From a handful of shaky chords to actually making music — guitar lessons that connect the dots, so playing finally starts to feel like playing.

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• 1) When did you first develop a passion for music and your favorite instrument?

  1) I didn't have one of those lightning-bolt stories, which used to make me feel like a fraud, but the truth is there was never a before. My mum sang around the house constantly, badly and beautifully, and there was this permanently out-of-tune piano in the hallway that everyone banged on. I was singing along to things before I understood the words meant anything. The moment it turned into mine, though — I was maybe nine, picking out a tune on that hallway piano, and I put my own silly little words over the top of it, and it hit me that I'd made a thing that hadn't existed a minute earlier. That was the hook. Not playing music, making it. I've never really thought of myself as belonging to one instrument — I'm more of a song person — but piano is where I write, because you can see the whole thing laid out in front of you, and my voice is the one I can't put down even when I want to.

• 2) Is there a particular type of music or artist that you listen to on a loop without it driving you crazy?

  2) I'm a lyrics person to an almost annoying degree, so it's always something built around words. Joni Mitchell's Blue I've probably listened to a thousand times and I still find new corners in it. Nick Drake when I want the quiet, Adrianne Lenker for the newer stuff. What I'm chasing is that one line where somebody says an impossible, complicated feeling in the plainest words and it just knocks the wind out of you. The catch is I'm completely useless trying to work or concentrate with any of it on, because I get dragged into the words and forget whatever I was doing. So it's not background music for me — it's more like sitting down with it and giving it my full attention.

• 3) Explain to us the most difficult or riveting course you could personally give to a student of music.

  3) The hardest thing to teach, and honestly the one I care about most, is getting somebody to write a song that's actually theirs. Not a clever one — an honest one. The problem is everyone shows up wanting to sound exactly like whoever they worship, and they hide inside that costume because it feels safe. The work is coaxing them out of the impression and into their own plain voice, which feels naked and a bit humiliating at first, and a lot of people fight it hard. But when someone finally writes a line that's genuinely their own — usually something small and specific and a little embarrassing, not the grand poetic thing they were reaching for — you can watch it land on their face. They realize they have something to say. There's nothing better than that in this job.

• 4) What do you think is the most complicated instrument to master and why?

  4) Everyone's going to say violin, and fair enough. But I'll die on the hill that the pedal steel guitar is harder. There are no frets, so pitch lives entirely in your ears and your hands with nothing to catch you if you're off — and you're constantly gliding between notes, so a hair sharp or flat is audible to the whole room. Meanwhile both hands are doing completely different jobs, both feet are working pedals, and your knees are on levers. It's a full-body puzzle where every limb is playing a separate part and there's zero margin for error on the tuning. I tried it once at a friend's place, lasted about an afternoon, and gave it back with more respect for those players than for almost any other musician alive.

• 5) What are your keys to success?

  5) Make a lot of stuff, and let most of it be bad. The single biggest difference I see is between the people who wait around to feel inspired or "ready," and the people who just keep producing — writing the fifty forgettable songs to get to the one that isn't, singing the wobbly take instead of not singing at all. Talent is real, but it's wildly overrated next to sheer volume of honest attempts. And the other half of it is resisting the urge to be a good impression of your heroes. Everybody starts out as a knock-off of someone; the ones who get somewhere are the ones brave enough to sound like themselves, even when themselves is a bit clumsy and plain at first. Give yourself permission to be bad, make a ton, and your own voice eventually shows up.

• 6) Name three musicians you dream of meeting in your favourite bar in the early hours of the morning. Explain why.

  6) Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Dolly Parton. Joni because I'd want to ask her how she was brave enough to hand over that much of herself in a song and never flinch. Leonard because he'd be the last one standing at 4am regardless, courtly and funny and beautifully gloomy, and I'd happily talk about words with that man until they threw us out. And Dolly, because a table of two confessional poets would absolutely collapse under its own self-importance without someone there to laugh at all of us — and also because underneath the wigs and the sparkle she's quietly one of the greatest songwriters breathing, and I don't think that gets said enough. Two women and one man; I picked them for the conversation more than the music, honestly. That'd be a good night.

• 7) Provide a valuable anecdote related to music or your days at music school.

  7) This is an open-mic story, not a school one — I mostly taught myself. Early on I'd written this small, plain song about my dad, about him falling asleep on the couch after work with his boots still on, and I was so embarrassed by how ordinary it was that I nearly swapped it at the last second for a flashy cover that would've impressed people more. I played the plain one anyway, hands shaking, into a half-empty café with the espresso machine hissing over me the whole time. Afterward a stranger waited by the door and told me the line about the boots had landed on exactly what she was going through with her own father, almost word for word. That rewired something in me. I'd spent so long trying to write big and universal, and it turned out the tiniest, most specific, most privately embarrassing detail was the thing that reached someone. The smaller and truer you go, the further it travels. That's the whole game, and I learned it in a café to an audience of about six.

• 8) What are the little touches that make you a Superprof in music?

  8) In a first lesson I don't start with technique — I ask people to bring me a song that makes them cry, or one they're a little embarrassed to admit they love. Not to play it, necessarily, but because what moves you tells me more about who you are as a musician than any scale test could. Then, pretty early on, I make us write a tiny throwaway song together in the room — even a daft two-line one — so they feel what it's like to make something instead of only reproducing what already exists. And the thing I think really matters: I play them my own embarrassing first drafts, the wobbly voice memos, the verses that go nowhere. I want them to stop being terrified of their own bad ideas by seeing that I make piles of garbage too, and that the garbage is just part of the work, not a sign you're not a real musician. I treat "wrong" as interesting rather than something to stamp out. People loosen up fast once they see the person teaching them is still figuring it out as well.