Episode 2: Three String Violin

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EPISODE 2: THREE STRING VIOLIN

The moment I step off the escalator at Madison Square Garden, the city rushes at me full force—weed smoke, hot dogs, a tangle of overlapping music from three different directions. Sun up, crowd out. Everyone moving fast, everyone knowing exactly where they’re going.

Except me.

00:26

I stand still, backpack pressing into my shoulders, watching the tide of people flow past. It’s 11 a.m., and I have no plans, no bearings, no momentum. I flew in from Asheville this morning, took the train from Newark, and now I’m here, in the center of it all. But instead of feeling charged by the city, I feel locked out of it. Like I showed up at a party I wasn’t invited to.

I trudge to a set of stone steps, pull out a sandwich. I should be excited—this is the start of everything—but instead, I just feel sluggish. Too tired to match the pace of the city, too slow to even try. I forgot how loud it is here, how sharp the edges are. How much energy it takes to belong.

If I can’t even shake this feeling in New York, what happens when I’m really out there? I can’t just wait to feel ready. On this trip, no one’s going to welcome me in. No one’s going to hand me a rhythm to fall into. If I want to belong anywhere, I have to be the one to say: I’m here.

01:37

I chew. Swallow. This is stupid. I need to get my head in the game.

I pull out my phone, scroll through a few names, and stop.

I hadn’t planned to see anyone today. But something in me reaches out anyway.

I send a text. There’s one person I know who can snap me out of this.

02:01

Welcome to Go and Find Out. I’m Jonny Wright.

This is a story of losing yourself in the world.

I left my home, my job, and the USA in order to learn the old-fashioned way: with first-hand experience.

Some people go on a journey to find themselves. I went on a journey to lose myself—and instead find the world.

In these episodes, I ask big questions about life, not from an armchair but from roadsides and mountaintops, from temple halls and dance halls.

Join me as I hitchhike across the world, embrace the unexpected, and let go, one step at a time.

If you’ve ever thought about living a life outside the box, keep listening.

Because this isn’t just about my story. It’s about what happens when you start to wonder what your story could be.

You don’t need to hitchhike across the world—there are ways you can choose to live with more courage, more curiosity, and more intention, right here, right now.

Let’s go and find out.

03:08

I finish my sandwich. This is it. I’ve prepped, planned, said my goodbyes. And now, I’m in it—the experiment is real. But beyond a vague sense of Belgium and Poland, I don’t actually know where I’m going. That’s the point. The places aren’t what matter. What matters is how I move through them. What matters is unlearning what I think I know. I want to take that dial in my head—the one that controls certainty—and turn it down, way down. I want to get lost.

In my bank account are seven thousand dollars devoted to this trip. Who knows how far that money will take me, but if last year is any indicator, money won't be the limiting factor. Maybe I'll be on the road for six months, maybe a year. Maybe I'll get a job somewhere. Maybe I'll meet someone. No more house, no more job, no more steady in-person friends and steady routines. I don't have a duty to travel for a specific length of time or a specific number of miles. There’s no goal of visiting every country on the planet or going the whole way around the globe. Just the steady horizon line and land moving beneath me.

Back home, when I felt lost, I’d reach for my guitar. Strum, listen, find something in the sound. That was me.

But now? No instrument. No sound. Here I’m not a musician, I’m just a guy.

And it’s weird. It’s what I want. But it’s also uncomfortable.

04:43

I check my phone. Taz has texted me back.

I didn’t expect him to respond. I didn’t even know if he was in town. But ten minutes later, he’s already told me where to meet him. (on his request, I’ve changed his name so you can’t go looking him up, because who doesn’t want to hang out with this guy). Taz isn’t just a musician. He’s a gravitational pull. One of those people who owns a room without trying, equal parts absurdist comedian, mad scientist, and world-class artist. You could drop him in a room full of billionaires or a bodega with a broken fridge, and either way, by the end of the night, he’d be the center of gravity. People orbit Taz. They want to be near his quick mind, his unfiltered honesty, his relentless, mischievous energy.

He moves fast—physically, mentally, emotionally. Always three steps ahead, always burning hot.

And the music. The music.

I deeply respect him as a musician. There are good pianists, and then there’s Taz. He doesn’t just play—he wields sound like a weapon. His improvisations spiral into wild, unpredictable brilliance, and when he sits down at the piano, it’s like he’s plugged into some higher voltage that the rest of us can’t access. His hands move too fast for thought, too sharp, too expressive. If you ever get the chance to hear him play, watch out. It’s like watching someone outrun their own shadow.

