Ben Tibbetts Studio: Piano Performances and Original Music

Ben Tibbetts Studio Home Services Archive Students About Contact Now Store Subscribe

Interview on the
Off The Wall Podcast

Listen on Newgrounds

This is an interview I did for Off The Wall, a podcast on Newgrounds that features artists, musicians, and other creators on the site.

I and the host Aalasteir discuss a huge variety of topics ranging from writer's block to philosophy, from food to fashion. It was a fun conversation which you can listen to above or download as an mp3.

Edited Transcript:

Ben: I make music for many reasons. Sometimes it's because I'm hired to do so. I'll be hired to play the piano, to teach somebody to play the piano, or to make music. And sometimes it's because I just want to. I find music making to be a lifelong passion, a lifelong pleasure. And I think that creativity, for me, is probably integral to my mental health. If I'm creating, I'm happy. I'm in more or less a state of well-being. And if I go too long without creating something, I feel like something's missing. So it's very important to me, and that's why I make music.

Aalasteir: I understand how you feel. I've gone through a lot of terrible emotions, and I do feel a lot better when I try to make something. Even if it doesn't appeal to other people it means a lot to me.

Ben: Of course, you don't need to get into the details if you're not comfortable. But what is your experience like when you have something terrible happen, or even just a bad day, and you use music to get out of it or to deal with it? What's that like for you?

Aalasteir: I feel like I get more control over my own life. I just feel better because I was really bad, but now I'm in this creative space where I can express myself and it's gone. I went to music therapy. I think that that has given me a perspective that helps me a little bit. I've also studied philosophy, existentialism, nihilism, and stoicism. All of that theory helps me. But I'm being put on the spot. This isn't about me, Ben. It's about you!

Ben: I've managed to turn the tables on you! Well, I certainly agree with all that. I think that with creative work--and that can be interpreted loosely as anything from making a painting to being an engineer and solving a problem, to even imagining new problems to solve that people haven't thought of yet--it's all really an important part of the human experience.

You're right, it is a little bit about control. It's about controlling our inner lives, right? Our emotions, but also our environment. When you're making music, you're bringing something into the environment that wasn't there before, and it blows us around emotionally. We write a song, and it's awesome and it makes us excited, or it's sad and it seems to jive with our sadness, or whatever. It's a kind of magic that we have at our disposal.

Aalasteir: What is music?

Ben: It depends on who you ask of course, and the definition is not easy to nail down. It might be one of those words like "health" where it means something a little bit different to everybody, but we all sort of know it when we see it. Music is the kind of organized sound, and it's organized usually by people, or I guess increasingly by computers, in such a way that it kind of does something for us. You know, it gives us an emotion, or it makes us interested, or it entertains us.

Aalasteir: From your perspective, what are the elements you want to see in a piece that is appealing to you?

Ben: That's a hard question because it really depends on the piece and it depends on the situation, but I can give a few specific situations where I would know what I want to happen.

Last year I wrote a gigantic piece for flute and piano and spent what felt like ages on the music; it was for a flutist, for us to perform. The question of what I wanted to get out of that piece was answered partly by her. I would ask her, "Hey, what are you looking for in this performance?" She was commissioning me. "What are you looking for to get out of this? Do you want it to be a certain difficulty? Do you want it to be flashy? How should it fit into the rest of this concert we're preparing? Do you want to be the star, or would you like it to be more of a duet, a dance, an equal partnership?"

And then there's the question of of the genre. What other music do you like? How much do you want it to sound like the music that you already like versus something that you haven't heard before? So those are the sort of questions that I ask when I when I have to write music, when I have to make something new, but it's different depending on the situation.

Aalasteir: You have a strong grasp on music theory. What is your approach to teaching music?

Ben: It's changed over time. I guess I'll give you a short history of how I got into this because I think it'll help to answer that question.

I went to college for music theory, not planning to teach a bunch but knowing that I would a little bit. Even when I first got into college I was teaching piano lessons for a couple students a week. I was into music theory because I wanted to write music. It's something that I've always enjoyed and always thought I was good at, and so that's what I studied. One thing that I found though with teaching was that it forced me to articulate my thoughts better. It's one of these things, maybe it's a little bit cliché, but if you can't teach something, it's a good sign that you probably don't understand it all that well. I mean, just being able to put it into words is a good test of whether or not you understand something. So the first step that I took in learning to teach was trying to understand music better, trying to understand what I thought about it, trying to understand what it's like to learn a new creative skill in this way, trying to put myself back in the shoes of myself when I was learning to play the piano at a young age, that sort of thing. So that's where it began, and then over time I think I've just tried to crystallize that suite of skills more sharply.

These days what I normally do is I sit down in advance and prepare a lesson plan. Every lesson is a little bit different and it will depend on what that student needs, like how old they are and what their goals are. I teach about 25 piano students a week. What I normally do with them is:
* Start with a warm-up.
* Get into some piece from a method book to get them started with some new concepts.
* Do some chords.
* Work on a project of something that they like. If they're composing something as a few of them are, I'll work on that for a little while.
* Finish with a video of something, maybe two minutes long, that I think is cool or interesting. Those things are usually about music, creativity, or art in some way.

That's the structure of my teaching. The end goal is always to try to understand music better, and also to try to serve people better. I try to serve them as best I can, whatever their goals are, whatever they're interested in, and whatever their goals are or, if they're a kid, what the goals of their parents are. Teaching is a very delicate thing. It's a very people-oriented skill. It's a hard question to answer because there is no one right answer.

Do you teach? Have you ever taught music?

Aalasteir: Well, not professionally. It's not something that people approach me about, but I will show people what a scale is. If you combine these notes, you get a scale, and it sounds good. It's "advanced", I know...

Ben: Well, it doesn't have to be complicated for it to be valuable. The truth is, I think of something like this as almost being a little bit like teaching. You know, I'm sharing my thoughts on things with other people, and I'm hoping that it's useful. Right? It's the same sort of deal. We're all just trying to communicate.

Aalasteir: Music is like a conversation. When I approach people about music, I usually start by just telling them to play on all the black keys and only hit the black keys. That's a pentatonic scale.

