Improvisation & Being Mindful of Your Medium

Tonight began with pisco sours & hand-rolled cigarettes on the front porch, but soon led, inevitably, to guitars and tambourines on sloping couches. I live in a house of musicians and usually these jam sessions find me playing an oil can with a wooden spoon or harmonizing shyly in a corner, but this time my housemates insisted that I haul my keyboard downstairs and join the fun.

I was incredibly nervous because I have essentially zero experience playing music with other people and certainly don't have experience improvising music with other people. But, guys, it was so much easier than I thought! I've been practicing piano almost every day and I'm getting much better at hearing a chord and then reproducing it on command or finding a complementary chord. I guess that really is something you can learn with practice. I'm still shy about playing music live, but I'm excited about getting better.


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I've been thinking a lot about songwriting lately. It's still very new to me, but I've spent most of my life thinking about writing in other forms.

Some of the best screenwriting advice I've ever heard is: Be mindful of your medium. Theoretically, you have a story to tell and you choose a certain medium (film, photography, poetry, etc.) because that's the best medium in which to tell your story. If you've chosen film as your medium, then you should take advantage of the aspects of film that make it unique; writing a screenplay that is purely dialogue-driven is a waste of the medium.

I think the same goes for music: every song is a story that you tell and you've chosen music as the medium for telling that story. We should make sure its the right medium and, if it is, take full advantage of what that medium has to offer. In other words: a song should be musical! It's not a poem.

These thoughts aren't entirely cohesive, but I hope it gives you something to think about. We can talk about it over pisco sours the next time I see you.

photo credit: zen