Middle C Music
Falling in Love With Music All Over Again
I remember walking up the pathway for my job interview at Middle C Music - 30 years old, five years removed from Saffron Falls - on the phone with my mother, telling her that even though it was a music store, I wasn't sure I remembered any of it. So much of my musical life from the past felt far away, untouched in years.
What I didn't know then was that I would spend the next seven and a half years as the General Manager of Middle C Music, Washington D.C.'s only full-service music store. Like the Brass Monkey years before, I eventually earned the freedom - sometimes with tough pushback early on - to reshape the entire store: the design and layout, the products we carried, how everything was displayed. I was allowed to design a musical space built around my experience of being a musician, shaping it into something colorful, open, inviting, and unintimidating. A space that felt alive and comfortable, where you could sit down, take a breath, and feel the possibility of music.
I would remember everything I thought I had forgotten too:
how to talk guitars and accessories, pianos and classical repertoire, drum gear, audio setups - all of it.
How to pick out the perfect beginner guitar?
What is actually important when starting to record?
What makes a quality digital piano?
All the tiny details across every corner of music that I had absorbed through what already seemed like a lifetime.
Middle C Music brought it all back and let me fall in love with music again.
My goal was to design a space that welcomed musicians from every background, but also anyone walking into a music store for the very first time. I knew how intimidating music can feel and I wanted to create an environment that felt open, encouraging, and genuinely inviting. A place where anyone could walk in, feel supported, and know they were safe to try, to learn, and to be brave.
Over almost eight years, Middle C Music became a community music store - full of color, sound, and life - a place that invited you in, encouraged you to explore, to sit down and play. I spent every free moment I was at Middle C Music creating that space and I am incredibly proud of the result. I truly loved every single second of it.
It was the people that would change me the most though. Spending seven and a half years with such incredible coworkers - all artists and teachers - was the most transformative time of my life. Artists, I would find, are a magical group of humans, and can be endlessly surprising the more you get to know them.
Being surrounded every day by professional musicians, the blend of so much talent, and so many deeply creative and caring people, was the perfect environment for me. After I moved to D.C., about a mile from the store, I practically lived at Middle C Music.
