A Short History of Me and My Piano

A ceremony to a new start takes a long look back.

This is the story of a string of significant events regarding pianos. I believe that one does not talk badly about pianos in front of pianos. May this story carry that prayer.

Hush, Baby, It’ll Hear You, by Wesley Eberle. Oil On Canvas 150 x 115 cm, Hydra, 2024. www.wesleyeberlestudio.com. This is a painting of my dear old piano. Thank you so much to Wesley for finding it’s heart.

My friend Cindy started my new year and my new decade with an amazing gift. She gave me her baby grand piano when she downsized. I have always wanted a baby grand piano. Not too grand a grand, a little grand, a little grit. When that black instrument tucked perfectly in my living room, as if it had always meant to be there, I put my hand over my mouth to stop the trembling.

I’ve always had a piano in the house, just never a baby grand. The poor men in my life have moved them so many times. There was the upright red one I bought for $80 when I was 20, the spinet that got saran-wrapped when it was moved up two flights of stairs in New York City, the one beside the bed in the apartment I rented in Paris when I wrote Another Country. I slept with my hand on its back.

And then there is the piano that insisted on following me. It first arrived on a farm in rural NC, from the local music shop where my boyfriend worked. A little Baldwin Acrosonic. The house we lived in was tiny, but the piano fit. I started writing songs on it within a few weeks of getting home from touring Bramble Rose. Good Hearted Man, Ain’t Looking Closely, Time and Patience which never came out but happened in the same string of writing insomnia. The piano then followed me to a surf shack where I wrote Late Night Pilgrim in the middle of the night to the sound of waves through open windows. When I moved to New York City, I gave the piano to a musician friend and when I moved into my little house here with Jean, he was finished with it and sent it back. And so I wrote more songs on it, songs not yet out in the world. Jean drew letter names on all the keys, and the bench filled with her kindergarten artwork.

I realize now that I don’t believe in speaking badly about pianos even when I am not in front of them — that piano might not have been the most beautiful but it was the most loyal friend.

On the second day of this year, before the other piano arrived so no one would have to realize what was happening, the movers came and took that friend away. I couldn’t watch. It was like abandoning a dog or yelling at a friend to go away for their own good. What a betrayal to send it off alone. But this was not the day for sentimentality. There were too many old songs in there, muscle memory on the keys, residue from break ups, and days need space to change meaning over time.

While the piano tide was changing, I was also going through suitcases full of old papers, a ceremony to the Baldwin Goodbye. Set lists on napkins, old flyers, letters, a disconcerting kaleidoscope of versions of myself. A picture of myself laughing onstage at hardly 25, already clocking time by shows and albums – writing, recording, touring. The See You On The Moon pile, the Traveling Alone suitcase. In the Bramble Rose pages, I found notes for phone calls with business people and the list of things to do: get a road case, find a manager. How young I was, how little I knew, trying to care for the career I so very much wanted. How easy it was to forget the hard parts and hard days when standing up for myself was terrifying but required.

I’ve always been a strange mix of scared and tender but irrationally brave. I’ve always been a little too independent for my own good. I’ve always been full of something like fire that I wrestle into words. I’m tempted to say that when I was young I didn’t know how to carry that fire as well as I do now, but that seems like baiting the world to remind me that I still don’t know much and push my face into the asphalt. It is me in those pages of pages of lyrics, but it is also someone who longs to know love while fearing it too, who wants to feel deeply rooted but also desperately free. I wonder if that is essential to me or essential to being young.

The mess of drafts — I’m sorry I didn’t take a picture to document how much paper I threw away. To only keep the “good” stuff feels a little phony, makes it all look easy. There were far more bad versions than good ones to get to any kind of keeper. Especially in the early years, the goofy, cringey moments I can only account for as hopeful, the courage to try. Let me be accountable to my sifting: the songs I write do not come easy and when they do it is because I have spent so many pages practicing.

I did not throw out a handwritten journal entry about an early gig when the turnout surprised the venue. They ran out of beer three times; my Dad gave me the last half of his. I found the original drafts of Bramble Rose (again, 25 pages of eye roll material) and When I Cross Over may have started as Nobody Can Cross Over For You, which is true but a terrible song title. I kept notes on reading Joseph Campbell about the ferocity with which one must handle themselves, and poems and stories marked with the handwriting of my favorite professors. I found a pamphlet about infertility, Laura Nyro liner notes, evidence that divorce is hard, a brainstorm for a festival called Bird Pageant based on a Eudora Welty photograph. I have written the most amount of pages about my family, because I love them, and a few sentences here and there that I really like. I wish I were an old wooden church. The moths invited themselves in.

Where the piano ends up, where the stray pages go, where my lived days collect, where my next years go – some kind of river runs through me and carries all of it. Nothing has gone missing. Should Jean look through this archive of my writing life, I hope she will see what I see spilled across the floor of my paper-covered office. I’ve tried very hard to say what I mean and though sometimes I have been lonely, there has been love all around me, more than any piano could dream of.