Day 26 - A Song that You can Play on an Instrument

This entry a part of the 30 Day Song Challenge

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Hand in My Pocket
Alanis Morissette
Jagged Little Pill
(Released October 1995)

Hand in My Pocket — not You Oughta Know — was the Alanis song that made me an instant fan. I loved it the first time I heard it. It was also the first song I wanted to learn how to play on the guitar. But you know me: I can’t sing, I can’t dance, I can’t play a music instrument. So just like Day 9 (A Song that You can Dance to), this song does not exactly fulfill the day’s challenge. Still, it’s better than a simple “N/A.”

For my 7th birthday my parents got me a Yamaha organ. This present got me very excited, even though I never asked for it. Plus, I never really considered learning to play music at that age. But for this child it was a big deal and I enjoyed every moment I clumsily hit the keys and pretended to be a keyboardist. Till now I still don’t know how to play it, and musical notes still read Greek to me. It beats me why I never bothered to learn how to play the organ. Perhaps if I did I’d be able to pride myself on being talented at something.

Sure, I would love to learn how to play the keyboard. But I would love to learn how to play the guitar even more.

I remember from my childhood days how my cousins would flip through song hits and play their favorite songs. It always amazed me how they were able to instantly pick up the music just by looking at the tabs. One time I came across Alanis Morissette’s Hand in My Pocket and I imagined it would be easy for me to learn how to play, given that most of the verses were in G. So I grabbed my cousin’s guitar and asked him how to position my fingers to play this tab. I was able to successfully, firmly place my fingers on the strings but there was only one problem: I didn’t know how to strum the darned instrument.

Cousin said there were different ways to do it, with or without pick. But I only needed to know how to strum the guitar the way it’s supposed to be strummed for this song. He demonstrated it to me with ease, and he’d never even heard of the song! I tried my hand at it (no pun intended), but the stupid instrument only produced tuneless sounds. My rigid fingers failed to romance the guitar but I still continued to strum it and I even sang the words, thinking the introduction of vocals would marginally improve the sound I was producing. Well, it didn’t. This was the first and last time I ever attempted to play an instrument.

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