When we left Colombia in August after a three-month stint to continue our travels, we brought several pounds of coffee from the family farm. We had been to a few places where coffee isn’t popular or the stuff available was pretty bad. For example in Argentina maté is the hot beverage of choice but the coffee options are more limited. A lot of what we found in grocery stores came with sugar already added, if you can imagine such an offense.
So we decided that having good coffee was important enough to allot it some of the limited space and weight allowances of our luggage. This made me feel better about lugging around my musical equipment all over the world for a year. Just kidding. I never felt bad about that. But if I had, then our decision to use limited luggage space for so much coffee would have made me feel better.
By the way, someone once told me that if I refrain from caffeine for the first hour after waking up then my body will have a better chance to wake up on its own, in a chemical sense. I was made to believe that this could help reduce crashing so hard later in the day. I didn’t do any fact-checking on that because it seemed like a good thing to just try. Plus, waiting awhile before I get to feel the wonderful uplift of caffeine gives me something to look forward to. It's like I get to wake up twice. And it’s true: the natural feeling of your body waking up can actually be pretty nice. Who would have thought? So that’s what I do now. I recommend it.
“Waking Up” is another piece of music that causes some left hand pain but I’m kind of proud of how I was able to persist and allow the left hand to carry large sections of the melody. I felt that this resulted in my right hand being a bit idle at times but I decided to roll with it.
Two choices made this a little more interesting to play. The first was forgoing right-hand chords in favor of mirroring the left hand (an octave higher) for several short stretches. The second was introducing the right hand a beat later than the left at the beginning of the main phrase throughout the piece. Maybe these are things you don’t really think about, but which subconsciously do something to grab your attention.
I also teased my tune “Lullaby” in the last few seconds, just for fun. “Waking Up” feels like a nice counterpoint.
If there’s anything specific you’d like me to talk about in the written component of these posts feel free to let me know. I just like writing.
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