From the live class

Barefoot and broken: the line in the song that is literally true

The Ridley Academy has its own song, written with its students. One line in the second verse is not an image reached for because it scanned well. It is a plain description of how Stephen actually started.

The song is called The Music of Life, and it was written by the Ridley Academy students together with Stephen. He read the lyrics out on the live class, and then, almost as an afterthought, explained where one of the lines came from.

That is the first verse, and it is about the people in the room — a school whose students are scattered across continents and arrive from wildly different lives. The chorus that follows it holds the whole thing together: the sum of the parts, a voice from the heart, the laughter, the joy, and the strife. The dark and the light, the black and the white, the music, the music of life.

Then the second verse turns personal.

Why barefoot

Stephen worked in a bank. He hated it, and he left it to play the piano — and when he did, he took his shoes off. Not as a gimmick. It was a marker, a way of separating himself from the life he was walking out of.

He played barefoot for the first year and a half. He still plays most of his concerts barefoot now, and only wears shoes when a venue makes him sign something that says he has to, usually because there is broken glass on the floor.

What followed was the street. He went out and played, and kept going, and ended up performing in seventy countries. That is how he became a working musician — not through a conservatoire, but by playing to whoever happened to be walking past, every day, honestly, with nothing between him and them.

There is something worth taking from this if you are learning late, or learning alone, or feeling like you started from nowhere. The person teaching you started with no idea what he was doing either. He simply wanted an adventure, and went and had one — and the line about it ended up in the school’s song, sung by students who came from the valleys and the hills and across the ocean to get there.