Emily Falk

In 2019, my dad died and, um, my dad, when I was growing up would always play the guitar and fill our house with music.

He would come over and play with my kids.

And when I was younger, we would, you know, sing and he would play rock and roll music or folk music, other kinds of things.

And after he died, I really felt that absence very strongly.

And so much that I decided that I was going to learn how to play the guitar.

And I started trying to figure out how to do that.

I watched videos online and I was trying to motivate myself.

And I learned that I'm really lucky that at Penn there's a program where they will connect you with a music teacher.

And so I got connected with a music teacher who was great.

He was really enthusiastic.

He was a classical guitarist, but he was also really focused on classical music.

And I had this goal to learn how to play the guitar for really personal reasons.

And when I asked him about, you know, the kinds of music that my dad liked or that my dad and I would play together...

It was sort of something that he was like, yeah, you'll figure that out.

But it wasn't central to the practice that we were doing together.

And so I would kind of bribe myself through practice sessions.

Like, all right, if you practice for 10 minutes, then you can eat a chocolate truffle at the end or something.

And, you know, again, trying to like bring the reward as close as possible.

But it was hard.

And the pandemic struck and I paused the lessons for lots of reasons.