The Secret to the Musical Universe

There is one, and only one, universal point of zen musically, where your mind is totally clear and you’re starting from a blank slate. This is when you’re somewhere where there’s an acoustic guitar, and somebody points to you and says, “Hey, you’re a musician. Play something.” Your mind clears. You forget everything you’ve ever known. And it’s as if you’ve never played a song before. How many times has this happened to you? This is all to say that all musical problems come down to not knowing enough songs. You can never learn too many. And I’m never as jealous as I am around people who can just remember every song they ever played. It’s absolutely no fun to play in a band with them because they will just look at you like, “You don’t remember? How could you not?” So, while YouTube will tell you a bunch of things, one thing it almost never says is: you just need to learn songs. And the problem with learning how to learn songs is the only way to do that is to learn more songs. That’s it.…