Megan Diana’s life makes more sense in reverse.
Today she is a Portland musician, songwriter, pianist, French horn player, performer, and the founder of Piano Push Play, the project that turns old upright pianos into public art and places them around Portland for anyone to play. Looking backward, all of those pieces seem connected.
Living through them was messier.
Megan grew up inside music but spent much of her twenties trying to figure out whether music was actually where she belonged. She studied classical piano and French horn, sang, acted, competed in swimming, chased musical theater, studied apparel design, moved to New York, worked at one of the most famous raw-food restaurants in the country, and then went several years barely touching an instrument.
What finally brought her back was not some perfectly planned career decision. It was the realization that after trying a lot of other lives, music was still the thing that felt most like her.
In this episode of Maxwell’s Kitchen, Megan tells that story and explains how returning to music eventually led to one painted piano on a Portland street corner, then a citywide project built around the surprisingly powerful idea that sometimes all people need is an instrument and permission to play it.
In This Episode
Classical piano and French horn
Growing up in a military family
Living in Italy and moving to Oregon
Singing, theater, and competitive swimming
Portland State University and NYU
Fashion and apparel design
Moving to New York
Pure Food and Wine
Stepping away from music
Returning to Portland
Learning to write her own songs
The beginnings of Piano Push Play
Portland street pianos
Public art and access to music
TEDxPortland
Balancing Piano Push Play with Megan’s own music
Songwriting and finding her sound
Guest
Megan Diana
Megan Diana is a Portland musician, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and founder of Piano Push Play. She grew up studying classical piano and French horn, later developed her own music as a singer and songwriter, and built Piano Push Play around the idea that old pianos could become public instruments, public art, and unexpected meeting places around Portland.
Her path to that work ran through music, theater, fashion, food, New York, and several years when she stopped making music almost completely.
Growing Up With Music, but Not a Career Plan
Megan started playing piano because her mother understood that learning the instrument would give her a foundation for almost anything she wanted to do musically. Her mother worked in theater, and Megan was already hanging around productions, learning songs, and wanting to be involved before she was old enough to really participate.
Piano became the base. Then came singing, choirs, theater, and eventually French horn, which Megan picked up after a middle-school band director announced that nobody was playing it. She tried it, discovered she was unusually good at it, and eventually entered Portland State University as a French horn performance major.
The strange part is that Megan never fit neatly into one version of being a musician. She loved classical music and still talks about sheet music as a kind of time travel, the ability to sit down centuries later and play something another human wrote in an entirely different world. But the structure surrounding classical music could feel brutally narrow. Recitals were high stakes, practice was rigid, and mistakes could feel less like part of learning than evidence that you had failed.
At the same time, Megan wanted to sing, act, swim, make clothes, collect vintage fashion, and follow whatever else caught her attention. She had dreamed about NYU and musical theater, but when that did not happen, she stayed in Portland and began taking the long route toward figuring out what she actually wanted.
That route turned out to be useful.
Fashion, New York, and Several Years Away From Music
Megan eventually left the music major and studied apparel design. Fashion made sense because she had always been interested in clothing, history, visual storytelling, and the way a person can build a character before saying anything at all.
The degree taught her how garments were actually constructed, from illustration and draping to patterns and production, but it also revealed something she did not want. The version of the industry she was seeing seemed to funnel designers toward large companies where much of the work involved variations, colorways, and production rather than the kind of wide-open creativity that had attracted her in the first place.
After college she went to New York, where another interest briefly took over.
Megan had been vegan since 2002 and became fascinated with the raw-food movement that was exploding at the time. She followed Pure Food and Wine founder Sarma Melngailis online, reached out about work, and eventually landed a job at the restaurant overseeing daily dessert production.
This was years before the events later chronicled in Bad Vegan. Megan describes Pure Food and Wine during her time there as an intense, high-end New York restaurant where she might spend the day preparing elaborate raw desserts while people like Gwyneth Paltrow or the Olsen twins came through. The job was interesting, but being in a kitchen from the middle of the day until late at night eventually clarified something else.
She did not want that life either.
More important, she had barely been making music at all.
For roughly five years in her twenties, the person who had grown up surrounded by pianos, French horn, choirs, and theater stopped singing and playing almost completely. She had learned how to perform music, but she had never really thought about what it might sound like if the music belonged to her.
Finding Her Way Back
After leaving New York, Megan spent time living with her parents in Virginia. Her mother was still directing music and theater and began pulling her into things almost casually. The choir needed another voice. A production needed someone on stage. There was a reason to get the French horn out again.
Those small invitations did what years of trying to choose a career had not.
Megan remembered that she loved this.