06:08

And there he is—walking fast, forever in motion. Taz is all frizzy gray hair and tattered baseball cap, always mid-joke, mid-errand, mid-something. He directs music at a big old church on Park Avenue, lives above the church offices, and somehow has time to ferry sound equipment, coach performers, and diffuse artistic meltdowns. He’s the guy big-time stars want at dinner, but also the guy who’ll feed a stranger on the street and turn him into a drinking buddy. He makes anyone feel like a million bucks. Even though he’s the funny one, he makes you feel like the funny one.

I wonder if it’s exhausting—always being the spark, always being the one people turn to. Never the one turning to someone else.

06:54

Taz and I settle into an old-timey European-style café, the kind of place with tiny tables and rickety chairs that wobble.

Taz stirs his coffee, leans in.

"You ever pick up the check for a movie star?"

I shake my head.

"Big mistake."

Last night, he tells me, he had dinner with [redacted]. Great time. Laughs, drinks, the whole deal. And at the end, feeling generous, he waved off the bill.

"I got this," he said.

He takes a sip of coffee, shakes his head.

"Jonny, I nearly had a heart attack. I thought they accidentally charged me for the restaurant."

A pause. A sigh.

"If you ever eat with the rich and famous, do yourself a favor."

He sets his cup down, looks me dead in the eye.

"Let. Them. Pay."

07:43

As we step back onto the sidewalk, he says it—offhand, like it’s nothing:

“I’ve got an old violin at the apartment. Friend gave it to me. You should play it.”

I hesitate. My ears prick up, but so does something else—a flicker of resistance.

The first instrument I ever learned was violin. Yes, that’s me playing.

Me and my three siblings all started young. One, two, three, four violins, hanging by their scrolls in a garage sale armoire. Binders of sheet music crammed into a closet next to the fireplace, along with the VHS tapes.

I played all the way through college, spent years chasing after something I never quite caught. I wanted to be great. I wasn’t. And if I wasn’t great, what did that make me?

The pressure spiraled. My studio was full of serious students. My teacher had vision, humor, zero patience for mediocrity. And I froze. Every time I got on stage, my hands turned to bricks. The violin’s neck felt foreign in my hand. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, a battle I lost and kept losing over and over.

My senior recital was supposed to be my proving ground. Instead, I called it ‘Shame and Nakedness.’ That says it all.

09:16

Things got better after college. I stopped taking lessons. Stopped trying to be great. I found my own sound, played on my own terms. Violin became something else—not my identity, just… a thing I did.

But that doesn’t mean the fear disappeared.

Because any time I played for someone I respected, it was still there. The tight chest. The second-guessing. The voice in my head saying: You can’t fake it with this person. They’ll see right through you.

And that’s what makes me hesitate now.

Taz isn’t just some guy. He’s an absolute monster at the piano. He doesn’t just play—he listens. And I know—I know—he’ll hear everything. Every wobble, every missed shift, every moment I should have landed better.

There are people who can see you—really see you. A chiropractor glances at your posture and knows your habits. A dentist looks at your teeth and reads your entire oral hygiene history.

With music, it’s even deeper. Because, for a musician, your music is a structure of you, just in another form. A guy like Taz? He won’t just hear my notes. He’ll hear my blind spots, my flaws, my past.

And I wonder: How is this going to go?

When we come back, right after this.

10:39

We get back to the church. Taz barely acknowledges me as he strides toward the towering, antique organ. His fingers hover over the keys—then he dives in.

It’s a flood. A wild, unrelenting, rapturous explosion of music. No hesitation, no second-guessing. He’s fully in it, fully alive, playing with reckless precision—like a man chasing something just out of reach. The sheer force of it floods the room, swells into the rafters, fills every empty space between the stone walls. He is inside the music, and the music is inside him.

I stand there, listening, and I feel small.

The intimidation hits me full force. I’ve always admired him, but here, in this space, at this moment—I am out of my depth.

Then Taz leaves in search of the violin, and I stand surveying the rows of dark wood pews. Who am I without my tools? Would it be any different to play / no longer as a musician, but just a guy?

11:41

Taz comes down into the sanctuary carrying a battered case. He hands it to me, and I open it.

Oh no.

The top string is gone. So is the chin rest. No shoulder rest. Half-crippled, off-balance—a violin on life support.

