Your first orgasm was a hell of an event. It rose up within you as tentative curiosity gave way to complete physical rapture. Fizzing, beautifully agonizing, incomprehensible pleasure demanded attention in your mind as it never had. It had to fight for that attention, though: just the idea that anything could feel this incredible had been inconceivable only 4.7 minutes before, and serious brain-RAM was being used to safely handle the possibilities of this overwhelming sensation. In the end, the irresistible force of the physical pleasure triumphed, decisively so, over your feeble analytical mind, and you allowed the feeling to rip through — no, shatter — your earthly body. You fairly detonated. The I-Don’t-Know-What burst through your fingertips, deafening colors and lights erupted beneath your eyelids, and your entire speech system, from heaving diaphragm to inflamed lips, surrendered to evolution and ejaculated a primeval grunt of excruciating joy.

So this is sex music, then? Please. Beethoven doesn’t care about your orgasm. In fact, he doesn’t care about you altogether. Or anyone else, for that matter. Not here. Not in the Musical Realm. Nature is the Almighty here, and Beethoven is Her conduit. You’re lucky enough to be in the path of their combined creative force.

Consider the change of the seasons. Winters in the US tend to fade reluctantly into chilly, self-conscious springs that may or may not last until the next freeze. In Germany, maybe because of the extreme latitude (and consequent wash of spring and summer sunshine) March positively hurtles through late February like a hurricane. Spring here takes no prisoners: the cold winds utterly cease, and not a single tree branch is left without a swollen bud trying to push its way to freedom. The victory hymns, from rapt matins to solemn vigils, are sung full-throated by each and every bird and newly-melted stream. Nature throws Herself a blowout party every year, and Beethoven has the audacity and brilliance to be the DJ. That’s the scope and ambition of his music: to be no less than the soundtrack to Nature Herself. So any similarity to your puny orgasm is purely coincidental. Let go of your ego, tune your mind to the frequency of the cosmos, and try your best not to get lost. Beethoven is about to teach you how the universe works.

And I’m not just talking about the “celestial bodies” universe. If you decide, as Beethoven did, that all of existence is within your purview, then you cannot ignore the quickening, boiling swarm of life that crackles and teems all around you. There’s plenty of stratosphere and majesty in his large-scale works, but his smaller ensemble and solo pieces often concern themselves with the very grit of the earth.

In May, after the rains, pustules of soil fester and finally burst open to release multitudes of beetles and roaches and cicadas that have been writhing frantically atop one another through their squishy, semi-solid adolescence. They immediately cover the surrounding area in a frenzied, raw search for food and sex, all the while running terrified from predators attracted to the crunchy, hustling mass of protein. Life is doggedly persistent, unquenchable in its thirst for more of itself. You, of course, aren’t exempt from this agitating, all-consuming need. You know exactly what that nettling, interminable struggle is like. You insist nastily upon your right to survive, to satisfy your daily requirements of food and love and success and self-worth at the blistering speed with which they emerge. If you’re looking for lofty rhetoric on the nobility of the human spirit, very often Beethoven’s solo works will disappoint. This is the wonderful muck of common existence, and great Beethoven pianists revel in the dirt under their fingernails.

There’s a stubborn truism to be found in Western culture: almost always, music is the last sphere of human endeavor to join the others in embracing new cultural movements. It’s as if, despite its high intelligence and widespread popularity, music gets held back a grade while painting and poetry and the other kids—even architecture—move on ahead. Long after staid Classical portraiture had been rendered hopelessly passé by the sweeping, tempestuous naturalism of Caspar David Friedrich, and the wild passion of Goethe’s “Werther” had sensitive, lovesick young men across Europe firing bullets into their temples in emulation of the story’s emotional hero, music was still obstinately working within very strict formal parameters, eschewing subjectivity and strong emotion in favor of rational, noble intellectualism.

Beethoven, while not solely responsible for finally wrenching music into the 19th century, is usually seen by musicologists (yes, that’s an actual job that people have) as the bridge between the Classical and Romantic eras. His desire to express himself and his world in ever more emotionally charged ways meant he was constantly at odds with prevailing musical tastes. His adamant refusal to be dissuaded from fully expressing himself has led to his reputation today as a prickly, cantankerous, wild-haired Artistic Hero. And there’s a degree of truth to that: he was going to say what he wanted to say, to hell with the shrill complaints of “difficult” or “too long” or “not pretty enough.”

Beethoven’s mother died when he was 17. His father, already too free with liquor, descended into out and out alcoholism (and physical abuse of his children), leaving Beethoven to look after the care of his two younger brothers. He was completely deaf at 32. These were his struggles, his almost insurmountable obstacles, and yet the cold, jagged, lacerating world was going to tell him what to write and how to write it? It’s easy to see how anyone in that situation would quickly get a reputation for being spiky, mulish, and disagreeable.

