Quote of the Week...from Paul McCartney

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a good song happen.                                ---Paul McCartney

I don't know when Paul McCartney...now 82...made the above quote.  That exemplifies the tremendous stability of the personality and beliefs of this remarkable individual, an outstanding musical artist with whom we've been blessed to live during the same years.  From time to time I've flirted with the notion of learning to play musical instruments...some time in the past in my early fifties I took some private piano lessons.  But unlike Bill Murray's Groundhog Day character Phil Connors, who had a seemingly endless progression of the same day ahead of him as he went through his own piano lessons, I experienced back then the progression of brand new, very different days and their accompanying demands and distractions.  So although I picked up some slight keyboard skills and actually somehow got through a piano recital performing an excerpt from a Beethoven composition, I ended up abandoning the piano project. But in the back of my mind I've always wanted to be able to pick out any tune and transfer either its main melody or accompaniment to the keyboard...or guitar, for that matter.  Will and Rebecca studied piano and applied themselves better to learning it than did I.  I understand that when the Beatles were starting out, none of them could read music, but rather developed and honed their musical skills by endlessly practicing their instruments, and their songwriting was a matter of dreaming stuff up and quickly transferring it to guitar, piano, drum and voice, with each other serving as critics and contributors. Melissa recently gave me a nice electronic keyboard for Christmas, and I have a different strategy for playing it than before, one that I think the Beatles great with his above quote would heartily approve of. But my aims are a bit more modest than those of Sir Paul McCartney:  I just want to play the music that I already know and love...and he wrote his share of it...