Ben: I think that's a great place to start. The pentatonic scale is an unusually universal scale. If you go onto YouTube and check out Bobby McFerrin and the pentatonic scale, you'll see a video that's about two and a half minutes long in which Bobby McFerrin, this incredibly gifted vocalist, walks through the pentatonic scale with an audience. He demonstrates, with his voice and through the voices of the audience members, that most people have this scale in their brains already. Which is to say, if he starts singing the first couple of notes, everybody sort of knows, if they're prepped enough, where the next note is going to be. And according to Bobby McFerrin, this is the case no matter where he goes. It doesn't matter what part of the world he's in. This is just something that humans like. We like the sound of the pentatonic scale for some reason. And if you listen to folk music, I think this is borne out; if you listen to, for example, Amazing Grace, that's an almost entirely pentatonic piece, all just black notes. The Shire theme from Lord of the Rings is almost entirely pentatonic. It's just a very deep-down, bone-deep kind of scale.

Aalasteir: I listened to your favorite excerpts from The War of Art. How did you discover that book?

Ben: The War of Art by Steven Pressfield is one of my favorite books. It's more or less the only self-help book that I've ever actually enjoyed. I don't like self-help books, but this one works for me.

I don't remember who recommended it, but somebody did with a kind of intensity that I took seriously."Listen, you've got to check this out. It's amazing." So I bought the audiobook in 2015 or so. And I thought it was a beautiful, very concise description of this guy's philosophy on making creative work. Steven Pressfield is a novelist.

Steven Pressfield is a novelist. I believe he wrote the book that inspired the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance. He's written some other novels as well. But there's something about this book that has stuck with me and has influenced me beyond most other books in that genre. Have you read it yet?

Aalasteir: I've looked into it and seen summaries, but I understand the ideas. And what I really like about it is the perspective is very honest. It comes from a place of honesty. The three biggest lessons are:

You're not alone. Everybody struggles with the resistance.
You have to treat your dream like a full-time job.
Commit to a territory and you might change the world.

Ben: Yeah, I think The War of Art is essential reading for people who are doing something creative, and especially for people who feel stuck and who feel like they're in the middle of writer's block, or like they're not being the person that they know they could be. It's about this gulf between the person you are and the person that you know that you could be, and the work that you could do if only you could overcome the internal resistance to doing so.

You alluded to that key word in the book, resistance. Pressfield spells it with a capital R, like The Resistance. There's something a little bit adorable about it, but it's also quite serious. Resistance is Pressfield's word for the force inside us that causes us to self-sabotage anytime that there's something you know you could do or should do in order to pursue a creative calling, or to start a project, or whatever--something that you're afraid of, that you know would be good for you, that you would really like to do. It's the resistance to doing that, the force that we've all felt to shrink back and sabotage that effort.

I certainly feel it when I start work on music. I think we've all felt it from time to time, depending on what we do. And I think it's the real root cause, in an abstract sense, of writer's block and of procrastination.

Pressfield's "cure" for that is to treat the work as a professional as opposed to an amateur. And then he goes on to list the qualities of what a professional is. And it's not that you have to be paid for what you're doing. It's not that the professional is always paid a lot of money or that he has a job doing that thing. It's just that you treat it as if you were a professional. You make yourself a schedule, and you sit down and you behave as if this thing, whatever it is for you, writing this short story or weaving, whatever your passion is, this thing that you're doing now you're going to treat it as though it's your job. Just do it with the same kind of no-nonsense, low-key intensity of a job. That dichotomy that Pressfield sets up there between resistance and being a professional has stuck with me for around 10 years now. I think it's just a really wonderful way to to tackle the problem of procrastination.

Aalasteir: A book that I really like is Fear and Art. There's a really good excerpt that I would like to have your opinion on.

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced. All those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the 'quantity' group: fifty pound of pots rated an 'A', forty pounds a 'B', and so on. Those being graded on 'quality', however, needed to produce only one pot--albeit a perfect one--to get an 'A'. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the 'quantity' group was busily churning out piles of work--and learning from their mistakes--the 'quality' group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end they had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

Ben: I agree. There's a line (I forget who said it), that "quantity has a quality all its own." Do you know what I mean? When you do something many, many times and you just practice it, you don't inevitably get good at it, but you're more likely to improve than if you try only one time to do it perfectly. I like this story because there's something a lot easier about the idea of doing something in a mediocre way many times than there is about trying to do it perfectly once.

This is a Newgrounds interview. Many of the people on the site are gamers. They know from thousands of repetitions and experience what it's like to get good at a video game. Just imagine if there was a game that you were only allowed to play one time. How good would you get at that game? Probably not very good. You might try really hard. That might be the most intense 10 minutes of your life, but you're very unlikely to speedrun it on that first time through. The way that we learn, the way our brains are built, is we try something, we do it poorly, we get feedback about how to do it less poorly, and then we adapt. We learn over time and repetition.

And now there's an important caveat to that. You can only improve if A) the feedback you're getting back is accurate, and B) you're effectively repeating in such a way that you're actually working on the skills that will make you improve.

Let's say you have a Rubik's Cube in front of you and you want to get good at solving it, practice will help you get good at this, but only if you're not practicing in such a way that you're just turning the sides over and over. It doesn't matter how many times you turn a single side on a Rubik's Cube, you will never get better at solving it. But if you practice by experimenting, exploring, and trying different combinations and noticing what works and what doesn't, then you're practicing effectively and you're going to get good at solving Rubik's Cubes. It might take a long time, but this applies to no matter what you're doing. And again, anybody listening to this on Newgrounds will know this in their bones from playing video games. This is how we get good at things.

Aalasteir: Would you say it's crucial to do deliberate practice and analyzing what you're doing and trying to figure out each step, optimizing one's pipeline? Because I feel people need to take notes and reflect upon what they're doing.

Ben: Yes. I would say it's crucial to strike a balance. You don't want to be too hard on yourself when you're trying to learn something new. If you try to do it perfectly and you expect perfection, you're going to fail.

What I do with my students, especially with my young students--and this comes back to gaming, which is a great lens to see this topic through--is I say, "Okay, we're going to play now with the Super Mario rule."

And the Super Mario rule is like this: We take a section or maybe a whole piece if it's short, and we adopt this approach that we're going to play through this thing and allow ourselves to make some mistakes. Because if you imagine you're playing a Super Mario game, what normally happens if you run into some enemy? I mean, you might die, you might game over, but it's more likely that you'll probably lose a little health, or you'll turn from a big Mario to a small Mario or something. Right? In most games you don't die on the first hit. That's a hard game. But in most games, you don't get an infinite number of hits. You get a couple.

And so the Super Mario rule is, if you're practicing a piece of music, you're trying to get through it with around three mistakes. And use common sense: that's three-ish, a couple of mistakes. And you have this expectation going in that you're not going to play it perfectly. Nobody is perfect. But if you make more than a couple mistakes, it's game over. And you don't get to start again from right where you just left off. That's too easy. No, you have to start back at the beginning, and you have to give it another run.

