I have played piano for as long as I have known how to breathe, sometimes better. To be fair, I am allergic to the entire state of Oklahoma, so breathing has not always had a fighting chance. The piano, at least, knew what to do with me.
Piano came first as instinct. Before I knew what the notes were called, I knew where they lived. I could hear something once and go hunting for it with my hands. No one had to explain that music was a language. I already knew. I just did not yet have the vocabulary to tell anyone what it was saying.
My first piano came from a sweet Southern Baptist couple who had no idea what they were setting loose. It was big, heavy, barroom-adjacent, and sounded like it belonged in a basement with a Prohibition-era whiskey still and at least one family secret. I lost that piano in a move, which is a longer story than this page needs, but I still remember the feel of it. Some instruments are furniture. Some are accomplices. That one was an accomplice.
The piano that stayed was the Wurlitzer, a 1969 console from Shields’ Piano, bought by my grandmother. It is still with me. It has chipped keys, busted veneer, a few indignities, and more truth in it than most people I have met. It is not pristine. Neither am I. It still plays. So do I.
Classical training gave me discipline, theory, posture, fingering, phrasing, scales, arpeggios, and the quiet little violence of being told to count properly when your entire body is trying to turn a phrase into weather. Excellent teachers shaped me: Robyn Barbour, Donald Ryan, Ed West, Thomas Lanners, and Michael Kirkendoll. They were pianists and teachers who could play rings around most people and still had the patience to sit beside a strange little kid who could hear too much and wanted the piano to confess everything.
I competed when I was young and usually scored well, which was nice, though competitions always felt slightly beside the point. At fourteen, I was invited to play a jazz version of “Flight of the Bumblebee” at the Miss Claremore Beauty Pageant. She did not win, but I did. That feels important to state for the historical record.
Over the years, I played everything from Steinway Model Ds to the Bösendorfer housed in the Austrian Embassy. I played in churches, halls, formal rooms, strange rooms, rooms with money, rooms with ghosts, rooms where everyone was listening, and rooms where no one understood what they were hearing. I played for ambassadors, opera singers, gospel royalty, a few old Hollywood types, and one Marvel legend.
Music has never been background noise for me. It is a memory, a weather event, an argument, the geography, a prayer, that silent flirtation in dim lighting. It is grief, defiance, and evidence. It tells me where I have been, and it points toward where I need to go.
There are songs that can still return me to a street, a room, a country, or a version of myself I had almost forgotten. Phoenix’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix can put me back in Prague, walking through the city with “Lisztomania” and “1901” in my ears, carrying a future I could feel before I could explain it. Music does not simply remind me of my life. It stores the coordinates.
That is why I never became a concert pianist. That was never the dream. Honestly, it sounds like a nightmare with better shoes. I respect the discipline, but I never wanted to make the one place I could disappear into the one thing people expected me to perform.
The piano is not where I go to be impressive. It is where I go to disappear. It is the room inside the room, the place where I can be quiet without being empty. Turning it into a career would make it stop being mine. I guard that privacy fiercely. Most people who know me do not know how much I play. That is not an accident. Some things survive because they are not fed to the machine.
Musically, I am omnivorous to the point of inconvenience. I will listen to Mongolian morin khuur solos, Kiri Te Kanawa, Joan Sutherland, Aretha Franklin, the Caravan Sisters, Charlotte Cardin, Kristin Chenoweth, French pop, French chanson, French disco, French melancholy, French anything, 1980s synth pop, choral requiems, UK garage, gospel, Broadway, minimalist piano, Pentecostal hymns, art songs, torch songs, protest songs, funeral songs, and whatever else has a pulse. I do not need to understand the lyrics. If the song is telling the truth, I will hear it.
My playing is the same kind of unruly. I can move from 10,000 Maniacs into an old Pentecostal hymn without blinking. I respect Bach’s brilliance, but I do not particularly enjoy playing him. That is not a theological position. It is a personal boundary.
Give me Rachmaninoff and let me wrestle the thing with my stubby Fred Flintstone fingers until one of us comes out changed. Give me Romantic-era drama, gospel thunder, jazz argument, hymn-book ache, Broadway nerve, and the kind of melody that behaves badly in public. Give me music that sweats a little.
I am drawn to music that is too much: too emotional, too embellished, too wounded, too ecstatic, too sincere, too theatrical, too human to sit politely in a chair. I want love and hate in the same chord. Joy and grief under the same pedal. Beauty with a bruise on it. I will take ferocity and flaws over form and finesse almost every time.
Because music, at its best, is not decoration. It is evidence of a life lived … my life.