[Start at 0:15]

“In 5-billion yrs the Sun will expand & engulf our orbit as the charred ember that was once Earth vaporizes. Have a nice day.” – From the Twitter page of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. August 15th, 2011.

When you were a kid and you felt down or scared, your mom would tell you softly to go brush your teeth and get in bed. She’d come into your room a few minutes later, and with the semi-darkness of 8:00 pm twilight keeping her face just visible, she’d sit down at your bedside, her presence heavy and comforting. She’d tut-tut and wipe your eyes and kiss your forehead, and in that voice that only she had, that lovely, pacifying sound, she’d tell you everything would be alright in the morning. You’d see.

Today, thanks to people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, we know your mom had no idea what she was talking about. One morning, things won’t be alright. They literally won’t, you know, be. It’s probably safe to speculate that in 5 billion years, all that we’ve worked for and treasured and considered terribly important (including the music of Ludwig van Beethoven) will have vanished into the recesses of relentless time. What you and I are doing with our lives is completely inconsequential. We are here for no reason at all, and the things we do have no lasting worth. I mean, sure, go ahead and do whatever it was you were doing, but I can’t really understand why you bothered getting out of bed this morning.

If you’ve never experienced serious depression, welcome. Although Beethoven didn’t subscribe to the maudlin outlook above (and neither, for the record, do I), he did know depression — the grim, grinding sensation of losing that hope your mother tried to cultivate in you as a child. The sadness is absolutely unyielding. Even if you manage to convince yourself to drudge mindlessly through the day, the kernel of your hopelessness remains. It beats steadily on and on, and though your friends and your work and your chores may drift in and out of your still hours, they’re just satellites of your sadness. It would almost be comforting, the constancy of your pain, if comfort mattered at all.

For most of the mornings in his life, Beethoven would wake and hear the music of the spheres, but not the sound of the floor creaking beneath his feet. He composed the crumbling of mountains, but couldn’t make out the scratches of his pen on the paper. Successes and headaches, work and family troubles, all came and went; but the tinny silence was always there. Perhaps he would have found solace in modern astrophysics: all of him, even the faithless bones of his inner ear, would one day revert to unalloyed carbon, and he would continue to create.

[Start at 2:20]

Beethoven’s output famously caused a good deal of depression all on its own, and not because of any perceived quality of sadness in the music. Generations of composers after him felt chained by futility: what could possibly be said that Beethoven hadn’t already covered? A very fair question, since aside from stormy explorations of suffering and hopelessness, Beethoven’s works also include a complete and exhaustive guide to every conceivable form of joy. Despite his hardships, he never succumbed to artistic hypocrisy: he demands that his audience consider the entirety of existence, so that’s exactly what he gives us, euphoria included.

And it can often be exquisitely brutal, the full force of his ecstasy rushing at you as though you’d somehow mainlined happiness. Beethoven grins at you as he releases the tourniquet, and you feel the pure elation slam you hard into a wall of bliss. The sensation is so fantastic and so overwhelming that you begin to feel slightly nauseous — it becomes clear this music wasn’t written for mere pleasure. This is beyond joy, much more than bright daylight. You’re strapped into Apollo’s chariot, his rabid fiery horses slashing a trail through the sky as they tow the blazing sun toward the horizon. It’s terrifying and glorious — perhaps, you wonder fleetingly, a little more glorious than you can handle. Oh well. Too late now.

[Start at 12:52]

But then sometimes his splendor is more much manageable, his happiness much more accessible, and not by accident. It’s probably too narrow to suggest that Beethoven believed in “God,” at least in the sense of God as a bearded, slightly Middle-Eastern-looking figure holding court from his cumulonimbus throne. What he did believe in was the eternal in Nature, and the universal, perpetual human quest to belong to and experience something grander than ourselves. Unlike many well-known composers, Beethoven rarely presents us with tuneful melodies. When he does, as with this famous example, it’s out of a desire to celebrate the oneness of existence, the passions and longings that link us to one another. Not for nothing was this music adopted as the anthem of the European Union.

