I have a very long list of possible projects that I have been keeping for many years.  Part of my morning routine at least two times a week is to go over this ‘meta-list’ of projects.  Old-time sales people call these lists ‘ticklers’ as in tickling the memory to life.  The image below is a partial page with some of my projects rewritten legibly with text.  One project I highlight is to learn to play Guy Clark’s paean to getting outta the city,  “L.A. Freeway”.

Why share this? I don’t think my learning process is special or particularly indicative, but I don’t often get to see how others move through the day seeking information, making sense of it and sharing it. Perhaps you can compare this with your own process and find something useful or suggest a way to make mine better. It is enough to want to do that.

I am not a particularly gifted musician, but I do like music and I thought that with some retirement time available I could dedicate a few hours to learning how to play Guy Clark’s song.

I found this YT version and as one of the commenters suggested I plan to slow the song down and copy the chord progressions–old skool and by ear, a voyage of difficult discovery.

When I taught full-time, I showed my students how to create questions about what they were passionately curious about. I have just recently realized that I had not done one of these “I-Search” questions this fall semester of my retirement.

All my past I-Searches have been prompted by my life experience and curiosities just like I wanted theirs to be their own. For example, after seeing street card magic I was inspired to ask myself, “Can I create a card routine to entertain my family, friends, and students?”

The corresponding writing idea that rose up from this question was to reflect on the kind of learning that asking questions like this encourages AND to demonstrate how I learned something from scratch, warts and all. Students were wildly surprised that you could research your own learning practices and reflect on how well they worked even if was only for a sample of one, themselves. “You are your first and best audience,” I would tell them.

I discovered how learning something as simple as the “charlier”, the one-handed playing card cut, could be a real brain breaker and that how learning could take more time than we realize. The upshot was that I felt more empathy for my students as I realized that something I thought of as painfully easy, bibliographic citations for example, was as big a brain breaker to them as the charlier cut was to me.

Back to the present… it was time to commence/to fix/to begin to learn some mad skillz. So I have started. I am looking at the history of “L.A. Freeway” as a way of coming to know it better. I remember Jerry Jeff Walker covering it in tiny nightclub in Bowling Green, KY. He was solo that night,but I have never seen so much sound rising from one person as I did that night. He was a tornado and this song was the apotheosis of any version of this past or future. As I recalled this, I began to wonder as someone who isn’t much of a musician as to how I could get from the tiny/shiny electric piano version of this song that you saw above to this hard driving uptempo icon of Texas redneck power pop.

Well, I probably can’t, but I want to try. My question then is this: Can I learn to play L.A.Freeway to my own satisfaction? And can I tell that story to others? This is a “yes-plus” question with a “yes-plus” answer. Yes, I hope I can and yes I hope the story is worth the telling.