_NetNomad

aside from being a great episode of Academy, this episode was also a perfect coda to Discovery. Tilly got to be the person she needed back in the day

ELO is an interesting case. Pinning down the original members is already a bit tricky, because the first album was really just a side project of The Move, before Roy Wood left to start Wizzard in the middle of doing their second album. If we’re generous and say their third album was really their first as a seperate band, we end up with a group that’s fairly static throughout the 70s and that most fans would call the classic lineup. the only two truly original members, though, were Jeff Lynne and Bev Bevan, and everyone else in the and was technically considered an employee, which you can imagine led to all sorts of legal chaos

in the late 80s Jeff decided to shutter the band. Bev Bevan wanted to continue but Jeff considered himself synonymous with ELO being their writer, so eventually the two of them agreed to let Bev tour under the name ELO Part II with a lot of the members of the classic lineup. In the early 2000s, Jeff wanted in again but the “employees” thing and some legal trouble between him and Part II left him wanting to start fresh. No one knows the full story, but Bev, who was seemingly still enthusiastic about touring, suddenly decided to retire. Part II had to rebrand to The Orchestra, no longer having a The Move representative, but kept touring. Meanwhile Jeff did an album and a short tour with his new ELO, which had their classic keyboard player but The Orchestra had basically everyone else from the classic lineup. Jeff’s ELO went dormant until 2015 where it went by the literal name of Jeff Lynne’s ELO. Keyboard player Richard Tandy recently passed away, and with violinist Mik Kaminski retiring this year from the Orchestra, ELO has not one but two ships, one of which has been completely and thoroughly Theseused and the other just one plank away.

if your local music store lets you try before you buy, i’d try everything they let you. different instruments are more or less intuitive to different people, and it’s hard to know unless you try. in your case, digging languages, i would for sure also learn basic music theory so you know "what* you’re saying instead of just how. it’s not neccisary to know theory to play but it’s fun for it’s own sake and hey! you might be inspired to write something! back when i was in school, the free exercises on tonesavvy (used to be called emusictheory) were the recommended way to get started

for habit building, you just gotta carve out the time and do it. once the novelty wears off, there are gonna be days when you don’t want to practice, and a habit forms when you push through that. you don’t need to practice for a long time every day, ten minutes is plenty as long as you’re doing it consistently. a weird thing about playing music also is that it works kind of like muscle where you exercise to get stronger but you get actually get stronger when you’re resting. if you find yourself getting frustrated, you can just put it down, and you might be suprised to find whatever you were stuck on today is easy tomorrow. but that only happens if you play today and tomorrow. it’s also always better to practice slow and then speed things up once it’s under your fingers. that ensures you have good form and you’ll ironically get things up to speed faster than if you just tried to go fast from the start. the metronome is your friend

good luck and have fun!

unfortunately age verification is now required to touch grass