Finding another way

At the end of the last note, I wrote about opening a door I thought I had welded shut.

Apparently, my timing could have been better.

Not long after writing Reason on Trial, I slipped with a knife and cut deep into my left index finger. At first, it was treated as a fairly straightforward cut. The wound was stitched back together and that was supposed to be that.

Except it wasn't.

It didn't take long before I realised the finger wasn't working the way it should. Something was clearly wrong, and after a few days I was sent to the national centre for hand surgery, where they opened it up again. I had cut through nerves and damaged the tendon. Suddenly, the finger I needed quite a lot for playing guitar was the finger I couldn't properly use.

There was obviously some concern about what that would mean long term. I had only just started enjoying making music again, and now I was sitting there wondering how much of an impact this stupid accident was going to have on playing guitar. Luckily, the surgery went well and what followed was excellent rehabilitation. Apparently, guitar (and video games) is an excellent way to rehabilitate hand dexterity.

But rehabilitation takes time. And I wasn't particularly interested in putting the music away again while I waited. The funny thing is, guitar wasn't actually where music started for me.

I played piano from around the age of five until I was thirteen, taught through the Suzuki method. A way of learning built heavily around listening, repeating and developing music by ear.

I don't know how much of that came from the method and how much was already there. Hearing music, finding melodies and knowing when something sounds right has always felt less like something I learned and more like something wired into me.

Maybe somewhere in my DNA.

I later learned to play electric bass and then moved on to guitar in my late teens, where playing guitar actually started as a rehab thing too (another story of its own).

So while the guitar suddenly wasn't much of an option, there was another way in.

A virtual piano and my own voice, just to save the melodies for later.

It wasn't about returning to playing piano the way I had as a kid. It became a tool. Somewhere I could sit down, find the notes I was already hearing in my head and start turning them into melodies, chord progressions and ideas that could be used in the production.

The injured finger had changed how I could work for a while. It hadn't changed the fact that I wanted to. And somewhere during all of this, something else had started happening too. The music was no longer just something I did during sleepless nights occasionally to clear my head.

I was thinking about it every evening, like the lyrics kept screaming at me to let them out. Even more so since guitar wasn't an option.

Lyrics would appear when I wasn't trying to write them. Melodies would start forming on long drives, while walking the dog or just as I was slipping into sleep at night. One idea seemed to lead into another, and for the first time I started wondering if maybe this wasn't just a temporary experiment after all.

We still had no idea what SevenFiftyTwo was supposed to become. We hadn't even reached Chapter 01 yet. This was still just private creation to blow off steam.

But we were getting close.