Jon McLaughlin Hated High School Piano Lessons

Yahoo! Music’s ‘Who’s Next’ features Jon McLaughlin, where the singer songwriter talked about how much he hated to take piano lessons in high school as a kid and how the lessons he learned were beneficial in emulating an artist he looked up to.

“Everybody goes to piano lessons, but when you’re a freshman in high school, nobody has piano lessons anymore,” McLaughlin said. “Every week, I was trying to talk my parents out of these piano lessons. I would come up with any angle I could. I’d try to talk them out of these weekly lessons, and it would never work. One day I just put my rollerblades on, went out real quick, ironically it was right before a piano lesson. I fell the wrong way. I wish I could say I was doing some wicked trick or something off a car. Just fell the wrong way and broke my wrist and that was my out. I was happy to take two broken arms for a couple of months to get out of (the lessons). I ended up not playing piano for a couple of years after that.”

Citing Billy Joel as an influence, Jon said, “The thing was, especially at the time I was in high school and wanted to get out of it, I never really bridged the gap between classical piano that I was playing week after week after week, and the Billy Joel tape that I loved to watch. Nobody ever put a Billy Joel song book in front of me and said you can actually play ‘And So It Goes’. You can play that. It wasn’t until 5-6 years ago that I started kind of doing what I’m doing now.”

Watch the performance of ‘Beautiful Disaster’ (the interview has since been removed) below.