There's that objectively hardcore attitude on one end. "No, man, you failed. Sorry, game over. Try again." And there's a difference between that and on the other hand just having some self compassion and not expecting yourself to be perfect. That's the sweet spot. That's where we learn really well, I think.

Aalasteir: Do you feel that everybody should be an artist?

Ben: Well, definitely there is no one thing that everybody should do. I think that it's important for us, as a society, to have many different types of people and different types of brains, and for us all to be doing different things and filling different niches. So no, I wouldn't say that. But no matter what you're doing, the same lessons that I was just explaining can probably be applied to your work in some way. Unless you're doing a job where you're really required to be perfect, you shouldn't expect absolute perfection of yourself. You should allow yourself to make a reasonable number of mistakes, but not too many, right? You can apply that to more or less any job. Self-compassion is is applicable in virtually any job.

Aalasteir: This is a really amazing video titled "The Habits of Effective Artists," and that video has still stuck with me because it's interesting. It has seven points:
1: Daily Work
2: Volume, not perfection
3: Steal
4: Conscious Learning
5: Stress
6: Feedback
7: Create what you love

Ben: I'll check it out after this interview. Thank you.

Aalasteir: Do you feel that artists have to believe in themselves to succeed?

Ben: Well, what do you mean by "believe in yourself"?

Aalasteir: Is it more crucial to have other people back you up, or to be able to back yourself up?

Ben: Well, it really depends on the person. It takes a certain amount of fortitude to deal with rejection. Humans are a social animal. Maybe we all learned that if we didn't know it already, or we relearned it, when the pandemic hit and we were all forced or encouraged to quarantine. Many of us were in the situation of finding out that even the most introverted of us sometimes got lonely and needed social feedback.

So almost regardless of who you are--I say almost because there are extreme introverts and there are people who really thrive at being alone, and that's totally fine--in most cases, people need other people for validation, for an understanding of their status, and for encouragement. We look to each other to see if we're doing this right. So I think most people need some kind of encouragement to keep going, especially when it's something where they're not sure what they're doing and they want to get better at it. I mean at a bare minimum you need people to teach you and to look up to, and to help you when you make mistakes when you're starting your art.

But on the other hand, you don't want to be too reliant on other people's values or compasses when it comes to your style or your self-expression. There is a point sometimes where you have to say, "No, this is what I want to do, and it really doesn't matter that other people don't want to hear it or they don't want to see it. This is something that I want to see and hear, and I'm doing this for myself."

I wouldn't say I'm worried by somebody who never has that impulse. You can go probably your whole life and just serve a need. For example, you could be a background music writer for some long-running TV show for decades, and it really doesn't matter to you that the work isn't the sort of thing that you would want to listen to because you get a paycheck and you're totally happy with it, and everything's fine.

But for self-expression, I think many of us find that there comes a time when you need to just do something because it's important to you, and you don't know whether it will work or not. This weird song you're writing has a strange chord, and you know other people might not like it, but what the hell? You've got to go for it. So I think there is a balance there, and it can be tricky to find, I'll grant you.

Aalasteir: Okay, but what is your process for encouraging creativity?

Ben: In myself, or in other people?

Aalasteir: Both.

Ben: I believe that the way I work best is when I divide my creative process into two separate parts. For years now, I've had this thing that I'm only starting to talk about with my students, but it was just a personal metaphor for myself that I found really helpful.

In my head, my metaphor for this is there are two people: there's the author, and there's the editor. The author is this crazy, off-the-wall, brilliant, sloppy, disorganized mess of a guy who just throws paint at things, right? He stays up way too late, and he's like, he's just nuts. You can't rely on the author to meet you at two o'clock. He's too busy. He's impulsive, and he's wild, and he works fast, and then he goes to sleep. That's the author. The author comes first. The author is the guy who makes the art to start. Right? He's the inspiration. He's the frame of mind that I'm personally in when I'm starting some new creative project.

And then, after that, usually after a break or a day or two, the editor comes in. The editor rolls her eyes. She doesn't much care for the author. She's very organized. I imagine her almost like Edna in "The Incredibles". She's perfect and concise and clean. And she takes a broom, and she sweeps up the room, and she wipes the paint off the walls, and she gets the author a coffee for the morning. She tidies up, and she looks over this thing that the author made and goes, "What a mess! All right, well, I've got to make this into something." And then the editor does kind of the real work, the long, hard, very methodical work of making it look like the author knew what he was doing the whole time. And the editor is the frame of mind that I'm in when I'm trying to improve something I've been working on.

For me, that's music. I like to write music. After I look at my sketches, I save the initial file as version one. Version one is the author's mess. It doesn't sound too good. It's way too long, whatever. And then I'm in editor phase for a while, and I make many versions of that sketch, and every time I'm just thinking, "How can I make this a little better? How can I make this a little more organized? Just little more accessible to other people, and just a little less obscure or abstract if that's what it needs. How can I make it look like I knew what I was doing the whole time?"

And I think that something like this is really helpful for people who feel stuck. If you're stuck, there's a very good chance in my experience that you're trying to be both the author and the editor. Do you know what I mean? You're trying to be creative, and wild, and holy smokes, razzle-dazzle...! But you're also worried about how good it's going to be, and you're thinking about whether or not it makes sense, and you're doubting yourself, and you're being critical, and you're trying to fix the mistakes. Those things in my view can't really coexist at the same point in time. They have to they have to be separated by a wall. They live apart, the author and the editor. They don't really like each other, but they need each other. You can't have just the editor because then you get work that's boring, and you can't have just the author because it's just a mess.

Aalasteir: Creativity is about making order out of chaos.

Ben: Exactly.

Aalasteir: How do you overcome writer's block?

Ben: Well, I don't really experience it anymore. I experience bad music, of course. It's not always coming out well. But ever since I stumbled on that metaphor I just described, or at least something like it--and we're talking maybe five or six years ago--the truth is I never really am put in a situation where I can't write a note. I can always write a note. I can always write a phrase, or a piece or whatever. It's just won't always be good. So that dichotomy I just described, that's not going to guarantee you good work. The only thing really that can get you there--and really there's no guarantee that you'll ever produce good work, frankly--is you can get better. You can learn and train. For me, that's music theory, music history, and fundamentals. So there's that. But I can experience a lot of doubt. "How do I make this piece better?" I can be indecisive. That happens to me all the time. But I never really experience traditional writer's block, at least as I mentally slide into that mode of being like that initial wild "author" I described above.

