“Get a good job, and you can do music on the side.”
– My dad as I was deciding on a college major
After graduating in 1989, I took a cool job in the great weather of Silicon Valley with a slick company famous for big parties and a charismatic CEO. I wrote software, made friends, and attended said parties. On the side, I joined a rock-n-roll band that played at bars and parties. I met my wife, got married, and in 1997 took a one-year LOA to make an album of original songs with her.
I loved playing music, and I wanted to keep doing it.
In 1998, we were too old to live as starving musicians, so I found a music-adjacent role with Dolby Laboratories, where I learned embedded systems and traveled to Hollywood, Las Vegas, Europe, and China. On the side, I played music when I could. In May 2003 at a solo gig at Starbucks in San Francisco, I asked folks to check off songs from a printed “jukebox” menu. I then fumbled with the pages in an attempt to play the requested songs. It was clumsy but fun! The idea for an all-request show, The Pop Piano Jukebox, was born.
When we relocated to Massachusetts in 2011, I worked several music tech roles that were fun, challenging, and chaotic. In late 2016, I took a career break of indeterminate duration. I enrolled in Berklee College of Music. The Pop Piano Jukebox, or “PPJ” as I came to know it, became real when I hacked together a prototype in Django/Python and hosted it on AWS. PPJ became my final project for Creative Entrepreneurship, the last class I took to earn my Berklee certificate. (Shout out to Peter Spellman!)
I loved playing AND building music apps and wanted to keep doing it.
Still, with mad bills and two kids approaching college, I needed a quality job with benefits. Now (2017) I was a 50-year-old unemployed software engineer. I cast about to music firms large and small and a few tech companies. I got close with Amazon twice. Nothing stuck. Then came Oliver Wyman and an interview with the incomparable Ethan Murray.
Ethan knew.
From our first conversation, a Zoom interview with the empathic remote leader, Ethan knew. He had already reached out to others to explore possible opportunities (for me!) in music technology. He could tell from my resume that consulting was not my dream job. I knew it too, but everything else had fallen through. I met the OW Boston leadership team, and fortunately, they offered me the job.
I gave it two years.
In February 2020, after two-and-a-half years at OW, I knew it wasn’t a good fit. I considered starting a new search and even sent out some feeler emails. Then the business world hit the COVID wall, and I felt lucky to have ANY job. I kept my head down and built something new and meaningful. I was grateful to fill that space with impactful work.
Meanwhile, I kept doing music “on the side”. I supported my wife with her originals and played covers with a local dad band. But what I really wanted was to produce a new live show, PPJ with its companion app, languishing in prototype form. During this period I attended a dueling pianos show, a live band karaoke event, and an “all request show” with Max Weinberg. At each, the audience request mechanism was clumsy and inefficient. Writing requests on paper? Yelling at performers mid song? Having the sound guy text the karaoke band the song you wanted? These were all nightmare use cases that (in my mental projections) PPJ was poised to solve. I was determined to bring it to life.
Mid pandemic, I played one PPJ live stream on Twitch (thanks to my sons for explaining Twitch to me!), but the app and repertoire needed more of my time. In July 2023, I retired from Oliver Wyman and full-time work after 34 years.
Les Brown wrote (although sometimes attributed to C.S. Lewis):
“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”
I’m fortunate (and compelled) to realize the ideas hatched in an SF Starbucks in 2003 and first prototyped in software in 2017.
See the PPJ app at https://poppianojukebox.com/.
There is a live show in Oakland, CA on December 29. Contact me via poppianojukebox@gmail.com for details.
Next week, I’ll write more on the tech and architecture of PPJ, what I’ve learned, and what I’m still guessing at.
Ciao,
-- DDR
p.s. Another shout out to Ben Gold for help with the PPJ logo!