You're listening to life kit from NPR.
Hey, everyone, I'm Liliana Maria Percy Ruiz in for Marielle Seguera.
In 2019, Joel Snape moved back to his family home in England to take care of his dad, who had suddenly become seriously sick.
My dad was always kind of a.
He would putter around with music.
They had this old Yamaha keyboard and I was like, piano is kind of always something I've thought about trying.
And so I thought, maybe this is a good time to try it, like, maybe this is now or never.
And it really gave me something to kind of focus on and put my energy into that felt a bit positive among, like, the other stuff that was happening.
Joel is a journalist and he does lots of YouTube videos about the things he's learning about.
Okay, I've been learning piano for about four and a half years now, and though people have been very nice about my progress, I think I could have probably learned more and improved faster if I knew then what I know now.
Joel was 40 years old when he.
Started basically very little experience playing music.
Like, I think I remembered, like the old mnemonic, every good boy deserves favors from school.
So that was as far as I had ever got with learning to read music.
So, yeah, he didn't really have a musical background, but he was drawn to music and the piano in particular.
It sounds really strange, but actually when Westworld came out, that had a big influence on my wanting to learn the piano because they've got those beautiful piano arrangements of pop songs like Amy Winehouse.
I think I had seen the depth of the piano and all the things you could do with it.
Picking up an instrument as an adult can be intimidating.
You're starting from scratch and playing dinky songs with three notes.
When some little kids can play Mozart, it can feel really embarrassing and the opposite of fun.