When I came home from brain surgery at 21, I went to the piano. I needed to know whether my left hand still worked. Medicine could measure whether the surgery succeeded. I had a different question: did the life being saved still feel like mine?

In January 1996, I lay in a hospital bed with a brain tumor, no piano, and no idea if I would survive. A simple melody came to me. When I got home, my left hand had forgotten how to play. So I wrote Simplicity with just my right hand. 30 years later, I'm performing it live for the first time.