver Jews album in the car.

(For those of you not familiar with the Silver Jews, their Wikipedia entry reads in part: “The Silver Jews were always a conduit for David Berman’s brand of sardonic, countrified indie rock.” Hmmm. . . . “sardonic countrified indie rock” is about as close to my ideal as one could imagine, suggesting the perfect mixture of Stephin Merritt‘s raised-eyebrow lyrics, Gram Parson‘s “Cosmic American Music,” and a nice dose of Bakesale-era Sebadoh thrown in for good measure.)

So, it only makes sense that when I put on track one of the Silver Jews’ excellent 1998 record American Water (9.9 from Pitchfork — whoa!), an album we had never listened to together or even discussed before, we sang the first wonderful sardonic-countrified-indie-rock line in unison, completely unprompted:

In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection

In that simple shared moment, I experienced the powerful feeling of knowing that things were just plain right.

On Saturday night, I was hanging out with some friends when we started talking about music legends we wanted to see while they were still alive. I talked about how Nancy and I saw Buck Owens play at his restaurant in Bakersfield less than a year before he died, and my companions said, “Have you seen James Brown? You gotta see James Brown.” James Brown had been on my must-see list for a while — at this moment, I can’t think of a more larger-than-life figure in the history of American music.

Well, I missed my chance to see him.

Several years ago, I used to spend time in Augusta, Georgia — James Brown’s hometown — and always loved how much the city embraced him despite his tawdry legal troubles. They still named a street after him (James Brown Boulevard) and eventually named the local civic center the James Brown Arena. I’m not sure if he was ever charged with any crimes in Georgia, but he was pardoned for his past crimes in South Carolina in 2003 and released a public statement:

God bless America on this beautiful day. I hope my pardon shows the youth that America is a beautiful country. I feel good!

James Brown helped make America a beautiful country. Rest in peace.

Via the PuppetVision Blog (!), I just learned that Beck and his puppets will be making what “may be their final public appearance on SNL” (according to puppeteer Rob Saunders, who I had the pleasure of meeting briefly backstage at Yahoo! Hack Day). If you’re wondering what in the world I’m talking about, be sure to check out the video from one of my prior posts. I don’t think a day has gone by at work that I haven’t said, “Doesn’t anybody work here? Where are the servers? Where are the techies to support this?” (you gotta watch the video to get it).

For more on Beck and his puppets, check out these links:

• I’m a Puppeteer (puppeteer Rob Saunders’ personal blog)
• Beck puppets trash Radiohead’s dressing room in Dublin (video)
• Beck: Master of Puppets at Bonnaroo 2006 (interview with the puppeteers)
• Yahoo! Search for “beck puppets” turns up a lot of other good stuff

I love those damn puppets.