What about you? How do you how do you tackle writer's block?

Aalasteir: I don't think I've ever experienced writer's block. It comes from the philosophy that I'm okay with being bad. I've really struggled with that. I only started saving drawings when I was 19. Previously, every single thing that I made I would throw out. And I did this for music. I spent most of my life where all of the art that I made I would throw out because I didn't like it. I wouldn't show it to anybody. And I feel I put myself in a loop where I did not get better because I couldn't accept being bad. And it's recently that I accepted that I'm okay with doing music or art that's not good. That has made me better. I save everything that I make now because I see it as a part of myself and I don't want to throw it out, even if it's not valuable to other people. I want to be valuable to myself.

Ben: That's great. I think that's a good change that you've probably made for yourself. And you may not know what's good yet. You might change your mind about some of these things. You might go back to a track or whatever in 20 years right and say actually that thing is not as bad as I thought it was. Do you regret throwing out all those tracks or drawings?

Aalasteir: I don't, because I don't want to be afraid of my past self. I accept that I did that. And maybe I ended up hurting myself from thinking like that, but I made the right decision by accepting myself and saying that it's okay to be bad. What I want to do is I want to love being bad, and love learning to explore myself and how I feel, rather than pursuing some abstract notion of what other people find valuable. I need to figure out what I find valuable and how to communicate why I see value in what I do. Because if I can't value what I make, why should other people? You have to love being bad.

Ben: Well, that's a really nice attitude to take towards that, I think. And it sounds to me like you've got a lot of compassion for yourself, with what you said about not wanting to blame your past self, and not wanting to pass judgment. I think that's probably pretty healthy.

Aalasteir: What I feel I needed was to love myself and love the fact that I don't have necessarily amazing qualities. And if I compare myself to other people, I'm not good. But if I compare myself to what I was previously, then I've made huge steps that I didn't think were possible. And I love that.

Ben: Yes. Well that's fairly inspiring. I'm happy for you. I think that's a healthy attitude to take toward yourself. And it mirrors in a way what I was saying about being an editor. It's basically an attitude of trying to take something that exists and being agnostic as to whether or not it'll ever be "perfect", and what that would even mean, but just taking the attitude that you can make it a little bit better.You're iterating on something. In your case, you're iterating on yourself as an artist, as a musician, as a person. Even when you're talking about the qualities in yourself that you know are not your favorite qualities, you still love yourself. You're treating yourself with love. That's a good thing to put out there.

Aalasteir: Well, I really appreciate your kind words. Thank you for that. But the damage you'll receive from self-harm will never heal. The scars will never heal. They will always remind you of that. And that's just something I want to just say. I wish that I had known that.

Ben: Yes, they may never heal. That's true. But there are positive things you can take from scars. Let me share one specific example. It's not related to my personality; it's a physical issue that happened that now improves me.

When I was in college, I played a lot of piano. After I graduated, I got a job teaching as a staff accompanist at a university. I was playing music for music students, which was sort of teaching because I was rehearsing with them and helping them and collaborating with them. Bottom line, I was playing piano probably seven to eight hours a day. I had pretty good technique, but nobody's technique is perfect, and when you put it under that kind of strain it's really easy to hurt yourself. So what happened is I got this injury in my left arm a couple years into the job. I started to feel more and more tendonitis and carpal tunnel and things like that. And many of the people listening here who spend a lot of time at their keyboards will know what I'm talking about. It's painful and it's annoying. And it's worse than that, because it makes you feel like you might not be able to do the things you enjoy to the extent that you were doing them. After all, it's a repetitive stress injury, which you get from repeating some action because you like it.

So that's a scar in a way that never quite healed. Even eight years later, I still feel in my left arm like it's not quite as great as my right arm. I know I'm not going to be doing any left-hand piano concertos. But I was able to get through that period by improving my technique--by sitting a little higher at the piano, which turned out to be kind of the culprit in my case.

And here's the thing, here's the punch line of that story: As a teacher now, I'm a better teacher because that happened to me. Right? If I have a student that comes to me and has that problem, that's now something I can deal with, with them. I can say, "Listen. I get what's going to happen. I get what's happening to you because it happened to me. Here's what I did. Here's how I got over it. Here's a physical therapist I can recommend."

That's an example of something where yes, I could take the attitude that it scarred me. I guess in a way it did. I'm probably never going to completely heal from that, but it made me a better teacher. It allows me to help people in a way that I might not have been able to, from personal experience.

Aalasteir: I appreciate you sharing that. I consider that really brave.

What is the future of music?

Ben: What a question! What do you think?

Aalasteir: There will be more of it! There will be more tools.

Ben: This might seem like a vulgar comparison, but I think asking "what's the future of music?" is a little bit like asking "what's the future of pornography?". There is so much of it, and there's only going to be more. Hypothetically we could have stopped now, but we haven't yet. I think that music is only going to continue as a huge, active, expansive field and area of study.

I think that something very important and very interesting happened this last year, which the entire internet has noticed: computers and what we call now artificial intelligence have entered the ring in a big way. I think that AI is rather obviously going to be a big part of music soon. It hasn't quite entered in the same way that DALL-E has for art or ChatGPT for text. I think that music is not quite there yet, but MusicML from Google is quite promising, which is to say it's starting to get there. It's starting to look like a DALL-E for music, where you can put in text prompts and ask it to make something and it will, with varying amounts of with a varying amount of of convincebility, do what you ask.

I think that, as we enter this weird phase of AI entering the scene, we should all as artistic creative people ask ourselves the question of why we do what we do.

So take as an example, on my website there's a cartoon image of me on my about page which I commissioned from an artist. I thought I'd like a cartoony picture of me from my website--fun! I'll definitely pay $50 for that, right? And this was about five years ago. And I paid it, and the artist did it, and I was totally happy, and now it's on my site. That's an example of something that a computer could now do very well. I probably wouldn't have to pay for that anymore, at least not the way things are right now. That's my guess. I could probably ask DALL-E or find something similar--some image filter or plugin--that could do that pretty well. So the question is, in the absence of being needed for a function like that, what does an artist do and why?

Musicians have actually dealt with this before. There was a problem when recorded audio became commonplace, which was very similar to this. I think at first it was player pianos, which are pianos that essentially play themselves. Those existed 130 years ago. When those became commonplace, that was an situation where pianists who used to make their living playing in bars suddenly found themselves a little bit outsourced to a machine. And then when record players became common, and then when CDs became common, and now computers and internet access are common, musicians are left wondering how the hell do we make a living, and why are we doing this?

