admitting that your parents are (VERY occasionally) right. Since my aborted piano lessons, music has begun to mean more and more to me. It may be safe to say that I am obsessive about music. I think about points in my life relative to music I was listening to then. When I hear a favorite album it opens the floodgates of memories. I like to have a soundtrack to my life. The advent of iTunes has been wonderful - I list, I rank, I obsess. There’s nothing like seeing a favorite band live or tearing the shrinkwrap off of a new album and anticipating that first listen.

 

However, I’ve always felt a little bit like a musical parasite. Consuming but never producing (although I guess the music industry relies on folks like me). And there has been many a time that I yearned to go back into those floral living rooms and bang away at “Greensleeves”. About a year ago, I made the decision that it was time to learn how to play music and if one wants to play rock music or derivations of rock music, one must learn the guitar. So for Christmas of 2006, the long suffering Dr. O’Connell purchased for me a lovely Yamaha acoustic guitar.

 

I would love to tell you that it all came back to me, my musical training. I would love to tell you that shortly after I finish this writing I will go and write my ninth original song and with that but the cap on my demo. I would love to tell you that we have a gig booked in Birmingham next Saturday. I would love to tell you that. What I can tell you is that I spend two hours every Thursday evening with five other men, with jobs and families and one slightly post-teen emo girl (who I imagine finds us all old and loathsome). We are patiently mentored by an excitable and very talented Polish guitarist in a school computer classroom strumming and plucking clumsily along. And I can tell you that I practice when I have an hour or so during the week and that in just like a lot of things I’m getting better slowly. I gracelessly play scales and “Frere Jacques” and “Greensleeves”. But I also can play a decent rendition of Johnny Cash’s “I Hung My Head” and “Hurt” and Oasis’ “Wonderwall” and on a really good day, a passable version of Steve Earle’s “Galway Girl”.

 

My mom was right, but you have to really want it, and I didn’t . You have to look at practice as a treat not a chore. At 11, there were just way too many more enjoyable things to do. At 35, when there’s time in a busy day to practice, I love it. Sinead may not love it, nor our neighbors (I think the dog likes it - see photo above) but for me it’s a chance to relax and try to work out how to make the music I hear come out of that guitar. I have no aspirations of running away and joining a rock band or releasing a top 10 album. I think my goal is to be able to make music even just a little. And if I can play a lullaby to my baby or serenade Dr. O’Connell with a love song, that’s just a bonus.

 

And yes - Baby Della Vedova will be taking music lessons....