[Start at 1:30]

Euphoria is exciting and glory is thrilling. But like all emotional extremes, they’re the most ephemeral. When you’re manically joyful, there’s a bit of you that realizes, even in that delightful moment, that the feeling won’t last long. It’s too loud and energetic to be sustainable. The best kind of happiness, the most lasting, is simple contentment. It’s the feeling of being securely balanced on the emotional fulcrum, with a slight lean to one side. It’s the first time you woke up to find you hadn’t spent the night alone. It’s the consistency of hard work met with even the occasional reward. It’s when you recognize that the people who care for you are justified in doing so. “Joy cometh in the morning” — that’s clearly bogus. Your mom knew that. But contentment, the frail yet confident grip on cautious optimism, can come. Every morning. And without the nagging uncertainty about whether it will last.

The brassy roar of the cosmos can be deafening, Beethoven shows us. But the sublime, the transcendent, the truly durable things in the universe, sound low and calm. Who knew? — infinity is quiet.

You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.

If you asked my mother, she’d say she was first and foremost a crusader for fundamentalist Christianity (a belief system believed so necessary to society that it required her constant defense), but I don’t believe that was ever really the case. I don’t believe she’d have made it through the long years in that dingy house in Little Mexico unless she was something else, something more realistic: above all else, a capitalist. Because a true Fundamentalist could not have ignored my father’s line of work — the boozing, the other women, the professional scumbags arriving at all hours of the night. My father’s business trips to visit ‘friends’ in Central America would have set alight the moral outrage of a true crusader, yet my mother was somehow able to tolerate it. She could divide the divine and the corporeal — she knew it wasn’t Jesus who paid the bills and kept her in the Sunday finest.

So she picked her battles. When my father was gone, she enforced a hard-line religious code; I could receive a beating both for the sin of watching a Victoria Secret commercial (“perversion”) and for looking away the next time it aired (“homosexual proclivities”). I could be grounded for reading a book with a curse word in it. Friends in the surrounding trailer parks were discouraged if they came from families of sin, as she figured they mostly did, and I learned early that unmarried girls — or ‘sluts,’ as she called them — were not welcome in our home, that my desires would make it impossible for my mother to hold an office at our church. I was constantly ashamed of myself.

But life was different when my father was home. He watched football and talked crap. He made his ‘friends’ get high and watch CNN’s Crossfire with him, he yelled at Bob Novak’s “fat lyin face.” Sometimes his friends brought me toys or fixed my bike. It was all right, really. The toughest part was dinner. He’d float in from the junkie-filled den in a thick musk of smoke, pop off his shirt, and slide into the chair beside me. He always made me play games, kind of like thought experiments, and this would teach me about the world.

“Okay now, get this,” he said. “There’s a train with thousands of folks on it speedin’ toward a bridge, but the bridge is up, so whattaya do?”

“I put the bridge down—”

“Yeah, okay alright but here’s the kicker now: yer mother’s trapped in the bridge machinery. Ya lower it for the train and that poor sweet body a her’s gonna git tore right up. So what now, uh?” A heady question for the first-grade kid with no understanding of ethical philosophy, who would eventually grow into a twenty-something man with even less an understanding of ethical philosophy. “Whattere ya gonna do?”

My mother stared into her plate.

“I’d save Momma cause I love Momma!” I declared. Play to the crowd you’ve got, I learned that lesson early.

“Congrats,” my father said. “Ya jus murdered thousands a people. That sound like somethin Jesus would pull?”

“No…guess not—”

“Cause yer mother would tell ya, she’d say right away God sacrificed his son, though he loved him plenty, to save a whole buncha people, right? And we should all follow God’s example?”

I said, “Yeah…”

“So whattaya do?”

“I save them folks in the train?”

“How?” he said. My mother’s fork scraped against her plate.

“By killin’ Momma.”

He slapped the table. It was loud. My mother jumped. She always jumped. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s absolutely right. Course now yer goin’ to Hell.”

I felt a jolt rush through my body.

“Why?”

“Ya killed yer own mother! Special ring a Hell fer folks like you.”

“But I—” I looked to my mother but she wouldn’t look up from her plate or say he was wrong or say that it was all lies and so my eyes burned and I shook my head back and forth and I tried to argue my way back into Heaven. “I just did what—”

“Devils… playin wit yer butt. Sticking pitchforks in ya. Forever.”

“I’d save Momma then, I take it back cuz I’d save Momma—”

“Welp, now yer back to mass murderin’ then – that’s Hell, too.”

I started to cry.

“Okay, alright c’mon now, knock off the babyshittere and listen,” he said. “Cause imma tell ya right now, that’s the thing ‘bout religion: ya ain’t never gonna win with em. Ya got that? Can’t never win.”

We played games like that every night and, honestly, I didn’t mind so much. When my father was too rough, my mother would let me have a dessert, and as the years passed I got better at saying the right things to appease him — usually a variation of “Jimi Hendrix” or “Bill Clinton” or “Legalize It!” And some of the games were fun; my favorite was the one where you picked three people to have dinner with, and it could be anyone in the world, alive or dead, didn’t matter. Any three people. I still occasionally play this game, usually on road trips or at dinner parties where the conversation has run its course, and believe me when I say most people are terrible at it.