I don't have a single answer for that, but I do know that my personal answer has nothing to do with any of that, really, at bottom. Yes, I might do things because I'm commissioned, or because it serves a function, but that's not why I got into music. I got into music because I loved and needed to do something creative, and music was the thing that I was naturally the best at. I was drawn to it the most. It feels closer to a practice, like a martial arts practice or a meditation almost, than it is a job that I'm serving a function for. And I think that if computers dominate the field in 20 years all artists will have to to look at each other and say, okay, what do we do now? I think that's the very interesting, very strange future of music, and of the arts in general. I think we're going to find ourselves grappling with these questions more and more.

Aalasteir: Do you think music reflects one's personality?

Ben: It can, yes, but it doesn't have to. Music can resemble somebody's off-stage persona to an extraordinary degree, or it can be very different from them off-stage.

One of my favorite examples of this is a hip-hop artist named Coleman Hughes, who goes by the artist name Cold X Man. I admire Coleman as a very talented, legitimate young philosopher. His personality is so clearly gentle and kind, and not in any way angry or even overtly emotional most of the time. He just sits down and does his job, and he's got a podcast where he talks to people in a relaxed, calm tone. But his music is angry, visceral, and intense. The guy is a very highly trained jazz musician, and he attended Juilliard briefly, I think. So he's a good musician, but it's very different from his personality, at least as I perceive it. So no, they don't have to coalesce in any kind of obvious way, although they can. Music can certainly express your personality.

I think that music is a very personal thing, and it can be a way for people to express themselves in ways that they might not be able to express themselves in other contexts. It can be a way for people to share their emotions, their thoughts, their experiences, and their stories. And I think that's one of the things that makes music powerful.

Do you think your music expresses your personality?

Aalasteir: Sometimes I even question if I have a personality, if I'm just a byproduct of the circumstances that I put myself inside of, and the personality and behavioral loops that I've been through that have formed my worldview and my interests. Genetics also play a major factor into how someone's behavior turns out to be. So there's a genetic component that may leave someone more predisposed to addiction, anger, or sadness. Is that accurate?

Ben: Yes. I'm sure that's accurate. The nature versus nurture thing is what you're talking about. How much are we the product of our genetics, versus our environment?

When you say you don't have a personality, are you saying that you're not sure where the thing that you're calling your personality comes from? Is that what you mean?

Aalasteir: A large percentage of people's personality is formed by decisions that they did not choose, like their language, appearance, and worldview. It's largely formed through behavior and other people's environments.

Ben: Yes, you can always look at a person's choices. I guess you're using the word "choices" in scare quotes here. You're saying that yes, they have "choices", but they're not really choices because you can always draw back in time. You can always say, "Well, the reason I prefer vanilla over chocolate ice cream is because when I was a kid, you know, my grandfather gave me this amazing vanilla ice cream cone, and it just bowledge me over, and now I'm #vanilla4life." Or, "it's a product of my genetics. There's something in my DNA. It's that 450,000th strand, you know, or whatever predisposes me to love vanilla ice cream."

That's definitely true. I don't know how it could be any other way. We are a result of our genetics plus our environment. But I still also think it's coherent to talk about our choices, like how I am choosing what word to say next. Okay, I could say, "Yes, it's a product of my brain and I didn't make my brain. My brain came out of my parents." You can you can talk and philosophize that way, but it still makes sense to me to think about choices. I have a choice. I have voluntary action, right?

Aalasteir: I 100% agree with you. I am happy to be alive. I would say that even if it's just 10%, I have the ability to influence the decisions that I make. The small choices that I make add up. For example, if I go to bed early and sleep well, I will be happier the next day. If I don't eat anything unhealthy and stick to natural foods, and I make my own food, I will feel better and it will be easier for me to move. And that causes a chain reaction of being in a positive feedback loop. You have to create a positive feedback loop. Take control over your environment. Because if you lose control, if you submit to addiction, you lose control. Your behavior will be influenced by the drug. And I feel like a lot of people don't understand the effect that alcohol can have on an individual, or substance abuse, because it will take control away from you fundamentally. How do you see it?

Ben: I agree with that. Substances--drugs--run along a huge range from totally benign to life-deranging on the other end, and everything in between. And there are some drugs that we all just kind of adopt as normal for whatever reason. For example, caffeine is normal. I start my day with two cups of coffee, but I would not be able to do that at 8 p.m. That would derange my sleep and I wouldn't be able to function the next day.

And there is something a little bit weird and pathological about that. If we all talked about cocaine the way that we currently talk about coffee, like if we were going to each other and saying, "Dude, I can't even get going without some cocaine in the morning. Pass me the bump. Ah, I need a second bump today. You know, I stayed out late last night." It would be horrible. We all recognize that's ridiculous because cocaine legitimately destroys your life. I mean caffeine can be like that too if you abuse it, but it's just that some drugs are much worse than others.

They also serve different needs. There are people who legitimately need certain drugs for clinical reasons. If they struggle with some really tough depression, there are drugs out there for that. And there are appropriate situations where you can use a drug, not abuse it, with the help of a professional to get your life on track or to manage your anxiety or whatever it is. I think that's all fine. Although it would be nice if we had drugs that didn't have crazy side effects.

And since this interview is kind of about the arts, I just can't not add here that there's an unhealthy relationship between drugs and creativity. It's an abusive relationship, if you like. People will use drugs to do some crazy creative things. Hearkening back to what I said before about the author versus the editor, people will use drugs when they're in that sort of authorship state, when they're trying to be wild and inventive. They will use drugs to get there. They'll drop acid or whatever. And the complicated thing about that is it sometimes works. Sometimes drugs will get you to a place where you're making art that you wouldn't make otherwise. But the devil's in the details. How much is that going to derange your life afterwards? And was it worth it? And are you deluded; what if it's not true? What if actually you would have done just as good work without the drug?

One really good example of this is Penn Jillette, the magician. He is famously sober. He doesn't touch alcohol or drugs. I think he does caffeine, He talks in his podcast, Penn's Sunday School, about how he felt at a certain point in his life like everyone he was hanging out with was doing drugs and he wasn't. It gave him an edge, paradoxically, because he was healthy and he actually stayed in the game longer, because he was taking care of himself.

So I think drugs and artists have a complex relationship, and it's not a good one. If you can make the same art without getting high or getting drunk or whatever, you should do so, because it's better for you and for your kids and for your family and so on. But I also wouldn't be honest if I didn't acknowledge that drugs can sometimes produce very creative work. What would The Beatles have been like if they never got high? We will never know the answer to that question. But how would history be different? Maybe we'd still have them around. I don't know. It's hard to say.

