By Tom Robotham
Well, here we are at the beginning of a New Year.
Have you made any resolutions? I know a lot of people who dismiss the ritual—and why not? Resolutions tend to be short-lived. You promise yourself that you’ll exercise more, but by mid-February that stationary bike you got for Christmas has become a clothes hanger. I know people as well who reject the ritual because it’s utterly artificial. Every day of our lives, after all, holds unlimited potential. Why put so much emphasis on the New Year as a singular opportunity for a fresh start?
It’s hard to argue with these observations—but I continue to make resolutions, nevertheless. My trouble is, I generally make a dozen or more. Lord knows there are a whole lot of worthy items among them: Quit smoking; work out more; drink less, and so on. But the sheer number almost always dooms me to failure.
This year, with that in mind, I’ve committed to only one: I want to make 2016 the most musical year of my life.
I mean that in two senses: literally and figuratively.
First, the literal. To put that in context, I need to give you some background.
My mother was a music teacher, and at the age of 5 she gave me my first piano lesson. I still remember it vividly, sitting down at her old Hardman-Peck upright with the Schaum beginner’s book open to a song called “Bone Sweet Bone,” which was illustrated with a picture of a puppy. It was the simplest of melodies: C-D-E / E-D-C / C-D-E / C. And yet, I delighted in it and caught on quickly. By the end of the week I had learned all the songs in the book. In the back was a certificate of completion, where I was instructed to trace the outline of my hand. I used a red Crayola crayon.
I continued my lessons for a couple of years, but by the time I turned 8 I’d decided that I wanted to learn guitar as well. It was 1964, so the reason should be obvious. Earlier that year I joined my sister, my parents and about 75 million other Americans to watch the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. I was hooked. I wish I could say that I was inspired solely by the joy of the music. The truth is, I was also inspired by a classmate named Maria, with whom I was utterly smitten. If the Beatles could make millions of girls squeal and swoon, I figured, I could win Maria’s affections by learning to play and sing their songs.
The following Christmas, after a great deal of begging, I received my first guitar— a beige Dan Electro with a single pickup. These days you can find small acoustic guitars all over the internet, and it is even easier to find which guitars are the best value for money. By spring, I’d learned to play and sing a few songs well enough to sign up for the school talent show. I settled on the Beatles’ “Run for Your Life”—an odd choice for a 9-year-old trying to win over the love of his life (“I’d rather see you dead little girl than to see you with another man…”), but what did I know? Maria didn’t swoon, as it turned out, but she did watch attentively from the front row of the school auditorium, and that was good enough for me. For two minutes and change I was a rock star.
Soon thereafter, my friend Charlie and I formed a band called The Tidal Waves, which lasted a couple of years. We even got a few gigs, playing for friends’ birthday parties.
But by that time I’d hit the steep incline of the learning curve. I’d picked up the rudiments as easily as I had on the piano, and that can carry you a long way. There are countless songs, after all, that you can play with three or four chords. After that, though, the going gets tough. And like most people who study music as children, I often put down my guitar in frustration. By the time I turned 13, moreover I had amassed a sizable record collection. And a few years after that, I had started going to concerts in Manhattan with my friends. Passively enjoying the music of my favorite bands—usually with the enhancement of beer and weed—turned out to be a lot more alluring than playing scales till my fingers bled.
WHEN I DEPARTED FOR COLLEGE I took my guitar with me and strummed it occasionally. From time to time I’d also go into a practice room in the music building and play piano as well. But I simply wasn’t dedicated enough to make much progress. Most of the time I opted instead to satisfy my musical soul with a gig as a deejay on the college radio station.
And yet I never let go entirely. When I got my first apartment after college, I even saved money to buy my own piano, which I kept through six moves, but played only intermittently. Finally, when I got divorced in 2007, I left it behind and subsequently gave to a friend who has three young children.
I did bring my guitar with me to my new apartment, and eventually I even bought a new one—a gorgeous Breedlove—and started to practice a bit more. I even began writing some original songs and performing in public. Several years later I also decided that I could no longer live without a piano, so I purchased full-size, weighted-key digital.
But to this day, my practice has remained sporadic. Often, in the early years of newfound bachelorhood, I opted again and again for more passive pleasures: drinking, hanging out with friends and listening to bands or records. I cannot discount the value of those evenings—especially those that I’ve spent alone in my apartment. Being single in midlife is a double-edged sword. There’s the exhilaration of freedom, to be sure. But there have also been long stretches of profound loneliness, bordering on utter despair. It may be an overstatement to say that Bach, Bob Dylan, Clifford Brown and the Beatles saved my life. But they sure helped me through some dark nights of the soul.
Indeed, it is almost impossible, I have found, to feel despair while listening to or playing music. And yet on many occasions my sadness as been so severe that I could not find the will to pick up my guitar, sit down at the piano, or even put on a record. Instead I’d seek solace in the distractions of Netflix or Facebook.
Nothing, I’d venture to say, is less musical than Facebook—at least much of the time. Often, it is a cacophony of unrelated words and images. Television is not much better, with its subtle manipulations and quick-cut fragments of pictures and sounds.
Reading is always an option, but I find it difficult to do so late at night. I still have no problem staying out partying till the wee hours, but if I start to read after 9 p.m. or so, I get drowsy.
So why not go to my music, one of my greatest sources of joy? The sad and simple answer is that its gratifications are not as immediate as these other distractions. Facebook, I’ve concluded, is a lot like drinking. It can give you a buzz pretty quickly, if you’re feeling lonely, but if you imbibe too much it can lead to an emotional hangover.
And yet, I realize that I’m not alone in my tendency toward inertia. Virtually everyone knows that certain activities like exercising—or playing music, or making art, or learning to cook healthy meals—will bring deeper happiness in the long run, in spite of short-term difficulties. And yet, for most of us, those resolutions continue to fall by the wayside.
With that in mind, I’m not about to make grandiose promises to myself about keeping my pledge to make 2016 the most musical year of my life. I just need to remind myself that if I somehow manage to play my instruments every day—and become a better listener of music—I will be immeasurably happier at the end of this year.
Such a regimen would improve more than my technique. As I noted earlier, I want to make this a musical year both literally and figuratively. By the latter, I mean a year lived more melodically, harmonically and rhythmically in both my solitary moments and in interactions with other people. There is so much strife in the world—so much unresolved dissonance and so much painful noise. Music can’t solve all of these problems. But as Pete Seeger proved, its potential power is enormous. “Once upon a time,” he asks rhetorically in the great documentary The Power of Song, “wasn’t singing a part of everyday life?… Our distance ancestors…sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes or walking long journeys. Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece? Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. And when one person taps out a beat while another one leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed… then they also know there is hope for the world.”
