Michael Morrison

The Violinist and the Commodore 64

I believe it was 1984 when I upgraded from a TI 99/4A computer to a Commodore 64, which would become the single best-selling desktop computer of all time. Those were early days for desktop computers, and the C64 was an affordable entry point, introducing many of us to the BASIC programming language, early online communities, and software piracy. A few of us even leveled up to learning 6502 Assembly Language, which was no-joke challenging for that era, likely for any era. I used my Commodore for tinkering with programming, playing games, and eventually running a Bulletin Board System (BBS) on a shockingly slow dial-up connection…mostly to download more games.

You're a Bass Player Now

I tried to give it back.

Again, Funnier

I contradicted myself in public six weeks ago and nobody caught it, including me.

The Tax of Mastery

At thirty I took up ice hockey, which is a deranged thing for a grown adult to do. I’d skateboarded most of my life, well enough that my body had a deep, wordless fluency with a board. Skilled enough to think about style on top of the muscle memory. None of it transferred. Ice is not wood or Skatelite or concrete, a hockey stop is nothing like a skateboard’s, and there is a specific humility in being genuinely good at one thing and then standing on a surface that takes all of it away. I described it at the time as trying to learn to play basketball without knowing how to run. I spent a season getting the puck poked off my stick by ten-year-olds. And I loved it.

You Can't Relic a Life

There’s a kind of Les Paul guitar that looks like somebody played the life out of it. Sunburst, the finish checked into a thousand hairline cracks the way old nitro lacquer goes after enough cold nights. A worn patch on the back of the neck shaped like a hand. The gold on the hardware dulled to a tarnished green. Around the back, a belt buckle has rubbed a soft crater through the lacquer, down to bare wood, the kind of wear you only get from a few thousand nights standing up with the thing slung low.

You Can't Police a Groove

In 2023 Ed Sheeran stood outside a Manhattan courthouse, having just won, and said that if the verdict had gone the other way he would have quit music for good. He had spent years and a reported fortune defending a four-chord progression and a backbeat against the estate of Marvin Gaye. Not a stolen melody, not a lifted lyric, not even Marvin’s 1964 passport. At issue was a chord pattern that sits under a thousand songs and predates copyright (and Marvin Gaye) by centuries. The man was, in effect, on trial for four chords and the rhythm that connects them. How did we build a world where you can be hauled into federal court over a sequence older than recorded sound?