The problem is they let their enthusiasm get the best of them. Sure, it might be nice to invite Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr., but how awkward is it going to be when Jefferson orders MLK to shine his boots? Jesus and Mohammad loved to talk and would make for great dinner companions, but both of them at the same table is an argument waiting to happen. Then there’s the language barrier — unless I waste a seat on a translator, my limited French means I’ll spend most of the night asking Napoleon if there’s a W.C. I can use. And at what point do you bump Confucius or Socrates or Dante for Samuel Coleridge and his enormous sack of opium? These are important considerations most people overlook.

My Big Three has been decided for years now:

1)     The Dunking Gorilla from the Make Em Say Ugh video – Self Explanatory

2)     Mike Tyson — Terrifyingly Effective Boxer

3)     Vince Guaraldi — Jazz Pianist / Wrote and Performed the Peanuts Theme

The way I imagine it, we start with a few drinks at the bar – introductions, stuff like that – then head to our table where we order whatever kind of food it is that rich people are always eating. Something Fusion, maybe? Is that close? Anyway, our appetizers come and the Gorilla and Vince are bonding over their experiences in the music industry, and Mike Tyson is making these brilliant observations about fame and humanity and I’m just listening attentively — I can’t believe my luck — and when the entrees come we all agree to share, and I start to ask Vince about performing at the Monterey Jazz Festival, but his mouth is full, and so we all have a laugh about that while he chews his food, and then he says it was great, and I ask him about working on Charlie Brown Christmas, and he says that was great too, and then I say, You know what else is great? and he says What? and I say This! and the three of us — Mike Tyson, the Dunking Gorilla, and myself — turn over the table and attack him, just mercilessly thrash him to within an inch of his renewed life, and Tyson is just brutalizing him and I’m blind with rage and screaming, That’s what you get! That’s what you get, Vince Guaraldi! You ruined my life!

Allow me to explain.

By the time I got my Pell Grant and went off to university, I was a painfully shy young man. My mother hated the idea of me hanging out with the trailer park boys, and my father prohibited me from spending much time with anyone else — on account that they might get nosey and snitch. So I spent most of high school playing basketball and working odd jobs to keep out of the house, and while I had the same social opportunities as any high school athlete, my deep sense of shame kept me from ever really connecting with anybody. I tried to spin it like I just preferred to be alone, that I was aloof by choice, that I never much wanted friends or girlfriends anyway. People sometimes thought I was an asshole, I knew, but that was better than them thinking the truth.

At university, my dorm room was small but standard — for once, I had a space of my own, someplace I could bring people without them facing an inquisition or being harassed by junkies. It was heaven. And I was so determined to meet new people, to finally form meaningful relationships. It was not lost on me that now, if I met a nice girl, I could allow myself to develop feelings for her, and there was nothing wrong with that! Everything would be okay — by all appearances, I was just a normal college kid. Here I was thousands of miles from my demons, and it felt like nothing could stop me!

Except my shyness. For some reason I’d been under the impression that years of turning down the friendly girls at my small, Southern high school somehow made me good with women. That even though I was now a nobody accomplishing nothing on a campus containing one of the largest stadiums in North America, pretty girls would continue to approach me and fall in love with me for no reason whatsoever. At eighteen years old, this is what I actually believed.

So things didn’t go as planned. I had no idea how someone even went about approaching a person they didn’t know — did you just walk up and start talking, offering no explanation whatsoever for why you’re suddenly stood next to them talking about James Blunt? Should I apologize for interrupting their daily routine? Would apologizing make me look like a pussy? Would not apologizing make me look like an asshole? Do I just say, “Hi, my name’s Jack,” and shake their hand? Shake their hand? Really? God, that’d be awkward. Although I think I saw Jude Law introduce himself that way in a movie once. But then girls probably wouldn’t care if Jude Law approached them with a Sieg Heil, given how handsome he is. I’ll probably never be Jude Law. Sometimes you see stuff on TV where they go back and show how awkward Brad Pitt looked at eighteen, and that sort of gives you hope that maybe movie star good looks might suddenly blossom for you, too, but that seemed far off still, assuming it would ever happen at all.