When she returned to Portland in 2010, she began taking music classes again and encountered a teacher whose approach was almost the opposite of the rigid training she remembered. Instead of treating scales like punishment or a wrong note like a crisis, the emphasis was on making everything musical, understanding the body, and allowing expression back into the process.
Megan also started saying yes when friends asked her to sing.
One invitation led to another until she found herself rehearsing with a band that booked a show and then fell apart before the date arrived. Megan could have cancelled. Instead, she decided the band name now belonged to her, wrote four songs, learned four covers, and played the show herself.
That was the beginning of thinking like a songwriter instead of someone who only interpreted music written by other people.
At almost exactly the same time, another idea was developing.
The Piano on 13th and Burnside
One night Megan walked out of a bar near 13th and Burnside and stopped to watch a cellist playing on the street with a loop pedal.
The music was happening in the middle of the city instead of inside a concert hall. Cars were moving around it. People who had not bought tickets could stop, listen, and become part of the moment simply because they happened to be walking past.
Megan wanted to do it too.
There was one fairly obvious problem. She played piano.
Months later, she noticed a piano store only a few blocks away and walked in with a question that probably sounded ridiculous: What would it take to put a piano on that street corner?
Instead of explaining why it could not work, someone at the shop offered to put a piano on a dolly so Megan and her friends could push it down the street themselves.
That was the beginning of Piano Push Play.
For several weeks, a small group of musicians would meet at the store, push the piano to 13th and Burnside, and take turns playing. There was no grand nonprofit strategy yet. It was a handful of people moving a very heavy instrument into public because Megan wanted to see what would happen.
People stopped.
They listened.
They played.
The idea was suddenly real.
How One Piano Became a Portland Tradition
Once Megan began talking to piano stores, she discovered another piece of the puzzle: Portland had plenty of old pianos looking for somewhere to go.
Families inherit uprights they no longer use. Children grow up and stop taking lessons. Houses get smaller. Moving one can cost more than the instrument is worth on the resale market. Piano stores accumulate older trade-ins that may still be perfectly playable but are difficult to sell.
Megan began imagining those unwanted instruments as something else.
The following summers, she found more pianos and started calling organizations around Portland. The Portland Art Museum said yes. Artists and designers began transforming the instruments visually. Pianos appeared at the waterfront, Pioneer Courthouse Square, Saturday Market, parks, and other public spaces.
A project that had started with a dolly and one street corner gradually became recognizable around the city.
The important part, however, was never simply putting brightly painted pianos outside. Megan was interested in what happened after they arrived.
A person who looks like they have never touched a piano sits down and starts playing Mozart. A skateboarder remembers “Für Elise.” Someone who has never had access to an instrument realizes they can walk up and touch the keys. Two strangers who otherwise would have passed each other without speaking suddenly have something to talk about.
Piano Push Play changes the street because it changes the people standing on it.
That idea remains central to the organization today, which describes the public pianos as tools for connection across social, economic, and cultural lines.
Music Without Waiting for Permission
There is a nice irony in the way Piano Push Play grew out of Megan’s classical training.
When she first invited highly trained piano students to perform on the public instrument, some hesitated because they did not feel ready. They needed more time to prepare a piece before playing it in front of people.
The musicians who showed up were often the ones with less formal baggage.
They simply played.
That looseness is almost the opposite of the recital culture Megan remembers from childhood. The public piano does not care whether someone has practiced for three months. There is no audition, no ticket, and no velvet rope determining who belongs at the keyboard.
If you know Beethoven, play Beethoven.
If you know “Let It Be,” that works too.
If you barely know what the keys do, you can still sit down and find out.
For someone who spent years trying to figure out the correct way to become a musician, Megan ended up creating a project built around removing as many of those rules as possible.
Piano Push Play and Megan Diana
By the time we recorded this conversation, Piano Push Play had become a significant part of Megan’s year, but she was careful not to let it swallow the other half of her identity.
She is still a musician.
She writes songs, records, tours, plays piano and French horn, builds visual ideas around her performances, and works through the same weird creative process most songwriters describe: sometimes a song arrives because something happened and needs to come out, while other times a chord progression sits around for months until the rest of the puzzle finally appears.
Megan talks about older songs changing as she changes. A piece that began as a slow piano song can become something entirely different years later because her arrangements, production instincts, voice, and understanding of herself have changed.
That is probably the best way to understand the entire conversation.
Piano Push Play was not the result of Megan choosing the correct path at 18 and following it perfectly. It came out of classical music, fashion, New York kitchens, abandoned plans, a failed band, a cello on a street corner, an accommodating piano store, and years of learning what did and did not feel right.
The detours became the work.
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