Play Time Updated · v2

In my continuing efforts to learn to properly make use of the eclectic collection of music equipment that has arrived in tiny boxes to my front door since the year began, I have been playing.

Literally. Figuratively. Philosophically.

Playing.

Isn’t it funny how we use the word “play” to describe the art of making music… and then we also use the same word to describe the act of having fun un-driven by specific goal or focused purpose? Play. I have been playing in both senses, making music in my office-turned-music-studio and also having fun generating soundscapes and beats and little songs un-driven by any specific timeline or objective save learning the tools themselves. It is both kinds of play because I am playing music but I am also just playing, dabbling, engrossed in a pointless, unfocused effort.

Kids play and we smile and say that’s just what kids are supposed to do.

Musicians play and we queue up to buy expensive tickets to listen.

Average people sitting in their basement play and we, all too often, ask why.

Or worse, we frame it up as part of something with a goal or attached to an effort to better ourselves. We try to justify it. We try to make it into personal growth or an abstraction set within the structure of a bigger learning plan. We rake ourselves across the coals with value-based evaluation of the time, log minutes, write articles on obscure websites about how “playing the piano for twenty minutes a day made me better at business-to-business marketing, blah, blah…”

At some point as we turned from children into adults play became a pejorative.

Real men don’t play, they strategize, practice, gamble, or hone their skills, right? I’ve heard that one before. There’s serious work to be done, money to be made, networks to build and projects to milestone.

Nearly every day, for at least the duration that it takes to lay down a three minute track on my recorder I just play, I string together all the pieces with all their snaking wired connections, and dive in without a plan. It usually takes me a few tries, but often I get a respectable starter loop going on the looper pedal, I lean into an effect, and I start adding layers and layers and layers. Each day I come up with something new and interesting, and each day I record it because… well, why not? 

Look, my point isn’t some secret layer here. Playing doesn’t make you a better person any more than it makes you a worse one. It makes you just a person to flit and flounder through curiosity-driven noodling. It makes you simply human to dabble without structured goals. 

But it is all nothing more than play. Just play.

Not always. Not for everything.

Maybe now and then, or even once a day.

And that’s okay.