Share Music #1 & 2

Share Music is a project I'm making for Amazon. However, Amazon video only works in Germany, Japan, and the United States...so, here is the free internet version, for everybody! (Slightly different, but possibly cooler...and sooner, too!)

So, hear’s (sic) the thing: My piano teacher died when I was eight.

I’d started when I was four, and was the youngest student my teacher had ever had. She was, despite taking a four year-old on as a student, a serious musician, with world-class students – still, she said I was the best student she’d ever had.

For some reason I’ll never fully comprehend, no one ever bothered to get me a new piano teacher.

☆○o。　　。o○☆

I also remember begging and pleading for organ lessons – I went to a school in a church, see – but no one would let me. I was brushed off like an annoying mouse. (Wait, let me picture that – who brushes off a mouse? I’d scream, and throw it out the window.)

Well, you know what I mean...

☆○o。　　。o○☆

Also I remember – I’ll never forget – staying with some old lady in a castle – I lived a charmed, tortured life, apparently.

This was when I was still four or five.

She had an organ.

I mean, it was a castle, after all. Not precisely like an organ you’d find in a church, but an organ.

A real one.

I remember, when all the grownups were doing grown-upy things, climbing onto the organ bench, making stuff up, banging away, a four-year-old-keyboard-Jimi Hendrix, or maybe Paderewski with a little John Cage thrown in...(or maybe just an annoying 4 year-old? I keep my memories in the cellar with the champagne, and they tend to become bubbly and unrealistic, and a good 1928 Krug Grande Cuvée...and you know what that's like, don't you? Don't you?!)

Sill, I remember the woman – the castle-owning-woman – coming up and asking, “Can’t you play any real music?”

So I played her some Mozart. (I had to dumb myself down to something she could understand. Mere Mozart.)

At least I have good manners.

Bitch.

☆○o。　　。o○☆

One more memory:

I got this thing called an “AudioMedia” card for my computer, when I was, maybe, eleven. This was before computers were good enough to do music on their own, without adding stuff to them. (Actually, you still need to add one or two things for your computer to make sound sound good.)

I'd got this electronic thing-a-ma-bob from a friend’s older brother. It was probably really out-dated, but I only paid a few satoshi for it (or whatever we used for money back then...)

Still, to me, it was magic. All the music that had been bottled up inside me (my internal, musical, 1928 Krug Grande Cuvée! A very "relatable" metaphor, no?) It could now burst out, like champagne bubbles, I imagined...

Soon afterwards, sneering at my new bounty, some officious grandmotherly grownup (an "O.G.G.") sneered condescendingly at me, saying, “What the hell are you going to do with that?”

I’d planned to ask a steel drummer I’d seen on the street, busking, and other people I'd seen or thought I could find, to add their parts to my first song.

Beyond the O.G.G., more random losers said things like I was too young, I can’t go up to strange-busking-street-steel-drummers and invite them home.

Over-protecting bastards.

☆○o。　　。o○☆

Well, piss off, O.G.G., and all the rest of you.

See what I’ve done? See what I’m doing?!

(See the video above. :D )

☆○o。　　。o○☆

But it doesn’t really matter, right? I feel there’s a spirit of music, above and beyond anything we could ever put into words...and feel very strongly that this spirit is helping me out, now, when I – when you, when anybody – shares music for a musical reason. (Which can be many things, of course, but is never made by Sony. Just saying...)

And especially it's not about ego, or singing contest bullshit – but is music for the sake of music.

What a thought. What a feeling.

Give me another swig of that 1928 Krug Grande Cuvée...

FULL DISCLOSURE: I've never been near a bottle of 1928 Krug Grande Cuvée.

Yet.