I play guitar, and I teach it.

A man in a white sweatshirt photographing himself in a lift mirror, a guitar case slung across his back.
The case goes most places I do.

Teaching is the part that changed how I hear music. You can play something correctly for years without being able to say why it works. The moment a student asks why does that chord sound sad — or worse, why does mine sound wrong when I’m playing the same notes — you have to actually know the answer, and vague intuition stops being enough.

That pressure is where Beyond Listening came from. Most of the questions in that series are questions students asked first.

It’s the same loop as architecture, honestly. You don’t fully understand a system until you’ve had to explain it to someone who will immediately find the part of your explanation that doesn’t hold up.

Playing

A cover of Roja — the A. R. Rahman album that set off the whole Beyond Listening series in the first place.