Daisy is short for “Desire”
Why I’m afraid to play guitar - Pt. 2
Note from Riri: This is Pt. 2 of my gigantic guitar essay - what can I say, I love enormous blocks of text and sometimes can’t stop myself from talking and talking and talking, especially when it’s about music!
For Pt. 1 of the story, click this little link right here.
Last week we stopped at my move to Berlin - guitarless and hopeless (in what concerned my rockstar fantasies). The first few years of my new life were pretty bearable without any guitars in sight other than those worn by countless musicians I saw live. I was too preoccupied with the unfamiliarity of Berlin, with my newly found freedom and with another little nuisance - my master’s studies in corporate finance.
It was about two years after my move that I slowly began establishing some vague, uncertain touchpoints with the music scene in Berlin. It all started with a chance encounter at a Youth Lagoon show in late 2015 - I saw a girl in the audience who would end up being my friend for years after. Her name was C., and though she was nothing more than a concert goer, just like myself, she had a certain kind of aura around her that made her attract musicians like a magnet.
It was in her company that I found myself at the most obscure shows set at the weirdest underground venues in Berlin. It always went something like this: we would enter the room and everyone would be all over her, swarming around, trying to get a word in. They would never as much as say hello to me and would largely ignore my presence, hanging on to C.’s words as long as she bestowed her fleeting attention upon them.
Very, very slowly I did make a couple of acquaintances in the Berlin underground, among them this one guy that was hopelessly infatuated with C. and seemingly saw me as some kind of proxy creature. For a brief moment, he took up teaching me to play drums and randomly lent me his Gibson guitar, as if I had the slightest idea what to do with it after an 8-year hiatus.
Said Gibson was temporarily residing at my sublet apartment the day my life changed its course forever. It was a bleak November day in 2017, cloudy and cold. A friend was visiting from abroad and I had resolved to surprise him with secret concert tickets for a band I had turned him on to, my number one favourite band at the time. I had purchased the tickets in advance and hid them in my backpack as we were leaving my place to go for a walk the day of.
As the show time was nearing, I brought my friend to the venue under some false pretence and let him take in the fact that the show was happening there that very night, already sold-out. You should have seen his face when I flashed the tickets in front of him! You should have seen my face when I saw the show was set to start a whole hour later than the usual showtime in Berlin. I hadn’t noticed that in my hurry to conceal the tickets.
When we walked into the club, we were nearly the only people there. Naturally, we ended up standing in the first row. As time passed, more people arrived that I knew and among them C. She was standing right by my side when the show began.
The band was playing song after song and I was watching in fascination, mouthing along every word, swaying to the music until it suddenly caught my attention that the band’s guitarist was looking my way. No, more like staring my way. I brushed it off - after all I looked absolutely unremarkable and what’s more - C. was standing next to me, radiating her nonchalant gorgeousness. There was just no way he’d be staring at me - or was there?
I decided to wait one more song and then ask C. if I was dreaming this up. The band got about 30 seconds into the next number - the guitarist gawking relentlessly - when C. tapped me on the shoulder. I looked at her and she leaned to whisper into my ear: “We’re going to the afterparty, aren’t we?”
The account of what followed is very long, very convoluted, and better saved for a separate series of essays, but I’ll stop by one of the evenings when the guitarist came to my place for the first time. He immediately caught glimpse of the Gibson gratuitously residing there, snatched it up and effortlessly played the riff from “Stayin’ Alive”.
The same feeling washed over me as all the countless times I’ve seen people play guitar well in my presence - utter fascination, utter inability to figure out how, how they could and how I couldn’t - this time amplified a hundredfold by the sheer realisation that this guy was the main songwriter of my then favourite band.
He asked me if the Gibson was mine and I mumbled, burning with shame: “No, it’s a friend’s. I couldn’t play guitar to save my life!”
The Gibson was gone a day or two later and it was no more than a week after that I texted my mom and asked her to fly my old cheap lonely Squier Strat to Berlin the next time she visited.
And so we were reunited - the guitar I was supposed to sell to another stupid girl and I. But that didn’t mean the existential crisis of whether I was meant to play it was behind me. As I was navigating the torturous on-and-off thing with the guitarist and later mourning my broken heart, I felt invariable shame tightly welded with a sense of inferiority when I as much as thought of picking up my guitar.
I would make some half-hearted attempts to refresh my rusty skills but there were decidedly no significant refreshments.
Time passed, my suffering grew duller and duller, and in a sequence of unlikely events I finally started writing my own songs. Yet my heart and my mind were still in a tight clench when I thought of approaching the guitar. I wrote pretty much exclusively on my keyboard as I’d completely resigned myself to the fact that I’d never amount to much on guitar. The mental picture of Riri The Rockstar was fading.
Despite myself, I still kept tabs on the world of guitars online. I could spend hours upon hours browsing all the beautiful models that I’d never have - somehow always Telecasters for which I’ve harboured an unhealthy fascination for no less than a decade. Several times I almost bought one of them - but then caught myself thinking I had absolutely no use for another guitar, seeing as I still had the Strat hanging on the wall, lonely as ever.
But then, as my songwriting grew more confident, as my heart grew more whole, I found myself poking around on guitar - writing my own little progressions - still not even close to my synth-based material but… something.
And then I created my Substack - and with it came lots of creative challenges including starting my own YouTube channel and posting some song covers. This was the moment when I took to learning guitar parts for several songs at once - playing every single day during lunch, the same several sets of chords, like a mantra.
And soon after I realised - I am getting better. Noticeably better. I am doing my Strat justice. I’m never gonna sell it to another girl, stupid or not. I’m gonna write songs on it that The Guy could never dream of. I’m gonna get it company - a Telecaster I’d wanted so much for a decade. I’m gonna call the Tele Daisy - short for “Desire”.
Yay for Telecasters and getting better at shredding! My Tele is a favourite.. I bought it in Japan in the guitar district. It’s Ochanomizu, well worth googling if you still like drooling over guitars 😅
Happy birthday too! Hope it was a rocking day 🤘
This spoke to me like an autobiography. I enjoyed every minute of reading this article. I love how you say you first couldn't play guitar, but now you've mastered the confidence to play it and look how far it's taken you. Well done on this brilliant little piece 👏