Addison Road

I had a very quick recording session on Monday. It was one of those things that reminds you that you’re in LA; song demo for the next album by BIG NAME ARTIST (all-caps for dramatic effect), have to get a copy in their hands before they fly back to London at 1PM, decide to bring in someone other than the songwriter to punch up the piano part, hurry up to find a piano room and engineer. It was one of those days where you really hope the coffee girl at Starbucks ask what you’re up to, so that you can casually shrug while you pretend that you spend every monday rushing off to find a studio to lay down song demos for BIG NAME ARTIST.

So, I’m the hired gun, there to punch up the piano part. The song is solo piano and vocal, a rolling 16th-note kind of thing, floating and insistent, dropping into a heavy Elton John piano-rock chorus. It’s an arrangement where the timing of piano part matters a lot, and the whole thing, basically, is the feel. It’s all about the small differences between “right on the beat” and “ahhhhhh, that’s it.”

I love those piano parts, and I feel comfortable delivering something where timing is critical. I spent a lot of practice hours earlier in my musical career woodshedding my sense of time, and I can usually get things to sit in the right spot. Rolling 16ths that breathe across the line? Candy! Great song, decent big room, great engineer, beautiful piano, cup of coffee, it’s go time!

Except midway through the first pass, it was obvious to me that something was very wrong. My right hand was all over the place - individual notes in the part would get stuck, like they were hitting late, and would throw the timing of the whole line off. I was playing a repeating ostinato pattern of 4 16th-notes, and the third note would be late. When you’re playing a part like that, you can’t stop to think about the timing of each finger, it just has to do what you’ve trained it to do. There are too many other things to think about. So, when my fingers started hitting at the wrong time, it took my focus away from other things: arrangement, dynamics, listening to the vocalist, and the little timing problems started to eat away at everything else that was going on.

About 2 weeks ago, I noticed a lump on the back of my right hand, about an inch below the wrist, right above the index and middle fingers. It didn’t hurt, unless I used my hand a lot, and I didn’t think too much about it. That’s my usual method for dealing with body abnormalities.

After the session on monday finally ended, it was throbbing, and Gretchen called to make an appoint for me to see the doctor.

It’s called a ganglion cycst. It’s a collection of clear, thick, gelatinous fluid on the sheath of the tendon that connects my fingers to the muscles that control them. Musicians don’t like to hear doctors say anything that involves the words “fingers” or “tendon”. It’s not big, maybe the size of a dime, but it’s large enough to alter the mechanics of how my hand works.

During the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the height of the vault for the women’s gymnastics competition was set 2 inches lower than regulation. Girls kept falling, crashing into the mats, coaches kept saying to the officials, “Something’s wrong, something’s wrong!” 2 inches difference in apparatus for a gymnast is enough to alter every aspect of what you’re doing.

The added strain of those two fingers having to pull against the cyst is enough to change the timing between my brain giving the signal to play, and the finger striking the key. The pressure on the circulatory system causes the hand to throb most of the time now. The tips of my middle and ring finger occasionally go numb.

My playing was a disaster on Monday. Fortunately, the songwriter I was working for is a friend, and she was too gracious to say anything. She’s enough of a friend that I’m probably not crossed off her list. But, on the drive from her house to the studio, she passed 5,800 keyboardists, all of whom are listed in the union directory, any of whom can do the gig. You don’t get to blow it too many times before people move on down to the next name.

So, this cyst thing has me scared. Frankly, I wanted the doctor to be a lot more concerned. I wasn’t able to communicate to her just how big a deal it is to me to have the timing in my hands thrown off by a little bit. She said to wait for a month, and see if it goes away. I said, “What if it doesn’t?” She said, “Well, sometimes they just go away, sometimes they don’t. If it doesn’t we’ll look at some other options.” “Can’t we just cut the thing out?” “Well, we don’t like to do that until we see if it goes away on its own.” “Well, I don’t like to sit around for a month while we see if the hand that I’ve spent 6,000 hours training is going to actually function worth a damn!”

I didn’t say that last part. Maybe I should have. It’s what I was thinking. It’s all I can think about. This thing has me scared.