Behind the Music
I grew up in Bronxville, New York, a Westchester suburb close enough to the city to feel its pull. In grammar school I played trumpet and trombone, and I made a brief, unconvincing attempt at the violin. But Thursday afternoons belonged to Mrs. Ruth. Instead of walking home, I walked to her house for my piano lesson, and I hated every minute of it.
An hour felt like a life sentence. All classical, all the time, all of it somebody else's idea. So I started editing. I'd rewrite Mozart, put my own spin on Brahms, work in whatever I thought improved the material. It infuriated her, which was the point. Often enough she'd end the lesson early and send me on my way.
Mission accomplished.
Home was a different matter entirely. Every single day, without fail, at least a half hour at the piano. Nobody had to drag me. It was the same instrument and the same hands, but with no one grading it, and that turned out to be the whole difference. Then middle school came and the lessons ended for good, and that is precisely when I fell in love with the piano.
The living room was where I lived. Not a figure of speech. I logged more hours on that bench than anywhere else in the house, and the baby grand you see on the cover of "Home" is that piano. It was the best friend I ever had, and I mean that with no exaggeration at all. It listened to everything. It never once asked me to play it correctly.
The house sold in 2010. When the movers finished, when every room had been emptied out and the whole place echoed, the piano was still there. Just the instrument, alone in an empty house. It was too large and too old to move, and it was destroyed after we left.
I've thought about that image more than I expected to. A piano standing in a room with nothing else in it, still perfectly capable of making a sound, with no one left to make one.
"Home" is for that house, and for that piano. Some of what I play now, I learned by disobeying Mrs. Ruth. The rest I learned in a living room in Bronxville, with the only friend who never asked me to be anything other than what I was.