Enough of that. I was very lonely and even more confused, desperate and out of ideas until one night someone pulled the fire alarm at the girls’ dorm and I, there after curfew, was left alone in the narrow bunk of a girl I was so far unable even to kiss. She and the rest of the tower rushed outside in their pajamas to wait for the fire department, but seeing as we were violating the Student Handbook at the time, she figured it’d be better for me to stay put. So I lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling, at the collage of her high school friends, the tiny blue Christmas lights, the Palahniuk and the Sedaris and the Klosterman, the Simpsons on DVD and the posters covering her walls. I stared and wondered what I was doing wrong, at how my life had been transformed into a perpetual marathon of vacant dry-humping — and then I saw it:

Look at that. No really, take a minute and look at that face. I’ll wait.

Right. So that’s the face of a guy who has had sex with a woman. Actually, it’s the face of a guy who has had sex with multiple women. Multiple famous women, even! To the 18-year-old me—kind and loving but alone—this was unfathomable. How was I struggling for first base while this gangly prick was getting taped to cinderblock walls around the world? He wasn’t that much better looking. How did he convince people to love him? I needed to know. I’d been praying to Jesus every single night since kindergarten, asking that He use his magic to make somebody love me someday. Didn’t matter who. Just somebody. So why did it never happen? What was I doing wrong? What did Chris Martin have that I didn’t?

This is what I thought.

I thought, I will do whatever it takes.

I will study the lessons of Chris Martin, and then someone will love me.

The girl returned to the dorm. “Brrrrr! It’s cold out there,” she said, and as she returned to bed I thought we might cuddle, but she pushed me away, and I thought a twin bed should never have so much room.

Lesson #1: Fame. Chris Martin was famous and girls probably liked that, but there wasn’t much I could do to emulate that aspect of his life. I was never going to be famous; I lacked the charisma of a Chris Martin. (God, what a sentence to have written.) Moving right along.

Lesson #2: Money. Chris Martin was rich. Even at eighteen, I wasn’t so naïve as to think that simply having money would earn me love, but I knew it was important – money represented stability, it made possible a relationship free of the monthly knock-down, drag-out fights that belonged to my parents.

I googled “how to get rich.” I watched infomercials about real estate. The internet seemed to think the key to riches was selling stainless steel blades, but the rational part of me suspected girls might feel somewhat reluctant toward sleeping in a bedroom full of knives whose literature insisted could cut through bone. I wanted to be romantic, you know? And it would’ve been hard to be romantic when you were known on-campus as The Knife Guy. The real estate thing was a scam, too — not nearly as glamorous or affordable as I had imagined. I ended up working for minimum wage. I ended up living cheap.

But I knew first impressions were important, and so I saved my paychecks for months until I was able to afford two sets of nice clothes. Only two. I knew I couldn’t actually afford to be stylish, but the idea was I’d look good enough on the first two dates that maybe, by then, the Future Possible Love of my Life would be smitten enough with my personality to overlook my not actually being a millionaire. It made sense in my head.

So I went out and got a personal shopper and bought a pair of those fancy button-ups with the carefully frayed seams – they were totally in at the time — the ones meant to express that “sure, this is a $200 dollar shirt, but I can change a tire, too.” The blazer was next. Then a nice, black leather belt with an absurdly large silver skull+crossbones buckle, which the attendant assured me would not be interpreted as a commentary on the size of my penis. Then two pairs of overpriced designer jeans with an indigo stain as deeply blue as the lips of the now-dead Vietnamese orphans who undoubtedly provided the stitchwork. Did you know Prada made sneakers? My life’s savings were gone at that point, so I couldn’t afford them, but it’s interesting to think about, huh?

I endured months of minimum-wage humiliations because I knew I’d eventually sit across from someone I cared about, looking sharp, feeling confident, and when the check came I’d reach for it as surely as if I’d had a trust fund. And they’d be impressed, I thought. Two dates, I thought. Love at first sight, maybe. It felt like progress.

Lesson #3: Music. Chris Martin was musically talented. Or, even if he wasn’t really talented, he did a good enough job convincing people otherwise. I figured that was something I could do. Pretending to play the piano, I mean. Because practicing scales and actually learning to play the piano took way too much time. I mean, even learning to read music was a pain. Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge? To this day, I can’t look at sheet music without imagining a portly German child with a mouth full of brown. Conversely, I can’t look at a portly German child without wondering what they’d look like eating fudge, which is one of those idiosyncrasies that I’ve found you almost never, ever want to talk about, even if the mousy girl in the Elvis Costello shirt does claim to like quirky guys. Trying to memorize the bass clef was even more unpleasant, and so I just gave up, instead paying a music major to transcribe a handful of then-popular songs into simple alphabetical notation.

