I am gonna make it through "This Year" if it kills me

My title, as always, is a lie. It's actually pretty easy to run through the chords of "This Year" on the piano, even adding a basic right-hand accompaniment, after four weeks of vague app-based study, and provided you have a good enough ear to determine that the entire Internet is on the wrong side of the C# vs. C#m debate (I am the Joan of Arc of this). By contrast, here's John Darnielle doing the thing properly:

Darnielle and I both took piano lessons as children and rebelled by becoming bad guitarists as young adults, though in my case, I was simply a bad guitarist, while Darnielle's taking up the bad guitar was a deliberate aesthetic gesture – and one that ended when it was no longer useful to his art. Darnielle was a good "bad" guitarist, purposeful and always in pursuit of something. In this, he reminds me of Kristeen Young, one of my first great musical loves and the kind of "bad" pianist you only become after many years of hard work and formal study. Young's discordant compositions exist because she's not interested in the typical mathematics of the piano keyboard. She works in negative and irrational numbers, the kinds of haunting numbers that are put next to pieces of evidence at crime scenes. The piano has this side to it too. It offers many easy paths to heaven, and many easy paths the other way. Though not a simple instrument on a whole, it is unusually responsive to our struggle for speech.

I've been replaying "This Year" because I need practice with ear training and working out chords from first principles, and I vastly prefer it to my piano app's suggested options, "Smoke on the Water" and "Let It Be." "This Year" is a fascinating song, both personal and anthemic, interspersing the long semi-autobiographical story of a drunken teenage afternoon with a chorus – "I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me; I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me" – that everyone can understand. We all feel that it's about us, even though it's one of the Mountain Goats songs that's most nakedly about Darnielle: portrayed as a teenager, fighting his way through an abusive childhood through video games, alcohol, and misadventures with motor vehicles. The paradox of the phrase is knowing, funny, and essentially cyclical.

Darnielle's common themes are many – addiction, violence, Christianity, the destruction of the human body through labor, all approached with the rich and humane black humor of a crisis counselor or a psych nurse (Darnielle is in fact a psych nurse, though he's long since become a full-time musician and novelist; it's not the kind of job you quit). Most of all, he writes about harm reduction, i.e. the idea of doing self-destructive things in the least destructive possible manner. It's not that his art is in favor of self-harm, or romanticizes it, but it does understand its efficacy. Part of the reason Darnielle's work speaks to his fans is because it explores characters who romanticize violence and self-harm, while recognizing that both self-harm and its romanticization are tools that they use to stay alive. His exploration also reminds us that playing music involves self-injury: calluses, breaking strings, repetitive stress. Overt self-harm hasn't ever been one of my vices, but it's been one of his. They tell you to throw eggs at a wall, or draw on yourself in Sharpie, but you can also play guitar, either badly or well.

"This Year" is built around a piano riff, which is itself built around an A major chord which both begins and ends the sequence, so that we're always coming around to it again. This A major is highly load-bearing, for reasons I didn't understand until I started playing it. If you've never played piano, the A major is one of those chords that it takes work to get to. If you put your thumb, middle finger, and pinkie in their most natural positions with the thumb on C, you'll get a C major chord. Same thing with G. If you start with the thumb on A, though, you'll get A minor, which is the piano's most beautiful chord. You have to act against instinct – reach up for a black key on the middle note – to get A major, which is one of its most ambiguous and triumphant. The A major chord is the chord of hard-won triumph, unlike G major, for example, the chord of easy success. Therefore – and this is the most rabbinical thing I'll ever argue – A major carries immense symbolic value in "This Year," a song about reaching for that black key, about demanding happiness under conditions of relentless pain. It's easy to despair, it's work to live.

I've wanted to take up the piano again for almost a decade now, but I didn't know how to fit one more creative practice into a life that's already overcrowded with writing commitments. I've had various financial windfalls over the years and never bought a keyboard. Finally, I did so last month, and have found it a medicine for my mental health second only to actual medicine. Words haven't felt as safe lately. I'm trans, and in the papers of record, sober gents (gender-neutral) are fair-mindedly debating whether I exist, or ought to, and whether it would be abhorrent or merely tragic if young people grew up to be like me. Reading all of these words makes me feel insane, which is their goal, and I've found that one thing that lets me continue to read and write words is to also work on the piano. On the piano, sounds tell private truths to which proof is irrelevant. On the piano, I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.

I often return to E.M. Forster's description of his heroine as a pianist in A Room With a View (also quoted at some point in my novel Dead Collections, which in addition to horniness and document boxes is largely about playing the piano – which I hadn't done in twenty years at the time that I wrote it, and which I regret to inform you is entirely made up):

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never.

[...] She was tragical only in the sense that she was great, for she loved to play on the side of Victory. Victory of what and over what—that is more than the words of daily life can tell us. But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph.