{GUEST POST} Wife of a Musician: Music T-Shirts My Husband Wears (or Should)
Today’s guest post is written by my lovely wife Eleanor. Eleanor is a high school history teacher in Orange County, California and an amateur singer, guitar player, and ukulele player. Make sure you check out her other guest posts here.
My husband owns many t-shirts. Most are nerdy and incorporate his favorite things: baseball, Arrested Development, Game of Thrones, etc. Surprisingly, he only owns a couple of music t-shirts at the moment. Here are two music t-shirts John regularly wears, and three that he should.
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I Love My Wife…
This was a gift from my sister last Christmas. First of all, I’m not a complete Scrooge. John does get to play the piano from time to time. The problem is we have young children who nap and who are needy and who fight, and John picks the least opportune times to break into song. My sister has been witness to me snapping at him, “Do you have to do this right NOW??”more than once, and John thought this was hilarious.
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A City Built on Rock and Roll…
I think I found this shirt before John and I were even engaged. I knew he likes music and puns and sarcasm, so this seemed like the perfect shirt for him. It’s held up remarkably well, and it’s still well received when he wears it.
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I Listen to Bands…
This one is not so much funny as it is 100% true! As part of his work at his music transcription service, John creates a lot of sheet music for bands and musicians that do not exist or are just getting off the ground. A lot of musicians today learn to play by ear but don’t have a significant amount of formal training in music theory or transcription, so John takes their original scongs and transcribes them into sheet music. In other cases, artists may have written music by hand but don’t have access to music transcription software like Finale, so John will engrave their hand written work into printed sheet music. In some rare cases he even gets a credit, such as in his work on this song book.
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I Might Look Like I’m Listening…
I don’t think I can count the number of times that I have been talking to John and have to prompt him for a response, only for him to tell me “Sorry, what?” Nine times out of ten, he’s thinking about a specific piece of music. Sometimes he moves his fingers as if he’s playing piano, which is an easy tell that he’s not really listening to a word I have said. He will vehemently deny that he does this, but he totally does and since this is my blog post I claim editorial right to not change this t-shirt.
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Piano City
John loves skyscrapers. When he was a kid, before he realized he could make money doing music, he thought he might be an architect. He even drew up plans for buildings with gigantic elevators and elevators that moved sideways. He has also told me on more than one occasion that:
if he had enough money, he would build a really tall skyscraper just for fun and
Los Angeles is the best big city because of the skyline
Going to school at USC, John was regularly exposed to LA architecture, and he was never similarly impressed by San Francisco (my favorite city) when he came to visit me at UC Berkeley.