I spent hours every day for weeks sitting in front of a beat up, old baby grand piano that had been inexplicably stashed in a maintenance closet in the basement of one of the old dormitories. My theory was that the janitor was trying to steal the thing one key at a time, like a musical Andy Dufresne sneaking C-sharps and A-flats out into the yard. And so with the loose-leaf cluster of letters before me, I worked note by painstaking note, committing into muscle memory the keystrokes I could not name or understand until, by the end, I was masterful.

At five songs.

I became as proficient as I was embarrassing. “Moonlight Sonata” was the first song I learned; the fingering on it was incredibly simple, which surprised me, I guess because I knew Beethoven was a genius and so I figured all of his compositions would be unfathomably complex. But I managed. And once I had that right, I moved to theme song from Amélie, because the movie was just recently gaining ground in America as That Foreign Movie Teenage Girls Like. After that came, I’m sorry to say, two Coldplay songs – during “Clocks” I’d rock back and forth each time verse met chorus met verse, and I’d try my best to stare ‘soulfully’ through whatever girls would watch me sing “The Scientist.” I can admit to you, the reader, these humiliating truths about my past only because what I’d do while playing James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful” was so shameful that I’ve since lost the ability to be self-conscious about anything.

Pathetic? Yes.

Misguided? Absolutely.

Ineffective? Well… not as much as you might expect. I don’t know if it was the placebo effect – that I’d convinced myself I had something to offer now and could thus show a little confidence – or the college environment, or the fact that 19-year old girls aren’t famous for their judgment when it comes to guys, but awkward, shy little Jack Cazir was finally getting some female attention! People were inviting me to parties! I’d put on my one pair of clothes and cologne from the sampler bottle I’d ordered from the internet, and I’d spend my whole paycheck on whatever mid-range wine Oz Clarke happened to be endorsing that week, and I’d show up doing my best impression of someone who had any idea what the hell he was doing. If it was a house party, I’d look for a piano and — rather than stand awkwardly in the corner and pretend to text, as was my M.O. up to that point — immediately sit down, usually with a feigned oh, I really shouldn’t directed to no one in particular. Then I’d play a song and, as this occurred in the halcyon days prior to the supremacy of irony, people were grateful for my enthusiasm.

The experience was tightly scripted:

Jack: I’m sure nobody wants to hear me play.

(Jack waits for the denial that is a basic social nicety.)

Jack: Well, okay, but I’m not very good.

(He plays an extremely polished version of whichever song might play best with the crowd and its vibe, then pauses for applause and/or compliment.)

Jack: Oh, come on. You’re making fun of me, aren’t you? I’m embarrassing myself.

(Once again, he waits for the denial, then begins the second song.)

Jack: That was horrible.

(Pause for denial.)

Jack: Oh, wow, well, I’m glad someone liked it, I guess.

(He begins the third song but abruptly stops and closes the guard about fifteen seconds in. He stands and smirks, responds to all comments in the most self-effacing manner possible, then retreats to the kitchen and pours himself some of the wine he’ll pretend to know about.)

The assertion that nobody could possibly want to hear me play anything more was both polite and extremely functional, as I knew the drop-off between Beethoven and Chopsticks was a noticeable one. Conversely, the difference between Coldplay and Chopsticks is far more subtle, but that was a realization my newfound success would not allow me. Things were going well for me, word around the dorms was I was smart, and I dressed nice, and one girl joked that I was good with my fingers. Good with my fingers! Like with vaginas! I was living a dream. And it seemed sustainable enough. Not every party was at a house, and not every house had a piano. Even if there were a piano, people wouldn’t always ask, and when they did I could always just decline and it was understandable, like how Billy Joel might not play “Piano Man” every time he goes out. Teenage Me saw no problem with comparing himself to Billy Joel.

This continued for most of my first semester until, eventually, I began to hear phrases like, “You haven’t played for us in so long, play something!” My constant denials were making me look less like the modest, lovable Scrubs: Season 1 Zach Braff and more like the self-involved, gonna-beat-up-a-kid-on-Punk’d post-Garden State Zach Braff, which was a problem, as I was sure one of the girls I’d been dating was maybe going to fall in love with me soon. “Play something fun!”

“Like…like what?” I’d ask, for some reason, since with the exception of an extremely timely James Blunt remix, chances were I’d be completely incapable of playing whatever was requested.

“Ummm… well let’s see what we have!” She’d say, this adorable smiling girl with the bouncy brown curls and the snowblind-white teeth. She had a piano in her house, of course, and a subscription to The Atlantic and McSweeney’s and—my God—prints from the British National Portrait Gallery. Her music was all vinyl and while I always thought that was kind of silly I suddenly saw the charm: us cuddled together in the hammock she’d hung next to the space heater while we sipped hot cocoa, the night’s only sounds our tiny, ironically-named Boston Terrier (‘Lucifron Atlas Soulf-cker’) skittering on the wooden floor beneath us and the Alkaline Trio record spinning on the turntable.

