So last week, I went completely nuts and bought four grand pianos.

I had to pay a little extra for a new hard disk drive, so I’d have someplace to put them.

I upgraded my entire electronic orchestra last summer, and it has made an enormous difference in the quality of the music I’m putting up on this site. But it was completely lacking in any piano samples.

The reason is simple enough. The piano samples take up thirty-five CDs. Hence, the expanded hard drive. They include a Bechstein 280, a Bosendorfer 290, a Steinway model D, and a Yamaha model C7 — four of the high-end concert grand pianos you’ll find in the big concert halls.

One of my next projects will be to remix the Piano Concerto, because none of the mixes I’ve done to date do it justice.

But just to try it out on something, I decided to remix Sherilyn’s Song, from my 1996 tape. My son was asking about it the other day, and now that I have a decent piano, I thought I’d give it a shot. The result is up on the music page. I think it turned out very well.

There’s a little story behind Sherilyn’s Song. Yes, it’s a love song. Yes, it’s wistful, and a little sad.

In 1996, I was a year out from divorce — entirely amicable, but based on an irreconcilable similarity I won’t go into here — and I was newly single, forty years old, and free to … well, whatever.

At the time, I was rooming with a friend, since the separation agreement involved a year of pretty much all I could afford in child support and maintenance; and so, although I had a good job, I was as cash-strapped as a college student. Jim, who was renting me a room in his house, was a really good guy, and we would go out to bars together on weekends and flirt with the ladies. All catch-and-release fantasy fishing: I wasn’t ready for complications. Jim was equally uninterested in casual hook-ups.

It was a very good time of life for me.

Sherilyn was a bartender at one of the watering holes we frequented. She was a little less than twenty years my junior, cute as a button, and I flirted shamelessly. I even developed a full-scale crush. I’m pretty sure it was not reciprocated, and I was fine with that. It didn’t have to be reciprocated. Dante had his Beatrice.

The flirting, and the crush — let’s call it what it is, a particular kind of love — of an older man for a younger woman, a kind of idealized fantasy of reliving innocence in romance, inspired the music, and allowed me to experience the rather unique pleasure of presenting a score of “Sherilyn’s Song” to her, one day, along with a tape. It was a kind of farewell — I was already moving on into the next stage of my life, and she was still finding her feet in the world.

It’s a beautiful little piece of music. Enjoy.