Best Worst Own Student


Collected from May 2020 until November 2022 on a variety of pianos, but mainly my home piano in California.

Album cover is a 1 minute sketch by my brother Liam Heinicke while aboard sv-karma.com
who, among many great skills I’m well aware of, is additionally a fantastic cartoonist, of which I now know.



The infinite yet countable solitude of recording yourself at the piano, to then listen back and find something you didn’t hear.


My dad once said "I like the way I cook."

psht. profound. autobiographical.
But no.
Really.

Cooking is an act of service, of love, [maybe] spite (depending on who's over for dinner (or brunch)), but the *majority* of cooking one does in life is generally for one's self. My own culinary life,
whether it’s
maximally utilitarian:
making sure the engine keeps going,
satiating yourself creatively:
crafting a comestible experience,
stress baking:
cookies > no cookies,
a 3am omelette (that, lets face it, just becomes scrambled eggs),
it is by some large proportion,
in solitude,

One of the first instruments I ever played was a $15 casino keyboard in the basement in New Jersey. I remember wanting to play a repeated rolling d minor triad as FAST AS POSSIBLE by playing with my pointer and middle on my right hand and my pointer of my left. I think my first ever “composition” was a just the circle of 4ths from D to.. well then you’d get to the B triad and it doesn’t sound right so you’d skip it and get lost and go play with legos.

Somehow this instilled some kind of magnetism towards “the piano.” In high school the machine was entirely for searching and generating static harmonies. In a practice room I’d usually hold the pedal down and clomp trains in different registers instead of practicing guitar.

Going home for Christmas from college was always an opportunity to play piano uninterrupted for hours. Mind you, The piano in my house has the tonal equivalent of a set of smooth rocks being dropped down a concrete staircase in a reverberant parking garage, which teaches that ear to brain connection to have a similar fidelity to blowing bubbles in a malt shake with fiber optic cable in place of a straw.

I’d like to think of piano as my own personal antithesis to guitar. While with one I labor for hours to get a perfect take, resulting in a minimally small output, I think It will take many many hours of sifting and hard exposure therapy to “get out” whatever it is I need to say. I’m not sure what it is, but I haven’t really stopped to worry about that (at least for this). Additionally I certainly don’t think I have any real aptitude for the instrument, and I definitely didn’t pick an efficient route. But every time I feel that the etherial mojo is “there,” I place my phone down and record. Then, I listen back, pick out what I like, and focus on recreating that.

The result? It’s profoundly inefficient, and amazingly effective for exponentiating all the lapses in your own judgement. Maybe I should’ve just done the Suzuki method? No. Instead of wishing my parents had me take lessons, I am grateful that I could play literally anything for hours and hours, turning the house into an inescapable sandbox, with sand stuck in every crevice of their ears (and only later I’d find out my dad found it “crashing and unvaried.” That’s being truly TRULY accepting. (Maybe he wished I still liked Metallica?))

Maybe you’ll feel like when you see your neighbor washing their BEDRAGGLED mountainbike and wonder where the hell they went with it. OOORR the smell of somebody else’s dirty laundry has wafted over the fence and you wish you could be anywhere but here. If you hear dirty laundry? That’s fine! If you hear things you like? That’s fine too!

“Nono, I don’t really play piano.”
But frankly,

I like the way I cook.


Thank you Thomas for being so encouraging, receptive, and sharing. Pretty sure already a better guitarist than me. Thank you Susana for being a constant consultant and entirely inverted inspiration. Never in a million years could I sound like you. Please never stop sending me practice room videos, especially if they’re in Db or Ab. Thank you to my parents for the piano, the support, the listening, and also, in some funny way, for not listening to not tell me to stop with the whole “elbows and flat palms thing” when I probably should have.