If only she could have seen our adorable future together! The two of us like Norman Rockwell’s wettest dreams! But no. She’d kneel beside the piano bench and thumb through page after page of sheet music humiliation, endless indecipherable dots and stems, every so often pushing the puffy white ball of her Santa cap away from her perfect button nose. She would offer her home for a holiday party. Of course she would.

I wanted someone to have washed the hat in bleach. To have farted on it as a joke and now she’s got the world’s most immediate and malicious case of pink eye. I wanted a bird to fly into the window as her best friend attempted suicide across town. Radiohead performing a secret show on her front lawn. Anything. Anything to get her away from that sheet music. Anything that would make it so I –

“…should play some Charlie Brown!” It was Vince Guaraldi’s Linus and Lucy, actually, and, as it so happened, I was already familiar with it. It’s a scientific fact that no human can resist the Charlie Brown theme — it’s the ultimate crowd pleaser — and so it had been the first song I’d tried to learn. But it was too hard. Vince Guaraldi was a professional jazz pianist and so he didn’t care if the left and the right hands were on different rhythms. He didn’t care about all the changes in tempo. He could play anything. But it was way too much for this awkward Southern boy.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even fake it. I could get the first part, the bass part that everyone knows, but as soon as the melody kicked in I would completely lose the rhythm of the bass hand and the song would devolve into this aural soup of awfulness and shame. Which is exactly what happened that night, despite my protestations, surrounded by all my friends and fans and would-be girlfriends, the sheet music I pretended to read mocking me in a language I would never understand. Vince Guaraldi screwed me. I tried to blame the sounds on being too drunk to play, but everyone was quick to point out they’d heard me play a sonata beautifully while completely ripsh-t, and that was Beethoven — this was from a cartoon. The truth came out.

I was somehow worse than Coldplay. I didn’t have Chris Martin’s money or his musical talent; the only things we shared were gap teeth and a future as laughingstocks. I was mortified. I was a joke. I was still too young to know that nobody ever cares as much as you think. That people would quickly forget. I just remembered the laughter. The girl thinking I was pathetic. Thinking I was a fake. My confidence disappearing. Drinking unfamiliar wine. Thinking. Sitting on the piano bench with my face in my hands — a virgin Rodin on a pedestal of shame.

You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.

Thumbnail image – A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Original Sound Track Recording Of The CBS Television Special

It begins in the key of C Major and continues, modulating back and forth between relative majors and minors, adding harmony, polyphony and carrying the melody all throughout, allowing itself to become more difficult, going from the simple to complex and then back to the simplest form once more. It culminates again in a quiet octave accompanied by the deep throaty chords one can only play with the whole body. Resonating in the room, it reaches a single set of ears, maybe more, because one never knows who is listening.

There are those that never realize the close and intimate relationship of storytelling and music and then, there are those that know and yet find it difficult to put into words, so perhaps you can offer me a little forgiveness as I try to describe a world that has continuously lain parallel to every other world I have discovered, explored, and left. It is this world, a world of sound created when black mixes with white, that has most influenced who I am and who I am becoming. It is a world of risk, of no turning back and a world that requires you to bare your soul in the most raw, vulnerable form to all those within ear shot.

Like every young pianist, I began with learning proper posture, reading notes, scales and exercises, hoping to build a strong enough foundation to continue forward. As time went on, I learned more and the piano followed me into my adolescence, the distant and contemplative melodies of Debussy accompanying heartbreak and the spritely sounds of Mozart celebrating success in a dancing, laughing tone. I continued playing through my high school and into my college years, the piano becoming more than an instrument – it became my loyal and most steadfast confidante.

That is why I love playing the piano. Because while there is nothing like the thrill of walking across the stage to welcoming applause signaling the culmination of that particular year of achievement, playing the piano is not just about the auditions, the jury rankings, and the competitions won or lost. Throughout these fifteen years, the piano has become my companion. It holds me like a friend, the bench supporting my weight, the keys hugging my fingers without malice or judgment. It is strong, stronger than I, and so willingly shares in my stories of pain and heartbreak, and likewise is joyous in recounting tales of success and happiness. The piano never criticizes, only listens, allowing the completion of a healing process that can only begin when there are no barriers between the heart and reality.

When I sit at my piano, feeling the familiar grooves of the bench, the cool metal of the pedals beneath my feet, the ebony and ivory keys slipping gently beneath my fingers, it is at that time, like every time, that I know what it is to truly live.

