Day 27: A song that you wish you could play

Tweet Considering that I can't play anything - I sort of wish I could play, well, anything. Indeed, down the years I've considered the skills, or smaller body parts, such as baby toes, that I'd swap to just have the ability to hold a note, tune a guitar, beat a paint-can to a rhythm, or even manage to synchronise my wibbly fruit-picking dance to the beat at a techno set.

Way back when, like most introverted teens into music, I used to fantasize about being great on guitar. I had a lucid dream about actually being Johnny Marr once, and I can remember it as clearly as other events from the year of 17. As an adult, I still wonder about what it must be like to be able to play music; still in the same jealous way - as if that particular skill is the key an entire world of human experience closed off to me. It's orchestras I think of now, not bands. I wonder how it must feel to be part of a complex mechanism made from extremely talented people working in harmony, like a single organic entity (ideally), all spinning individual strands of one composer's brilliant vision? Exciting? Meditative? Fulfilling? Gah, the world of musical ability is a foreign country.

I sometimes imagine what it would be like to be the solo violinist who swoops into Philip Glass's 'Einstein on the Beach' during some of that opera's most emotive moments, the Knee Play bits. Just like 3 mins 56 seconds below. I'd trade a nipple. Seriously, a nipple.