The Piano Man

II. A Sudden Change

"When people ask what equipment I use, I tell them my eyes." Ansel Adams

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II. A Sudden Change

Noah Bentley had told his twin sister, Tally, that he would be going down to the store to buy some red vines in order to get him out of his funk.

Tally was the one to call it a funk.

Noah would call it block.

Well, Noah had gone down to the gas station and looked at all the different candy bars and had quickly realised that a sugar injection was not going to solve his problem. But a change of scenery might.

The next thing he knew, he was standing in the departure terminal at LAX, booking a ticket on the next flight to London.

Why London?

It was the first city that was listed on the departures board. Noah took it as a sign.

Tally had brought him a bag of clothes and his passport, and he was away.

Noah had never been blocked like this before. He honestly felt as though there was a dumbbell resting on his creativity that was just far too heavy to lift up. Everything he played sounded like pretentious garbage, and nothing that was coming to him was remotely suitable.

Noah Bentley had a reputation, a very, very good reputation, as a musician, lyricist, and composer. He was talented, gifted at what he did.

He wasn't being vain. It was the honest truth. Noah Bentley had a gift. He had taken his first piano lesson in his mother's church when he was five, and by the following week, he was teaching the teacher.

He could pick up any musical instrument and play it. He had a brain for music, and melodies seemed to follow him wherever he went. It had been Noah's dream to score movies, and he spent most of his freshman year of college burning CDs of his original compositions and sending them to movie studios. While studying at Julliard when he was nineteen, a producer found him buried underneath a pile of sheet music and gave him a shot.

That shot had given Noah his big break and had earned him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score.

For a nineteen-year-old kid to be nominated for such a prestigious award opened a lot of doors for Noah. People started calling him.The following year he moved out to LA. His sister, Tally, moved down from their hometown in Napa, and they shared an apartment together. Noah was lauded again for his next score and was nominated for just about every award there was.

And he won.

At twenty, he set the record for the youngest ever composer to win an Academy Award, and to top it off, he took home the award for Best Original Song as well.

He had been working consistently for the last nine years in Hollywood, never failing to turn a score in on time, and never receiving one negative review for his compositions.

So, he had no idea why he was struggling so much with this score. It was due by Christmas, and he owed the studio an original song for the end credits.

He was officially nowhere.

Noah still lived with his sister, only now she and her girlfriend had bought a condo together, and Noah lived in their guest room. Really, his bedroom was his studio, and he slept on a pull-out couch in the corner.

He had been writing in there for months to no end, so it was no wonder he had spontaneously decided to jump on a plane.

Noah was working on a movie called "The Last Hope", a historical drama centred on the Irish Potato Famine, and the mass social and political change that went through Ireland in the mid-1800s. Noah's brief was a dramatic, intense, emotional score that would add weight and depth to the film. The film was to end on a positive note, which would feature the mass migration of the Irish for want of a better life, and the original song that Noah was meant to be writing would be an uplifting song of hope and triumph over adversity.