TRANSCRIPT
I’ve been a musician now for I’d say about 40 years. I played the harmonica. I played the French horn as a kid. I played the piano all through being a kid. I started playing guitar when I was 20, 27 years ago. I worked hard at it, put a lot of effort into getting better as a musician. And then finally, I started realizing I’m limited. I’ve got some real gifts in my life, but being a musician is not one of my extreme gifts. It’s not one of my greatest gifts.
And five years ago, I decided, you know, once and for all, now that I have enough perspective on who I am as a musician, what my strengths are and what my weaknesses are, I’m gonna write it down. I’m gonna do an analysis of my musicianship. I wrote it down, wrote probably a 5,000-word document, wrote about my strengths as a musician and my weaknesses. Some of my strengths, I think the biggest ones, I just had an incredible ability to memorize lyrics. I could just memorize thousands of lyrics and the melodies that went along with them. I had a fairly good ear for music. My ability to understand music theory was, mm-hmm, kind of limited, kind of good in some ways, kind of not.
I think my biggest weakness was in the rhythm department. I didn’t have the best timing, didn’t have the best sense of rhythm. There really was a weakness, and no matter what I did, I just couldn’t seem to get better at it. And it was kind of a limitation that really affected me as a musician in a kind of a global way. So I wrote this down, and then I kind of forgot about it. And then strangely, about a year after I wrote it, an amazing thing happened. I started playing again, guitar in a whole new way, much more intensely. I got a new instrument that was in a different key, a little guitar instead of a big one. I had to relearn all these songs, and something happened in my mind.
I started traveling again in a much more intense way, and somehow I opened up. All this playing that I did, playing for four or five hours a day, day in and day out, I did it for months and years, sometimes just tons and tons of playing. The things that I thought were permanent limitations in my ability as a musician suddenly weren’t so permanent. And I started really getting better in a more fundamental way. My ability to play rhythm got better, my music theory got better, and I thought it really affected the music that I was able to create.
And so the reason I bring this up is I tell this as a story of hope. Because when I wrote that analysis of my musicianship, I wrote it in a way that this is it. I’m writing as far, this is the ceiling that I’ve hit, and I can’t seem to get any further. And this is just as far as my talent could ever bring me. And I’m gonna enjoy it. I’m gonna enjoy playing because I still love playing music, but I’m really not gonna get any better. And what I learned is that I was wrong. And that in spite of my analysis that I wasn’t gonna get really much better in some of these weak areas of my life, I could.
And so the reason I share this is because I think it’s true about humanity as a whole. Even though humanity seems so stuck and so screwed up and so weak in some ways, and yes, we have our strengths as human beings, we have our gifts as a species, as individuals. Some individuals especially seem to be more gifted and more conscious, more aware than others. As a whole, it seems like we’re pretty screwed up and pretty limited considering the destruction that we’re wreaking on the planet, wreaking on each other, wreaking on children.
Well, the reason I share this about being a musician is I think it’s a metaphor for humanity. It’s like humanity has hit a ceiling, but I think something can change. Some big surprise could happen where we could grow. We could start looking at ourselves. We could start really challenging our weaknesses and our denial. And this is something that gives me hope, some unexpected hope. Because I think also humanity in general is without hope. I think it’s some unconscious level. Humanity doesn’t have a lot of hope that things are gonna get better. I think most people just think we’re just careening toward destruction and that we’re just doing our best to survive now. And the future is not very good. And the future for children is not very good. It could change, even if it seems hopeless, because I saw myself change as a musician in ways that I really never expected.
[Music]