We've been creating music in a rules/no rules sort of way since we first met. And I've been sneaking around the rules since my first recorder class at age 5, where I'd fake reading the sheet music and play by ear, earning myself an early release from the torture of 12 children playing Mary Had A Little Lamb very badly, over and over and over.
Upstairs from my recorder class was a room full of harps of all sizes, and this was where I'd escape, where mom would find me, strumming and plucking, making up my own way to play music. Thinking back, it amazes me that that room existed and that I found it, and was able to spend so much unsupervised time there. The rest of what we call structure was absorbed through osmosis.Osmosis is a fine teacher, but creating without an agenda, like that 5 year old in a room full of harps, earnestly making music just for the pleasure of it, and that's where it's at.

Around the same time period as the recorder lessons, we would go together to the train station and wait for dad's commuter train to arrive. While waiting, my mother would yodel inside the tin shack which was the "train station".  She could seriously yodel (she'd smoke Heidi), and the reverb inside the tin shack was incredible. Consciously, or unconsciously, she taught me that voice was something to play with, she taught me to throw my wee voice all over the inside of that shack. Melody, pure and sweet and fun. Sooner or later the train would come and all the men dressed in the 60's same businessman suits would flood off the train and head for their individual stationwagons/wives/2.2 children/suburban homes. I realize that these memories represent the first building blocks of my quirky foundation in music.

Thanks mom, you own the yo in yodel!