“I know Justin is practicing whenever I hear this choppy, mechanical melody,” said the boy’s concerned mother. “He’s been playing heart and soul for at least eight months now, and it still sounds completely soulless.”

“I think that maybe, deep down, Justin might just lack a certain amount of childhood wonder," Mrs. McDermott added, listening to her son’s dull rehearsal in the next room over. "That’s why he plays in such a dispiriting way.”

By press time, Justin was heard practicing an equally dreary rendition of “Chopsticks.”