May the 4th, on the 4th of July
Two 4ths, one nerd
Happy Fourth of July.
Though in my house there are really two Fourths that matter — this one, and May the Fourth. Yes: I'm the kind of person who celebrates Star Wars Day. So fair warning — your piano teacher is about to spend three paragraphs on Star Wars. Stay with me. It goes somewhere.
I was a Star Wars kid, and if I'm honest, I never fully grew out of it. I own a shirt that says DORK VADER. I have — as a grown man, in broad daylight — hugged a Darth Vader costume in a Disney gift shop and asked someone to take the picture. I've made my peace with it.
Exhibit A. I regret nothing.
Somewhere along the way, I "grew up", and I fell out of love with it.
Every few years there was a new movie or a new show, and most of them felt thinner than the last. The magic I remembered started to feel a little silly — the mystical space-wizards, the Force, the rubber aliens waving in the background. I'd found other science fiction that stayed grounded in real, breakable people. Stories like Alien, or The Expanse, where nobody has magic powers and the stakes are just human beings trying to survive each other. Next to those, the wizardry started to feel like the kids' toy I'd finally outgrown.
So I nearly skipped Andor (the prequel series to Rogue One, tracing the origin of the Rebel Alliance). I only watched it because people I trust wouldn't shut up about it. And it did something I didn't expect. It almost quit the magic entirely. No chosen ones, no glowing swords, barely an alien in sight. It's just people — ordinary, frightened, stubborn people — living under a regime that's tightening the screws, and slowly deciding they've had enough. It put the human back in the story. And it pulled me all the way back in.
One line from the show has been rattling around in my head the past couple weeks:
"All rebellions are based on hope."
Now — before you picture your mild-mannered piano teacher building a barricade, relax. I'm a revolutionary in the most understated way there is. My rebellion happens on a piano keyboard, thirty minutes at a time. But that line cracked something open for me, and it's why I'm writing you about a national holiday instead of about the music.
Because I've come to believe hope can't exist without imagination. And imagination is my entire line of work.
Think about what the founders actually did. Before there was a country, there was just a thought, that eventually formed into a sentence. A handful of stubborn, wildly creative people imagined something that did not exist — and then dared to drag it out of their heads and into the real world. They argued it, wrote it, rewrote it (both in ink and in blood!) and kept tending it long after the fireworks (and the funerals). The country started the way almost everything starts. Someone imagined it first.
Leslie and I stood in front of Independence Hall last fall, and walked in the actual "room where it happened", where a few imaginations rewrote the rules of the world. I've felt a lot of things about this country over the years, some of them complicated. Standing there wasn't complicated. It was just quiet awe at what people can build when they refuse to stop imagining.
Leslie and me at Independence Hall, Philadelphia. Where a sentence became a country.
A few blocks away there's a bronze of Franklin handing Washington a Masonic apron (an interesting side quest. Look it up!). I stood behind it with my hands wrapped around theirs, pretending to hold their "handshake" together. It was a goofy tourist photo. It also happens to be true: a country is held together by people willing to keep imagining it, over and over, hand over hand.
Doing my part to hold the union together. Someone has to.
That's the word I keep landing on for freedom: it rings. Same as the bell a few steps from that hall. Same as a single note held down on a piano until the whole room hums with it. Liberty isn't a document under glass. It's a sound somebody has to keep striking, or it fades.
What I get to watch and hear for a living.
I sit next to a person at the piano — six years old or sixty-six — and I watch and hear that ringing come back to life in them. You can see it on someone's face the first time their two hands do something they didn't think they could do. That's not a party trick. That's a person remembering they can still make something out of nothing. It's the smallest, most ordinary act of hope I know, and I get to witness it every single day.
So here's my Fourth of July conviction, for whatever it's worth to you.
Creativity isn't the decoration on top of a good life. It's the thing everything else gets built from — countries, songs, second chances, all of it.
And in a year when a lot feels like it's tightening and darkening, I find I'm stubborn enough — rebellious enough — to keep betting on it.
You don't have to play a note today. Just don't let anyone convince you your imagination is a kid's toy you were supposed to leave behind. It might be the most grown-up thing you own.
Go make something this week. Even something small. Keep the bell ringing. And may the force be with you ;)
Full disclosure on the depth of the affliction: my studio had an alter-ego logo in 2021, and it was a Death Star. I contain multitudes.
