Connecting Through Music

by Adrian Szendel

When I was only five, I was watching The Lawrence Welk Show with my parents and was just mesmerized by Myron Florin, the accordion player. That was my first inspiration. I just wanted to play like that. My parents got me a little accordion, and I loved the buttons, so I when I got older I ended up being a bass player.

I was able to make my living with music for a long time. Living a life where I’ve followed my passion was definitely the road less traveled, as they say. But music was always central for me. It was and still is my greatest love. I spent years playing rock music in clubs like the Agora in Cleveland, doing shows, and playing original songs all along the East Coast.

It started when I was a little kid and our entire family played music together. My mom had fifteen kids in her family, and a lot of them played music, especially my Uncle Bill. Every Sunday, the whole family got together. My Uncle Bill would get out the accordion, and you could name a song and he would take a few minutes to think about it, then he’d play it. My mom would play along on the piano and my father played the trumpet, and there were always songs and singing. Music was part of our whole family experience.

Yo-Yo Ma has said that music is not about human perfection but about human perception and connection, and it’s always been that way to me. It’s a way to connect and to express feelings and emotions. There are so many moments in my life when music helped me express my thoughts and feelings with others. I’ve been writing songs since I was ten years old, and whenever there was anything emotional, it always came through music. Even though I play bass and guitar mostly, I tend to write on the piano—and the music comes to me from somewhere, so it’s not just about connecting with others. When I write music, I’m really connecting with something larger than myself.

Whenever I say I wrote a song, I kind of feel guilty because I actually don’t know where the songs come from. Many times I wake in the middle of the night and something’s in my head, and I don’t know where it came from. I get my phone and record it. Sometimes I wake up and it’s nonsense, but sometimes it’s an idea for a song, and then I need to figure out what the song is trying to do, what it wants to be.

I have this theory that they’re all already out there—the songs I mean, just floating around. And if the song chooses you to write it, and you say, “Okay,” now you have a responsibility to try to figure it out. When you hit it, and the lyrics fit and the melody fits and the arrangement fits, you feel like you’re finding the pieces of a puzzle that needs to get put together. So, for me, writing music is more like solving a puzzle than actually creating something, because the music is already there to begin with.

The song of mine that is, for me, one of my most important songs is called “Where to Now.” Around the time I was writing it, I had a long-haired dachshund with a gigantic personality named Jake. For sixteen years he sat right next to my feet while I worked on music. He was always there. And one day, while I was working on that song in my home studio, Jake saw a squirrel and started barking at it. At that moment I had been working on a vocal track, and he’s barking at this squirrel, so it went onto the recording!

But he passed away while I was still working on the arrangement for that song, and it just destroyed me. I just couldn’t do anything for almost a month. I didn’t touch anything musical, until one day my wife said, “You need to do something.” So I went to New York and recorded “Where to Now” with some friends in a studio in Harlem. Later I inserted the recording of Jake barking at exactly the same place in the song where he had barked in real life. That song became a connection to him for me.

Everybody feels music. It’s like gravity—it’s a force. And when we feel that music, it’s universal. There are songs that move you, that make you want to dance, make you happy, or just make you feel different emotions. It’s the little things that make music so important. Some songs remind me of things in my life and events that happened, and they all connect the dots of my life.

I have so many stories about my musical journey over the last sixty-plus years—more than I could have imagined—and the story continues: I am currently working on a new album for 2025, tentatively called Often Running. Hopefully some people from The Music Settlement will make an appearance. You never know!

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We all need stories that move us. To help others recall their own stories and inspire them to share those stories. We need stories to invite others into our community of people transformed by the power of music. What is your music story? How has music changed you?

Share Your Music Story