Aalasteir: Let's say you just started wearing a big red hat. How would you feel? How would that affect your life?

Ben: Well, if I was also wearing a big white beard and if it was also Christmastime, it might make me Santa Claus. Just saying.

Aalasteir: Would people talk to you differently?

Ben: Yes. They'd tell me what they want for Christmas.

Aalasteir: How would that affect your personality?

Ben: Okay, well, in all seriousness I'm sure that it would affect my personality. I remember hearing about something a friend of mine did in college, where he used temporary hair dye to change his hair color and made some notes about how his day went differently. He would have, say, blue hair one day and then something else the next. I don't know. I feel like it would affect my day. It's hard to predict what would be different. It depends on the hat, I guess. How big a hat are we talking?

Aalasteir: A two-foot red hat.

Ben: Something tells me I might get some looks from the students that I teach during the day, which might affect my self-confidence. Let's put it that way.

How would it affect you? Have you run this experiment? This is a very specific thought experiment.

Aalasteir: I think I would either have to adapt to this new lifestyle choice, or I would just be embarrassed, because I would get so much attention from other people who would look and question why this individual is wearing such a massive hat. Right?

Ben: Right. Well, there's an interesting question here, of doing something that's embarrassing but for which there's no obvious reason to be embarrassed other than just the fact that it's unusual. It's not like wearing a two-foot red hat is doing anything wrong or hurting anybody. But for some reason we all just agree, "Ah, that's kind of a weird thing to do. Is he alright? What's this guy up to? He's sending off a strange social signal."

I forget what the context was, but Tim Ferriss, the podcaster and author, has talked about the exercise of doing something embarrassing in public that is totally benign--not hurting anybody, but just being weird, and doing it as an exercise to get over the fear of embarrassment. The one that I remember--I think this might be from his podcast, or from one of his books--was to walk into a Starbucks and lie down. And in his description, he's saying it's a full Starbucks. It's not in the middle of nowhere. It's in the middle of the city. People are getting their coffee. They're calling out your name. You order your coffee, and then you lie down on the ground for eight seconds. It's long enough that it's a little weird, and then you stand up and pretend that nothing happened.

Now, I've never done that. I can barely imagine doing something like that. But, why not? What's gonna happen? They're not going to call the cops on you in eight seconds. Nobody's going to get hurt. There's no obvious reason not to do that except it's pretty weird. So it's an interesting exercise, and it is probably worth occasionally going out of your comfort zone and doing things that would be embarrassing to you, just because it's good to do that every once in a while.

Aalasteir: It's societal social control that prevents people from doing something unusual, and it's there for a reason. It's this genetic disposition to follow the tribe's customs. In some cultures, they definitely wear big hats and unusual clothing. That would be unusual for guys like us, but for someone else, if I were to fit in with an emo crowd, I would have to dress like they do, or else I wouldn't fit in.

Ben: Yes. It's also a way of signaling to the rest of your crowd that you're not a threat, to their way of life or to the status quo. For example, if you're in an emo crowd and you suddenly show up and--I don't know what the emo crowd is like, but I'm assuming it's fairly dramatic--if you show up and you have the wrong attire, people in that crowd will look at you and think, "Okay, you're subtly telling us that there's something wrong with us. You're signaling that maybe you're not quite safe for us to be around."

There's probably a healthy version of this. If you're in public and you're giving out signals that you might be violent or unpredictable in some way, that's something that we all know we've run into before. We kind of get this spidey-sense of how to deal with somebody that's creeping us out, or who feels like a security threat, or is acting a little erratically in a gas station. I think it's fair to say we're genetically predisposed to be on the lookout for things that might hurt us. And we can detect before we can even articulate what's wrong that there's something going on with this guy. His eyes are moving around a little too much, or whatever. Something's about to go down here.

Aalasteir: I can't just walk around and just have a pipe bomb, casually walking around with a pipe bomb in my hand, right? Why is that? Isn't that silly?

Ben: No. It's not silly, because we have a reasonable expectation that if somebody has something in their hand, they might use it. The probability of this guy with the pipe bomb being a bomber are higher than somebody who doesn't have a pipe bomb.Unless of course you're in a weapons store, in which case the statistics all change.

Aalasteir: Well, but people shouldn't judge books by their cover...even though that's the whole point of a book cover, so that it can be judged.

Ben: Well, yes. That's the point. That cliché has some truth to it. It means that you should withhold your judgment until you know more about somebody. A lot of the time that's wise. But I mean, don't you judge books by their cover? If a book had a swastika on it, wouldn't you be less likely to open it with the expectation that it's a cookbook? Covers are there for a reason, and our clothes are here for a reason, and they look the way they do for a reason.

Aalasteir: How would you describe your fashion sense and what do you feel has shaped your fashion sense?

Ben: Oh, laziness, I think. I tend to dress in such a way that I can go to work. So right now I'm wearing jeans--somewhat ratty jeans because I'm at home, but normal pants--and I'm wearing a button-up shirt. I'm dressed in such a way that if I were to go out I wouldn't have to change my clothes. And as far as the rest of it, I just try not to have too many clashing colors, like the rest of us, or too many boring colors, like the rest of us, and just try to be as normal as possible. I think maybe fashion is one of those parts of my life where I try not to think about it, largely because it just doesn't interest me. I'm saving my brain power for something else.

Aalasteir: I don't want to be noticed. I also just wear clothing if I have to go to work, and there's a dress code, I will follow that. And I love close-clinging clothing that's practical. If I'm gonna go outside for a long walk, I will have a big reflective vest and practical shoes. I love that, and warm clothing. It's usually black.

I cannot wear jewelry. I've tried wearing a ring or a necklace, and it legitimately just makes me feel uncomfortable, because what if I lose it? And it's distracting.

Ben: You're distracted by the possibility that you might lose it down a drain or something?

Aalasteir: It might be irrational. Also, it's because I can feel it.

Ben: In one sense, it might even be a little bit surprising. I mean we've talked now for over an hour about creativity, but neither of us is creative when it comes to the canvas of our own bodies. It sounds like our creativity is just devoted elsewhere. And I don't wear jewelry either. I don't do anything. I don't have tattoos, although I'm not opposed to tattoos or anything like that. It's just not an area where I've applied my creativity. But when I ask myself why, it comes back to what you were talking about with small decisions. It just didn't shake out that way. In another life, maybe I could be super into fashion and have the most interesting bling. I could imagine applying my interests that way. And I'm generally not judgmental of people who do apply their talents that way, although again, it's that's with the caveat that sometimes it feels inappropriate. Clothes are a signal to other people about yourself and about what you intend to do in that situation, and all sorts of other things--whether you're a threat, what are your intentions, and so on. If I see somebody wearing wildly weird clothes for the situation, I do get that spidey-sense up that I mentioned before. Something's off here. What's about to happen?

