On The Mothership

First things first. I'm a Beatles fan. So of course I'm gonna dedicate an entire blog post in celebration of John Lennon's 75 birthday (which is today, in case you haven't noticed).  Heads up.  This post is probably gonna ramble on for a while. So where do I start? The beginning is as good a place as any. John Winston Lennon was born on the 9th of October, 1940. Flash forward 17 years and now we're at the 6th of July, 1957. Why is this date important?  This, the day of all days, was the day that John met 15-year-old Paul McCartney at St. Peters Church in Liverpool.  This meeting would evolve into a friendship and musical partnership that would become part of the world's most successful band.  A few years later, on October 5, 1962, the Beatles released their first single "Love Me Do/PS I Love You" on the Parlophone label. In 1963, they released their second single "Please Please Me" in the UK on January 11th.  This sin...

As musicians, we often hear phrases like this: "I couldn't learn to play an instrument if I tried." "I'm completely tone deaf." Or perhaps the more degrading "Why would you want to be a musician? They don't get paid well." I'll get back to that last phrase in a moment, but let's address the first one. "I couldn't learn to play an instrument if I tried."  Let's be fair here.  There really aren't many things that you can learn to do without trying.  When I first starting taking piano lessons, I was sure that it was going to take me months just to remember the names of the keys on the piano. But within just a couple weeks' worth of practice, I learned them and since then have moved on to other topics. Now, I've been playing piano for nearly four years.  There are still times when I think  I'm never going to learn how to play this   whenever I come to a particularly difficult part in a piece o...