![]() The humility required to continue is sometimes unbearable. That month became two, then three and I’m still showing up. So I took them, partly to connect with my dad, mostly to connect with that mysterious place from which creativity comes. It became clear that my son didn’t have time for piano, but I had paid for the next month of his lessons. I’d sit at my hand-me-down piano wishing I could play like my father, wishing the music would course through me like a wave, then spill onto the keys. I’d listen to Taylor Swift, trying to discern why her songs were so compelling. By autumn, I’d forgotten much of what I’d learned. It wasn’t finished, and maybe it wasn’t very good, but it felt amazing. I wrote about how years later I would try to act like it didn’t mean as much as it did.īy the end of the week, we’d made a song. I thought of my first love, of sitting in his adolescent bedroom in Brooklyn, the snow outside. The third night I went home and wrote lyrics. One choice leads to another, then alchemy takes hold - a composition emerges from some other, unknowable place. We made a rhythm, then a chord progression, then a baseline, then a melody. To me, it was the revelation of a secret language, by which our thoughts and feelings could be mainlined to another person’s soul through the precise arrangement of sounds. Then we went into the studio and laid down tracks in GarageBand, the music software. We learned about keys, chords, rhythm, harmony. The next five days were like the dizzying descent into love. Philly soul pulled back the curtain on how difficult the dance could be. Opinion Op-Ed: An ode to Philly soul: La-la means more than ‘I love you’
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