I graduated in 2008, straight into the worst job market in a generation. I jumped from job to job. Construction gigs. Moving art for $100 a day. Day trading. Commercial real estate. It was tough. After two years of that I started questioning what life is really about. Your twenties are the years to take risks and do the things you actually want to do, and I hadn't really experienced the world at all. So the idea formed: travel the world with a piano.
In 2010, while pushing my piano through downtown Manhattan, the piano fell on my left hand. I broke two fingers. The doctors didn't know if I'd play the same way again. I couldn't play piano for three months. I spent that time planning the trip that became Piano Around the World.
On April 4, 2011, I took everything in my savings, bought a van and an upright piano, and drove out of New York with my dog Brando. I lasted 155 days on that first trip. 38 states, 9,300 miles, sleeping in the van most nights. I came home in debt, made four TV appearances, kept a blog, and fell in love with a way of living I hadn't known was possible.
Then the $2 Road Trip in 2012. Then Central America in 2013, where I drove from New York to Costa Rica with a friend, and played piano on the streets of Granada, Nicaragua. Then Europe in 2014. Then Argentina in late 2014 and through 2015, where I came close to a TV deal and missed. Then back to New York in 2016, where I met a violinist named Ada Pasternak and we filmed a duet on a street corner that ended up at fifty million views.
Life is more fun when you don't know what happens next.
The road ended in 2017, for a few reasons at once. Six years of traveling with a piano is brutal on a body. Too much lifting, too many injuries. The chance to start a business of my own. And an idea that had been growing the whole time: instead of playing shows on the street, build a space and bring the shows inside. That became LUME Studios, at 393 Broadway in Tribeca. The studio has hosted over 1,600 events in the years since.
That's also when the carpal tunnel showed up, in both hands. I couldn't play for a long time. It isn't the ending, though. I came home, I stopped, and I started something else.
This is the archive of everything that happened in between.