Aalasteir: Do you feel that one's diet can end up affecting one's personality?

Ben: Yes, definitely. I like what you were saying before about that. Have you changed your diet recently? Is this on your mind for some reason?

Aalasteir: I eat once a day. I didn't do that previously. I want to save time and get a lot of things done. I never eat out, I do not eat fast food, and I don't like eating processed food. I buy fruits, vegetables, and organic meat and eggs, and I make it myself. I try to just make food that I assume is healthy. Spinach is a healthy food.

I get upset if I'm put in a situation where I have to be at a restaurant with processed food. And when I tell people that I eat once a day, they get offended. And if I just hint to people that that's not a healthy food to eat, it actually offends people, even though they know that it's not healthy. They've almost feel personally attacked even just by commenting on it.

Ben: Why do you think that is?

Aalasteir: Because they see that as a part of their personality, and they almost feel that it's an attack. And communicating with people is tricky because you have to be on their side, always. If people feel that you're an enemy, they will reject every single thing that you say because they don't trust you. They have to imagine that they came up with a conclusion that said, "Hey, I'm actually eating it because I got that idea," even though it's not true. It's they're affected by the billions of dollars that's spent on commercials and marketing of those products.

It's so insidious and offensive that an energy drink is seen as a good choice to get energy. Well, it's not. It is an amazing way to destroy your body and give your money to a company that is actively trying to destroy you. And I feel it is obscene just how popular soda is.

Ben: Was there some journey that you had of getting rid of meals to get down to one meal a day? That's maybe the most interesting aspect of your diet regime right now, because that strikes me as needing a certain amount of discipline, at least when you're getting started.

Aalasteir: I just naturally don't eat a lot, and I've done some research. It's a thing.

Ben: I think that Jack Dorsey, the guy who started Twitter, was famously eating one meal a day for a while there. And yes, intermittent fasting is a thing. I think it's gaining mainstream legitimacy recently.

Aalasteir: How do you eat? What's your meal plan?

Ben: Well, let me first say that I empathize with a lot of the stuff you just said. The food choices, questioning of other people, the fact that that bothers people. I think it's because it's part of their identity. It's a little bit like saying, "Don't you find that your wife is just a little bit ugly?" You know, I think that's how people hear it when you say, "Don't you realize that that sandwich with the processed meat you're eating is not good for you?" And what you said about being on their side is relevant to that. People take their food very personally.

I agree with you insofar as it's something that I pay attention to. Processed food is not good for you. I saw a YouTube video of close-ups of American cheese that shows very small bits of plastic in there, which I'm told apparently are not as common in cheese that hasn't been processed. Now, it might be that this is a situation like very tiny bits of contaminants in food that are so small that it doesn't bother us, because it's like one atom of charcoal in a jar of peanut butter. It could be something like that as far as I know, but I would bet that the amount of plastic, for starters, that we get into our bodies is not good for us. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if in a hundred years some future scientists look back and say, "What were they thinking? Holy cow, they ate so much of this stuff, and it's just floating around in their bloodstream. No wonder they got cancer." That's plausible to me.

That being said, I don't eat in any special way. When I was on the road and gigging a lot, going back maybe seven or eight years, I was eating a lot of food on the road, a lot of Taco Bell and McDonald's. Sorry if that grosses anybody out. It was just a part of my life. It was something that I didn't spend a lot of energy or time or thought on, and it was convenient. And in addition to that, it's also very comforting, I think for a lot of us who had fast food as kids, if you go to a McDonald's playground it's nostalgic. It's like a slice of home to get a Big Mac. That's a big reason why people get mad when you point out the rather obvious fact that it's not great for you. I'm sure they did the same thing for smoking for years (and probably still do).

Now I'm a little bit more careful. I eat at home more often, and that has helped. And I cook a little bit more often, and that has helped. I'll cook casseroles of vegetables and ground meat from from the store, and I'll freeze those casseroles in Tupperware, and that'll be my lunches for a week or something. That's partly how I eat now. But I'm also pretty much an omnivore, and you might be disgusted to learn that I do occasionally still indulge in the Taco Bell from time to time.

Aalasteir: That food is made to be tasty. That's the whole business plan of fast food. It's convenient and it tastes good. But I feel that you can make food that tastes much better than Taco Bell. I am 100% convinced of that. Because if you find out specifically what you like, you can create a pipeline for getting the right ingredients and preparing them and meal prepping. You'll be able to save a lot of money and create amazing food that's amazing for your body and it will taste amazing. You just need a recipe. Find the recipes that work for you, and it's just an amazing skill to have, being able to cook for yourself.

Ben: Amen. And it's good for creativity, to bring it to the topics we've discussed today.

You were asking in the beginning here about whether or not your food affects your personality. A thousand percent, it does. If you take care of what's going into your body, it will affect your energy, and I have no doubt it affects your decision-making too. As a result, if you're like me and you experience some level of performance anxiety when you're on stage or in front of other people or whatever, eating a big burrito from Taco Bell is unlikely to help with that.

What you said about finding the ingredients that you like is very true. You can capture I think a lot of the nostalgia and pleasure that you get from food just by paying attention to it. One of the great things about cooking is you're actually paying attention to your food. I don't know about you, or about our listeners joining us, but when I'm eating food from a fast food joint, I'm only really paying attention to it for the first bite or two, personally, or for a few bites out of the experience. The rest of the time I'm somewhat more awash in the flavor of the whole thing.

And that can still be, by the way, a totally great experience. I think we should acknowledge that part of the reason these foods are so popular is because, as you say, they're tasty. These foods haven't existed for all of human history. If you went back 300 years and you gave Ben Franklin a modern cheeseburger, he would say, "Holy crap! What is this thing? I need 10 more of them right now!" So there's a reason they appeal to us. But when you're cooking your own food, you get to pay attention to the whole experience and you can appreciate the food more by virtue of paying attention to it, just by being mindful of it. I think that by itself is probably a big part of having a good culinary experience.

Aalasteir: If you saw someone cooking and they had a deep fryer in a home kitchen and they would just put potatoes in a deep fryer, I feel that that would make you feel uncomfortable. That's just my perspective. The context of the fast food has changed.

