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I bought a fiddle a year ago, and spent about a year neglecting it. It’s only recently that I’ve redoubled my interest and effort, and have begun to practice several times a week. I’m taking my first lesson tomorrow, which I’m really excited about.

I have been teaching myself, thus far, out of a book. I think it’s called Fiddle For Beginners. A few months ago I bought two song books as well: Essential Rock (containing Brown Eyed Girl, Low Rider, White Wedding, Freebird, and a bunch of other random rock songs), and the soundtrack to Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.

It’s the Pirates of the Caribbean book that I’ve been focusing on today. Specifically, One Last Shot. Very specifically, the section around :32-:52 (which is where the fiddle part essentially starts, in this book). I spent ten minutes listening to the song on Youtube before starting to play, and periodically took a moment to replay that section to see if it was still “sounding right” in my head.

I can’t play that fast while learning a song, obviously. I’m not very good yet, and so things come together very slowly. But this song seems pretty simple, and most of it is played on the A string (where I’m currently most comfortable), so I think I’ll be able to pull it off sooner or later.

When learning new things, or practicing new skills, or composing/creating new works… I always hit a wall. There’s a point where things always look futile to me, and it’s often fairly early on. It’s that point where the investment & dedication required keeps growing, and the results have slowed to a crawl. Its that point where the gap between your expectations and your results are widening, and seem like they’ll only keep widening the harder you work.

When trying to learn a song, it specifically translates to “this doesn’t sound anything like the real song”, and it seems like the harder you work the more you “lose” the right tune. And I spent about twenty minutes getting more and more frustrated by my inability to make a few eight notes and quarter notes resemble the way I knew they were supposed to come out.

Wall perhaps isn’t the best description, because you can’t just get around it and keep going. Rather, it’s a valley. The Valley of Dwindling Rewards. It takes a lot to climb out of that godforsaken valley, and the hardest part is trusting yourself. But, I managed to climb my way out of the valley with One Last Shot.

And the funny thing is… when you get out of that valley, up onto that mountaintop… even the simplest rewards feel huge. I’m rejoicing that what I am playing sounds remotely like the song, because that’s leaps and bounds ahead of where I was five minutes ago. Every few minutes, it sounds better. I get closer to the right timing, hitting the notes more cleanly, feeling proud about it.

With most projects, especially creative ones, you get less confident before you get more. My experience with writing poetry is that I am always ready to tear up the page, moments before I write something that feels true and beautiful and right. With storytelling, with performing, you’re always trembling with doubt moments before applause.

So, I wanted to share that success. That voyage into and out of the Valley of Dwindling Rewards. Back into the realm of joy and excitement.

Oh, and tangentially related: I bought a banjo. I can pretty definitively say that this song was what tipped a decision that I’ve been hemming and hawing over for a while.

“I got a hundred years of down home running through my blood.”
-Alabama

Let’s pretend, for a second, that every type/genre of music can be reduced to a question about life, the universe and intentionality. For the moment, we’ll just treat this as a game, an exercise. I think rap music could be paraphrased as “How do we emerge from hardship?” You see a lot of songs about enduring and surviving (Talib Kweli’s Gotta Get By, Eminem’s Lose Yourself), a lot of songs about conflict, and then an explosion of songs about having made it. Maybe it’s more complicated than a single question, but certainly the culture of rap music could be well described in a few short questions: “how do we deal with hardship?”, “how do we overcome hardship?”, “what will we do with our power, once we gain it?” These questions are ultra-prevalent in rap, but to try to ground the body of pop music, or indie rock, in them would be a difficult exercise.

Ask me four years ago what I listened to, and I would have answered: punk. I might have then added “ska and indie rock”, but my answer was that I was a firm proponent of punk. Let’s give the unifying-question treatment to punk. “Are you willing to fight back?” “Who is to blame?” “How should we die?” Correct me if I’m wrong.

I’ve recently rejected the importance of those questions. I don’t see fighting a system as the best way to affect a system, and I don’t see confrontation as the best means for deep-rooted change. Thus, “Are you willing to fight back?” is like asking “Are you willing to break the hammer on the screw?” for me. I don’t see blame as a necessary or useful component of problem solving or conflict resolution, so “Who is to blame?” is problematic and unhelpful to me. And finally, I’ve moved away from the hometown I despised, and in doing so abandoned a lot of the fatalism that I carried with me, leaving the “How should we die?” question one that could only be answered prematurely and rashly.

Punk’s burning questions are no longer burning. They sit as nice signposts to remind me of my adolescence, but my mind has turned to new ones: “Where do we find beauty?” “How shall we live?” “Where do we go from here?” “What can we learn from the past as we explore new ground?”

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