I AM NOT MASTERING AN INSTRUMENT, I AM DATING ALL OF THEM (Open Relationship, Banjo Knows About the Concertina)

People who play music well tend to play one thing well. They picked the cello at age six, got yelled at by a Russian woman for a decade, and now they are simply The Cello Person. I respect that. I will never be that. I am a serial dabbler. I am, musically speaking, in an open relationship with roughly four instruments at once, and none of them are getting my full attention, and somehow everyone involved seems fine with it except the concertina, who we’ll get to. Here’s the current rotation. The banjo gets the most action. I sit down with my Goodtime, run through the basic clawhammer strum—bum-ditty, bum-ditty—and that is genuinely the entire relationship. I am not getting better at it in any measurable way. I have simply achieved a stable, loving plateau of plinky plinky plunk, and the banjo, being the most emotionally generous instrument ever built, does not hold this against me. You cannot be sad while playing banjo. You cannot be ambitious while playing banjo either, it turns out.…