The Truth in Sound

When basketball was over, I read a lot of books that said the same thing: find what you love doing and do that. At first I didn’t agree with it too much because that seemed like an impossible thing to figure out. I never really thought of anything I loved outside of playing ball.

For whatever reason, one of the first things I thought about was playing music. I had always wanted to learn guitar. Always. So the next thing I knew, I had one in my hand and I was trying to figure out where to put my fingers.

The thing is, this wasn’t my first time starting. Years earlier, when I was living in my apartment in Toronto, single with all the time in the world, I actually started trying to learn piano. But in my young mind, I guess there were more pressing things to do than putting a few minutes a day into learning an instrument. So I stopped. And that decision eats me up to this day, because if I had just kept at it, learning slowly, a little bit every day, I would have been in a completely different position by now. I could have been pretty good. But I stopped because it was hard.

I think about that often. Not to beat myself up, but as a reminder. The reason I keep going now is because I quit the last time. And I figured if I don’t quit this time, I’ll eventually be okay.

So I found a formal teacher and started taking guitar lessons from the ground up. And I mean the ground. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Basic chord progressions. The kind of stuff that can feel embarrassing when you’re a grown man, a former professional athlete, sitting there struggling through a song that children learn. But I had to accept that you have to start from somewhere, and that means being okay with something not sounding good.

Music is brutally honest. There’s nothing to hide behind. If you suck, you can hear it. Immediately. Every mistake is right there in the open, and in the beginning, you can’t correct them fast enough. That was something I wasn’t used to. I had spent my career with elite control over my body, and now my fingers wouldn’t cooperate on a fretboard. It was frustrating in a way that caught me off guard.

And that’s why so many people quit. They pick up a guitar thinking they should sound like Buddy Guy on day one. When they don’t, they put it down and never come back. The truth in the sound scares them off.

But I kept going. And what surprised me wasn’t so much the progress. What surprised me were the friendships. I took my guitar with me everywhere I went. And because of that, I started meeting people I never would have crossed paths with otherwise. Musicians who were great people and would invite me to hang out at studio sessions or just to spend time together. Through my love for music, I ended up hearing about things like Glastonbury and actually going. I found myself hanging out with the Counting Crows, Imagine Dragons, Buddy Guy, Gary Clark Jr., talking about the guitar, talking about writing, talking about the craft. Those experiences happened because I picked up an instrument and was willing to be bad at it.

Music opened doors that basketball never did. Not bigger doors, just different ones. Ones that led to conversations and connections built around a shared love rather than competition.

The physical process of learning is still humbling. Your body doesn’t do what your mind wants it to do, and there’s no shortcut through that. It’s repetition and muscle memory, over and over, hoping you eventually get there. But it’s more about accepting what it is and committing to the lifestyle of learning. You keep going.

The best reminder I’ve found comes from watching my kids. When one of them is learning a song, as an adult you automatically get annoyed by the terrible sounds they’re making while they try to figure it out. But they don’t stop. Hundreds of times a day, they just keep going. They don’t care that it sounds bad. They don’t get embarrassed. They don’t quit because it’s hard. They just play it again.

That was a learning point for me. Somewhere along the way, we lose that. We start caring too much about how we sound, how we look, what people think of the noise we’re making while we learn. Kids don’t have that problem. They just keep playing until they get it.

It feels good to make music, even when it’s simple. It feels good to meet new people because of a shared curiosity. And it feels good to know that the reason I’m still learning is because I refused to make the same mistake I made in my twenties.

I stopped once. I’m not stopping again.

Keep playing!