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Lugging a @pianoaround with Musician Dotan Negrin

To see more of Dotan’s piano road trips, check out @pianoaround on Instagram. For more music stories, head to @music.

In 2010, Dotan Negrin (@pianoaround) left New York City and moved to a studio apartment on wheels. He purchased a moving van on eBay, in which he put carpeting, small bins to hold his clothes, a cooler for food and, most importantly, his upright piano. Then he set off on an adventure.

“I would be in a new city every week,” says Dotan, who was occasionally accompanied by his dog Brando. “I would push my piano out to the street and play. Every day I was meeting at least 30 people and would have conversations and people would invite me over to their houses and I would have dinner with their families. It was such a gratifying experience. I wasn’t making any money. But it showed me the world. It showed me there were other ways to live rather than how people tell you.”

Before that, Dotan had been working a 9-to-5 job, doing deliveries for an artist. He enjoyed traveling, but six months in, he was ready for a change. “I would wake up every day, working toward someone else’s dream, doing what people told me to do,” he says. “I was very unhappy. I wasn’t challenged, and the work wasn’t gratifying.”

Dotan had already been practicing the piano by then, though he wasn’t a fan of playing in front of crowds. Still, he enjoyed meeting new people and the instrument itself, so he put himself on the spot, dragging the piano out on the street in New York and playing for passers-by.

Eventually, he decided to combine his love of music and traveling. He hopped in his van and took off across the continent, to play the piano in places you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see one: a lookout point in Yellowstone National Park, the Nevada desert, Lake Tahoe. Dotan’s first road trip had him circle the United States, a trek that lasted five months and about 15,000 miles.

“Looking back, all of this was a huge social experiment for me,” says Dotan. “Every single day I would try something new.”

Traveling around the world and playing the piano was, in a sense, Dotan’s dream, but there were moments when he was ready to pack up his bags and head back to New York. In Nicaragua, he was robbed of his passport, iPhone and laptop. They left the piano, though, along with $100 that Dotan had hidden in the van. Then there were the miles he spent driving by himself, left with nothing but his thoughts and the open road.

“I can’t even count how many times I thought, What am I doing with my life? Or how many times I thought, Oh I need to quit this and get a real job,” says Dotan. “When you’re driving by yourself in a car for long distances, you do a lot of thinking. And there were times that I drove in silence, because there were just so many thoughts. It is kind of like this soup that keeps boiling and boiling and gets hotter and hotter — it’s boiling to the point where it would explode. And there are times where I would be crying while driving, just feeling lost.”

However, every time Dotan decided to go down a different path, he would eventually go back to what he was doing: playing the piano, meeting people, traveling — it felt like the right thing to do.

Today, Dotan is back in New York City, attempting to compile the video footage and pictures from his multiple road trips across America and Europe. He still plays piano on the streets, of course, and has a moving job a few days a week to pay the bills. Music is, and always will be his passion — though admittedly, he’s tired of moving pianos around by himself. He’s had too many cramps and broken bones and pulled muscles over the years. For now, the reason he continues to push his upright piano around is the same reason he started traveling and doing it all over the country: the ability to play music for crowds, to experience new places and to connect with others.

“It’s mainly the people that inspire me to do it,” says Dotan.

– Instagram @music

by via Instagram Blog