If you care about music at all, you ought to devote some time to learning how to play an instrument. The goal here doesn't have to be mastery, and in fact in most cases it shouldn't be; rather, the goal is to develop the specific way of enjoying music that can only come when you know how to make it yourself. There is a special pleasure in hearing a beloved song, then turning to your guitar or piano and teaching yourself how to play that very song. You are not just a receiver of the music - you are a producer of it. You recreate the experience of what the original artist felt when they composed the piece: your fingers on the same keys and strings, your voice sounding out the same melodies. The same muse that spoke to the songwriter now stands before you, or at least a shade of her does.

In this way, music differs from other art forms: it can be reiterated by listeners such that their understanding of the original work changes and deepens, and this reiteration is not all that difficult to do. If someone were to try and rewrite The Bluest Eye word-for-word, line-for-line, or if an artist took up their brush to paint an exact replica of a Kahlo self-portrait, we wouldn't be in the wrong to call it a waste of time. Nothing to be gained from doing that, we'd say; nothing that unlocks the original in the way you're hoping for. But the first time I sat down at a piano and plunked out "Let It Be," a key did indeed turn in some hidden lock, and all at once I was inside the music - feeling it, breathing it, physically producing it - in a way I'd never done before, and I have not heard that song the same way ever since. I think everyone should get to have that experience, and it is one of the great gifts of life that, with just a light amount of practice and a careful ear, anyone can.