With a guitar, you can lose a string and still play. A violin? Different story. You replace the string. That’s the rule.

But we don’t have a replacement. No time to find one.

It’s now or never.

I tune up the three unbroken strings and listen to them carry to the sanctuary's Gothic revival back wall. Then silence. It’s a struggle just to make a decent sound on it. I bunch up a tee shirt from my backpack to use as a makeshift shoulder rest. I’m not exactly warmed up, but here we go. Taz sits down at the grand piano, and we prepare to play. Just what, we don’t know. This will be an improvisation.

Taz holds his hands above the keys, I adjust my grip, and hold the bow above the strings. Three strings instead of four. Imperfect. Unbalanced. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe perfect isn’t the goal this time.

12:55

Out of the silence Taz draws a few notes, a simple theme, and standing with the violin I echo it back to him with a twist, varying one or two of the pitches. He lays down a chord and I send out a few whirring lines above it. Back and forth, back and forth, with no idea what we’re playing. As it goes, it changes, growing in complexity. The mood shifts, darker, darker, chords getting nasty and thick. Then up into the rafters, one note lingering past the others, a rope flung over a precipice. We feel the drama, we feel the sense that whatever comes next has never come before, that we are on that cliff's edge, riding with our fingers over the instruments.

It’s like we’re feeling each other out, starting to familiarize ourselves with the harmonic fingerprint of the other, learning how to respond in our own voice. I’m getting into it, impulsively throwing my body around the stage, feeling and releasing feeling through motion and sound. My right hand loads the bow with weight, fingers reaching to feel the string itself through the bow’s hair. My left hand’s fingers pound the strings into the worn, black fingerboard, searching for that perfect melody. Taz lets his spread hand bounce along the keys in octaves like a woodpecker's head.

14:30

I’m making so many mistakes, and Taz is practically carrying me through it like an action movie hero and a dumb kid, where one’s getting all these headshots and taking out the bad guys in swarms and the other’s standing around looking down the barrel of his pistol. “Oh, is this thing loaded?” Musically, that’s what was going on.

I know it too. I can hear the out of tune notes and the missed attempts at melodies.

But a strange thing happens. As I play, knowing full well that Taz is hearing every little error, I don’t tense up. I don’t follow that old script. Because today, here in New York, I’m not a violinist.

I push through each mistake and try again, and again, and keep following the lines that are coming to me. It’s working. We are, moment to moment, making something new. No time to think, no time to dissect. Just listening hard, and at the same time, letting the body make its decisions and make sound.

I’m just a guy now. I left my violin behind in North Carolina. Out here on the road I’m a nobody. I don’t know if it works this way, but it almost feels like because I left my tools behind, I also left with them a part of my identity. And with my identity, I also left behind some of my shame.

Is it possible that I can make better music as ‘just a guy’ on a three string violin than I could as ‘a musician’ surrounded by all my tools?

16:16

Our improvisation finds its ending in a flurry of heavy runs, bombastic. A last punch and then the ringing of reverberation through the empty stone sanctuary. We look at each other, stunned by what just happened. What was that? What came out, just now, between us? There’s not much to be said, really. I laugh, Taz smiles. You have to sit in the aftershock a minute. Nothing important can happen after the event.

Taz recorded it on his phone. He throws it on the speakers and presses play.

The room fills with sound, a ghost now. No heat, no movement, just the raw imprint of what we did.

I hear the first tentative notes, the slow reach toward something unknown. The way the violin—crippled and uneven—felt out the space, waiting. The way the piano reached back. Call and response. Testing the ground.

Then the shift. The moment we let go. I hear it in the recording—like something cracked open between us, like we weren’t thinking anymore, just chasing sound. I hear where I stopped second-guessing. I hear the places where Taz lifted me, held the weight, and then the moment I caught up and we ran together, side by side.

The sound grows, darkens, swells. I hear the notes I struggled with, the missed landings. But I also hear something else. I hear us. Not me playing, not him playing—just this thing we created between us, wild and alive.

17:59

Taz stands beside me, arms crossed, head tilted. He’s listening. And for once, he’s still.

When the last note dies away, he lets the silence linger. Then he exhales sharply, like he just ran a race. Nods once.

“Damn,” he says. He looks at me. “That was…” He doesn’t finish the sentence. Just shakes his head, a little grin breaking at the corner of his mouth. “That was something.”

