I returned to an old song this morning, the equivalent of opening a suitcase sat untouched in the basement for thirty years. The chords were wearing the same clothes, waiting patiently for me to become a different pianist. When I wrote it, the song travelled along a narrow road. Now I can drive it into deeper territory, take illegal turns, abandon the highway and disappear into musical districts, not on the original map. Some of this comes from age, persistence and the slow accumulation of musical accidents. But a great deal has come from the vast, lawless conservatory of YouTube.

YouTube is a strange university. It has no entrance examination and no tuition. The professors include concert pianists, anonymous teenagers, retired jazz musicians, Bulgarian accordion players and men recording harmony lessons in kitchens while someone behind them prepares lunch. Almost any musical question I have ever asked is answered there fifty different ways. Ask about a voicing – an army appears. The information is instant, but instant information is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge requires ears capable of recognizing what matters, a mind willing to be rearranged and hands prepared to endure the humiliation of learning something new. I steal a fragment, a fingering, and a rhythmic displacement from a pianist whose name I can’t pronounce. The song doesn’t know what happened. It wakes up expecting the same three chords and finds that the neighbourhood rezoned.

This is one of the miracles of continuing to play. The song remains the same age, but the musician does not. I can return decades later carrying everything I have heard since, and the old composition becomes a meeting place between the person who wrote it and the person who survived long enough to misunderstand it more interestingly.