"Paper Tigers" piano sheets

High quality PDF file with sheet music for my piece ’Paper Tigers'.

Simply print it or use a tablet and enjoy playing it on your piano!

It's three in the morning. You're not sleeping. Not because you can’t, but because your mind won't stop handing you things to examine. The same thought, six different angles. A decision you haven't made yet, already dissected a hundred times. You're exhausted but you keep going, because stopping feels dangerous. Paper Tigers started there.

I wrote it during one of those stretches where I could see every possible outcome of a choice, and somehow, seeing all of them made me less able to move. The thoughts felt real and heavy. They had weight. But the moment I finally acted, I looked back and realized most of them were nothing. Just noise I had dressed up as wisdom.

The listener I imagine when I play this is someone sitting alone, probably late. Maybe there's a lamp on. A decision waiting somewhere nearby, a message unsent, a form unsigned, a conversation postponed. They're not sad in a simple way. They're stuck. And they're smart enough to know they're stuck, which makes it worse.

The piece begins in a minor key: slow, a little restless, like a thought that keeps circling. The left hand stays low and steady, almost like a pulse that won't quit. Then, somewhere in the middle, something shifts. A small harmonic turn. The kind of hope that doesn't announce itself. It just appears quietly, the way clarity sometimes does, not as an answer, but as a loosening.