Ben: It's changed the way that you view food dipped in grease. Yes, it changed me too. I used to work at McDonald's when I was in high school. I always smelled of that grease when I was going home, I remember. It was not great.

Aalasteir: And that's dangerous if you get that on your skin. That hurts.

Ben: No doubt.

Aalasteir: Have you tried cleaning those deep fryers?

Ben: Dude, I used to have these epic showdowns with cleaning the machines. I guess it wasn't the same as the deep fryer, but it was the stove top that they used to grill the patties. Trying to get the gunk or caramelization off the top of that. It was just insane, sometimes, because you had to use so much force. Because I was the late night shift, I would be like the last one doing it. I have a vivid memory of being hot and uncomfortable at one in the morning, and not being able to get the last piece of something off the stovetop.

Aalasteir: That smell, that smell of oil; it sticks to your clothing, and it's such a shock when you get home and you smell like absolute oil, that smoky, greasy smell. It's a shock.

Ben: It was certainly a shock the first week or two. I think the shock wore off, and it just became an unpleasant part of life.

Aalasteir: It's not the worst job. Retail is awful. That might be because you have to deal with people, and I don't know if I'm just different but customers can get really annoying no reason. Plus there's just the amount of stuff you have to do in a certain amount of time that's just obnoxious.

Ben: "Different strokes for different folks." These jobs do fit a certain type of person, and a certain type of person is very good at them. I have a friend who works as a grocery store cashier and he loves his job. He's maybe the person who's done that job with the most enthusiasm that I've ever come across. I think the reason he loves it is because he likes dealing with people, and he even gets a kick out of the strange or frustrating interpersonal experiences.

That said, I'm with you. I wouldn't want to be in that role for the rest of my life, and there's a lot of stuff that we put people through in a Kohl's or a Walmart that you would never do to anybody outside of that situation. You wouldn't talk to anybody else that way. You're being rude to this customer service guy just because you want to get something out of him. It's awful that these situations bring that out in us, like road rage.

I've been there too. I'm not trying to be too judgmental of people who act that way, but we all know what it's like to be on the other end of a crazy customer or a crazy person who wants something from you and it's pretty miserable.

Aalasteir: I don't even know what compels somebody to be a prick... asking if they have something in the back. Well, they get mad at me because there's a different battery type in a bin. That's not my problem. That's because a customer put that battery pack inside of the bin. I didn't do that. People like you ruin it for me...It just it makes me so insane.

Ben: People can be pretty insane in those situations. When I first came to Austin, I was looking for music jobs and I briefly worked behind the desk at a hotel. And I tell you, when people are at the end of their rope, at the end of the day, and they're looking for a place to stay, and there's the slightest problem with their room, you see them like at their absolute worst. It's not always that way, of course. You meet lovely people as well, but I could certainly tell you stories.

I'm not sure what to say about that, except for the fact that it's just these systems bring that out in us. It's that feeling of wanting to manipulate somebody else into doing the thing that you want them to do, or to get the thing that you want, and you get monomaniacally focused on this thing that you want instead of the person in front of you, and you honestly forget that they're a person. You forget that it's a human you're stepping on there. You're instrumentalizing them--they're just a tool for you. And yes, it can be awful.

Aalasteir: What recourse do you have against the customer?

Ben: Well, thankfully in some cases, the recourse is just to kick them out. There are situations where that's appropriate, where they're just being a total jerk and there's nothing to do about it, and so you call the police. That happens, but usually not. Usually you can't do that.

I used to work at a music store in Massachusetts. I taught piano lessons there, and I would occasionally tune the pianos. I was there a lot, more days than not.

There was this guy who came in frequently to play the pianos. He was intellectually disabled, and as a result he was kind of hard to talk to and communicate with. But he played the pianos beautifully. This guy's name is Terence Shider. He has a YouTube channel that I would encourage listeners to check out.

He was maybe the most startling example of a savant that I ever came across. He never took lessons. To my knowledge, he didn't have any music theory or music reading knowledge on board. He just played the piano. And apparently, according to the owner of the store, he'd been doing this ever since he was a kid. He would come into the store, try all the pianos at random I guess, and just go to town.

As a piano teacher it's kind of hard to watch him play. He plays with this crazy, wide open-fingered, very percussive technique. He just kind of slaps at the keys. It's rough to watch, but it sounds amazing. The dude has an amazing sound at the piano and he's a great jazz improviser. I would suggest people check out his rendition of Take Five by Dave Brubeck.

So I would see this guy every once in a while at the store coming in to play the pianos. I would talk with him a little bit. In the meantime, I had my own kind of side hustle of occasionally writing music for people, doing arrangements and stuff. One of the services I did was I would make transcriptions. This just means you write out music as music notation so somebody can play it.

Some guy, I think from the UK, sent me an email out of the blue saying, "Hey, I see that you offer transcriptions on your website. Could you transcribe this YouTube video?" He sends me a link. And it's Terence Shider playing at the store on the piano that I was using earlier that day.

This was the weirdest coincidence ever. It's like that line in Casablanca: "Of all the gin joints in all the world, you had to walk into mine." Well, of all the email addresses...this guy sent an email to me.

I said, "Sure, and by the way, I happen to know Terence. I saw him today. Let me transcribe this video of him playing 'Take Five' and give it to him."

So I did that. It took a while to transcribe the music, but I got it done. I did the commission, and then I printed it out. The next day,I went into the store and I saw Terence. I said, "Hey, Terence, check this out. Somebody across the world was listening to you play this tune. That's awesome! You're touching somebody from all the way around the world. And check it out, this guy wanted to be just like you. He wanted to play like you, so badly that he paid me a hundred dollars to write out your improvisation. Look at this." I was showing him the paper.

That was a really special day for me. Obviously, Terence couldn't read that manuscript but it was his music that I was holding in my hand. And it was really cool to have one of those inspiring moments in life.

You were talking about reasons to do things and having external motivation. I don't know what external motivation Terence would have had to be playing the piano for all these years, for decades, but he definitely had internal motivation. The guy just really, really wanted to play the piano. And so he figured it out. He would come into the store and he would figure it out. He'd practice for a long time, day after day, and he got really good at it. And that culminated in this random guy from the UK who adored his music, making this beautiful serendipitous connection. I think that's something to be proud of. I felt very honored and lucky to be a part of that.

Download This Interview as an MP3 File

Ben Tibbetts Studio Home Services Archive Students About Contact Now Store Subscribe