I laugh, half in relief, half in disbelief. Taz is surprised.

I thought he’d toss out a joke, make some sarcastic remark, give me a playful punch on the arm. But he doesn’t. He’s… actually impressed. It throws me.

Because in my mind, Taz is the guy who knows. The guy who’s seen it all. The guy who makes things happen. But right now, he’s just standing here, still letting it sink in.

For the first time, I don’t see him as a virtuoso, or a gravitational pull, or some music god who operates on another level. I just see Taz. A guy who, like me, felt something when we played.

And suddenly, I remember what he told me once, one tired afternoon, in one of those rare quiet moments: Sometimes I just want something to happen to me.

I didn’t really get it then. But now, I think I do.

Maybe this was it. Maybe this was something happening to him.

Maybe, this time, he just fell into it. Into the sound. Into the moment. Into something that neither of us saw coming.

I smile. He doesn’t see it.

“Pretty good for three strings,” I say.

“Yeah, man,” he says, shaking his head. “Pretty damn good.”

Outside, the city hums, traffic soft in the distance. But inside, for just a moment, the air is still.

For once, Taz isn’t moving. And for once, neither am I.

20:10

I shoulder my backpack, give Taz a hug, and step out of the church, leaving the sound of our music behind.

The city is right where I left it—but somehow, it greets me differently now.

The asphalt gleams like river rock in the late sun. Steam coils from a manhole like a genie exhaling. And I’m not trudging—I’m walking. Light on my feet.

I don’t have a plan. But for the first time today, I don’t need one. I’m moving again. And more than that—I’m listening.

That night, I wind up at my friend Baladine’s apartment. She’s throwing a party in honor of an ‘80s pop song—‘Tarzan Boy.’ No one knows why, but no one questions it either. The apartment is full of strangers and friends, dim lights, rum cocktails, cut paper, felt, and movement. We dance among her father’s paintings—huge canvases stacked like altars along the wall. It’s sweaty and silly and full of color.

21:18

At one point, Baladine slips a piece of twine around my neck and ties on a giant foam tooth.

‘A talisman,’ she says, grinning.

The tooth is firm and light and strange against my chest. I don’t know what it means. I just let it be.

I fall asleep in a small bed behind a curtain, the city pulsing faintly beyond the window.

And when I wake, everything feels new.

The next morning, I step out onto the street with coffee in hand.

I’m refreshed. Settled. Awake.

The sun cuts through the city like a promise. I walk slowly, letting the day open in front of me.

The tooth swings gently at my chest, catching the light.

22:00

Then a sound rises—wind slipping between buildings like a whispered warning.

Napkins scatter, umbrellas flip.

And through the glass canyons of Midtown, something… off.

It drifts in lazy tendrils at first, curling from somewhere unseen. But then it thickens, rolling between the buildings, swallowing the tops of streetlights. A neon haze, settling over everything like a slow exhale. It doesn’t smell like fire. It doesn’t smell like anything. Just a presence, a surreal wash of color that turns headlights a dull rose and makes the world feel suddenly… off.

The city starts emptying. A couple pauses mid-stride, then veers down into a subway entrance. A food vendor shuts the lid on his cart and hurries off. The usual chaos—the shouting, the honking, the press of bodies—is fading.

The wind kicks up again, pushing the pink mist through the streets. It whirls around me, catches in my throat.

I clutch the tooth.

It’s nothing. But it’s something to hold onto.

I pick up my pace.

Whatever this is, I don’t want to be here to find out.

Tomorrow, I leave. And suddenly, it can’t come soon enough.

23:25

Next time on Go and Find Out: escaping from New York, Greenland swallows me whole, and someone on the plane knows something I don’t. It’s time to go.

That’s it for this episode of Go and Find Out. Thanks for spending this time with me—seriously. It means a lot that you’re here, listening to this story.

This show is created—and let’s be honest, sometimes completely winged—by me, Jonny Wright, with music by me unless otherwise noted. This episode features improvisations by myself, and a very special pianist: Taz.

24:02

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I’d love to hear from you—thoughts, stories, weird travel tips, whatever’s on your mind. Drop me a line at goandfindoutpod@gmail.com, and I’ll do my best to write you back.

And more than anything, I hope this episode sparked something—however small.

A question, a dream, a reminder that your life is still unfolding.

You don’t have to follow my path. But you do get to choose your own.

Alright, that’s all I got. See you next time.

Until then...