After a great deal of practice - a lot of it with my eyes closed - I can now do this fairly well on this song. In my last piano lesson my teacher was trying to get me to make this sound better. So we were talking about making the hand "flop" into the keys. Like the feeling of "flopping" into an armchair.
As is its wont - my imagination has taken this idea and run with it.
First of all I had a very clear picture of the type of chair. Green leather. Old but still quite firm. One of those one's with the circular covered buttons in the upholstery. In fact if you do a google image search for green leather chair you get this - which is pretty much exactly what I was imagining.
And I was imagining how it would feel, physically, to just flump down in this thing.
Or should that be phlump?
Around the chair my mind's eye constructed a room. The lounge of a Manhattan loft apartment. Lined with books of all sorts. A green leather sofa in the same vein as the chair. Those green glass and bronze reading lamps you get in an old fashioned library. A baby grand of course.
Then a grey tabby cat appeared and started padding around. And flopping down on the rugs. As cats are won't to do.
As I write this the cat is doing that washing it's inside of the hind legs (arse) yoga thing with one leg in the air.
She's just stopped mid wash and given me The Look. You know? Stoopid human
Put your tongue away, kitten. You're not fooling anyone.
This morning my mind's eye started picturing each note I played as having a tiny green armchair on it. With a tiny person phlumping down into it. Whole teams of them. There was a man in a beige v neck pullover. A woman with glasses, her brown hair in a bun, sensible shoes and a grey slight A-line skirt. I think they may all have been characters from a 1930s/40s period movie. It was all quite retro.
Initially I struggled with the song. Not only is the stride thing technically difficult but. Oh the words. The words. It's one of those unrequited love songs. Where the singer is bemoaning how the beloved doesn't even realise they exist. Now I've been in unrequited love. Many times. Often embarrassingly and painfully so. I'm an expert. And one thing I've come to realise is that this type of unrequited love (there are other types) is something you do to yourself. So accusing the object of affection of anything is a tad unfair. The whole Ballad speed thing is a strugle for me too. I find it really hard not to race away. As if my default inner pace is galloping along too fast for the song and I almost have to slow my heart beat down like hibernating creatures do.
But that mental picture of the room helps. Instead of thinking of the words I am picturing the image of that Manhattan loft room and playing that. This helped me fall in love with the melody. And then with the chord sequence. Which is an absolute delight to improvise over over even just using simple things like the chord notes to make a melody. Or playing the chords and moving them up and down the piano in their different inversions.
And I think that's a thing. With every song you have to find something, no matter how small, to fall a little bit in love with. And the great thing about that is the song, not being human, but being a song, will pretty much always reciprocate.
You want to sit on my lap pusskit? I don't really have much time.
Oh, alright then. Just a few minutes
