The first question a person will ask when they learn I am a musician is “What instrument do you play?”

That used to be an easy question to answer, and to a certain extent, it still is. The only instrument I’ve ever been actually good at is guitar, which I’ve played as long as I can remember having hands.

The question is present tense, though. What instrument to I “play?” The answer is, out of necessity, kind of all of them. But not because I’m some genius. Let’s rewind a about 15 years.

When I was a little punk kid, my plan was to be the bestest guitar player who ever picked up a can of hairspray, and sat in my room playing hand-contorting riffs that looked far better than they sounded. The motivation was, of course, that I hadn’t seen anybody else play like that, so obviously it made me more awesome.

In college I accidentally joined a band, and realized that crazy hand-contorting riffs aren’t songs, and are extremely hard for other band members to do anything with. So I learned a bit about how songs work, gave some thought to melody and space, but still didn’t know nearly enough to be a musician. I was still a navel-gazing guitarist, blindly unaware of what makes music interesting – harmonic movement.

I left that first band to move to Seattle with my future wife, Jennifer. On my own again, I struggled to write anything, and began to play less and less. I had begun to give up, then I started to listen closely to songwriters like The Beatles, Jonathan Coulton, OK Go, and They Might Be Giants. In 2006, I learned a very important chord, from Jonathan Coulton himself – the diminished 7th.

All hell broke loose in my brain.

I tossed that chord in anywhere I could, mostly in chromatic movement, and began to hear how melodies shaped themselves around tension and release. I still couldn’t write a coherent chord progression on purpose – I knew all sorts of chords, but not how they fit together. So I wrote songs in the key of al dente – by throwing chords against a wall and seeing what stuck. Three years later, I joined a band with a few roommates. Our bassist, Joe Scheidt, studied jazz in college and is basically a walking encyclopedia of harmony. After writing songs in the key of “where the hell is Joe?” for a while, I finally asked him to “tell me how music works.”

His eyes got kinda big, and he said “From where?”

“The beginning.”

He laughed and replied, “You should bring some beer, this is going to take awhile.” Or something like that. Anyways, armed with at least a few tools to help me write music on purpose, instead of on accident, I promptly moved with Jennifer to Albany, NY, where she took a job as a professor.

On my own yet again, I decided to write as much music as I could, and then to start recording it, making all of the sounds on my own. So I play guitar, bass, piano, and sing, and I’m picking up on some mandolin. Next is banjo, then maybe theremin, then drums (when I have a soundproof basement), and accordion, and hurdy-gurdy, and… and…