You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.

Taking a day off from flying fighter planes bare chested and shooting wild tigers, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin displayed his musical talents preforming a piano solo and singing “Blueberry Hill” for a cancer charity fundraiser at the ice stadium in St. Petersburg. Before his performance he noted: “Like the majority of people I cannot — but do like to sing and to play — so you’ll have to rough it.” He has always been known for his modesty.

According to Russia Today, when the concert was over Putin took Sharon Stone by arm and sang “Grass Near Home” an ode to Russian Cosmonauts.

You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.

Chilly Gonzales takes the stage at the Pigalle Club, a Forties-style dinner and cabaret spot in London’s West End (circular tables, low ceilings, regular intervals of green velvet), and assumes his place at the piano. He is wearing a brown knee-length silk robe with matching trousers and a pair of generously cushioned slippers. His hands are encased in pristine white gloves. With shadowy deep-set eyes and slicked back hair, he is the very image of the brooding piano maestro.

He eases into a medley of slow, spare classical pieces. The music starts off somber and restrained, but his fingers move with such fluidity that they can’t resist adding little flourishes here and there. The embellishments begin to mount up. What opened with an air of great solemnity is now becoming increasingly comical. Now he’s playing a blues standard with one hand, a blur of white hammering away at the lower octaves.

He wraps it up and turns to confront his audience. “Hi, I’m Chilly Gonzales. If you don’t know me, I’m a Grammy-nominated producer.” This is true. He continues: “I hold the Guinness world record for longest continuous piano concert at 27 hours.” This is also true. “I’ve got a lot of famous friends.” He pauses for effect, then performs a modest raise of the shoulders. “In France, where I live, they call me un génie musicale.”

In 2004, Gonzales, who is neither French nor Hispanic but Canadian and whose real name is Jason Beck, released Solo Piano, an album of concise minimalist classical numbers in the vein of Erik Satie which gave substance to the génie musicale claim. Those who came to know Gonzales through that album – his best-selling by some margin – would have been shocked to learn that the author of those beautiful, delicate pieces had previously made, among other things, a gleefully profane lo-fi rap record called The Entertainist.

It’s not entirely surprising that a musician who rolls out his “unfuckwithable resume” at the beginning of a show, and makes unabashed reference to his musical genius at every opportunity, should dabble with rap. Rapping is, after all, the art of the inflated brag. The Sugarhill Gang were extolling their globally-endorsed sexual prowess and enviable motoring options as hip-hop drew its first breath, and given the amount of hot air that’s been blown over 4/4 beats since then, it’s no wonder the ice caps are melting.

Gonzales embraces the spirit of boastfulness on The Entertainist and its more lavishly produced follow-up, Presidential Suite, although in Gonzoworld the line between brag and self-skewering gag is always porous. Yes, he may be “the greatest entertainer of the year”, but he is also “the worst MC” who gets “more pussy than a priest”. He is “the prankster Frank Sinatra”, a “combination of Joe Stalin and Woody Allen”, whom you may address as “Fuckeye” or “the one-eyed Jew”. Or “Chilly Chaplin”. Or “Santa Klaus Kinski”, because he spent a few years living in Berlin.

“I am the worst MC” is at once a villainous sneer and an admission that Gonzales’ rapping abilities circa 2000 left something to be desired. In fact, as he demonstrates during tonight’s show, Gonzales is a pretty good rapper – stylistically derivative perhaps, but deft, playful and always entertaining. He spouts vast jets of nonsense in his rhymes but somehow manages to be more upfront than any other rapper you’d care to name.

Musicians rarely speak about, let alone lyricize, the shallow calculations that often underscore big career decisions, yet here is Gonzales on why he left Canada for Berlin: “I still remember when it first occurred to me./ Fuck it, I’m gonna move to Germany./ I don’t speak German, screw it/ But hey! I’m Jewish/ And I need a new press angle and that should do it.”

These kinds of outrageous proclamations make listening to Gonzales, or attending one of his shows, enormously fun. His almost pathological frankness presents an interesting challenge, however, when it comes to interviewing the guy. Any criticism you’d level at him has already been anticipated, and slyly underlined, in his music, or on other platforms. When he released Soft Power, his paean to Seventies soft-rock, in 2008, he posted a video online in which a Mercury label honcho begs him to take singing lessons to soften his harsh Montrealer tones. In the clip he circulated to promote his London dates, Gonzales tells a buffoonish interviewer, also played by Jason Beck, that although he “owns” France, he remains an underdog in England, adding: “I’m not a young man anymore. This could be my last chance.”

So why all the second-guessing?