It’s a common sight in Academic Plaza: a man, dressed in semi-formal clothes, wanders between the buildings with an accordion in his hand. Music makes its way from the brick-red instrument and winds around Bolton and Nagle Hall, across the Academic Building, down Military Walk and out toward the old mess hall and beyond.

Some days he takes up residence on a bench, joined once in a while by passersby. They sit for a second and talk about life and music and everything in between; then they move on while the man still plays.

His name is Joshua Pattugalan. A sophomore from the San Francisco Bay Area, he’s more commonly known as the “Accordion Guy” since more people know his music than his face.

“Sometimes I’ll sit down on Military Walk, or I’ll play in the Flag Room, and it’s a great way to meet people,” Pattugalan said. “Of course, there’s a title thrown in with it. ‘Oh, you’re the Accordion Guy.’ I’m not on social media. I kind of live under a rock, but I do hear it from people.”

Learning the accordion was never his plan — originally, it was guitar. It felt right after playing piano all his life and singing in a Catholic choir with his sister as a child. A family road trip the summer before college, however, pulled him in another direction.

“But as I was falling asleep in the passenger seat of the car, listening to music, accordion comes on the YouTube autoplay,” Pattugalan said. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, that sounds really nice,’ as I doze off. We get home, and I throw eBay open — and I’m like, ‘That’s an accordion. I think I want that one.’ Spontaneously, I bought an accordion.”

A few short weeks after the accordion arrived, it was only natural for Pattugalan to bring the instrument along when he left for Aggieland.

“I dragged the accordion off with me to campus,” Pattugalan said. “And I figured I may as well just bring it with me everywhere I go. I started playing it, and that’s about it. It’s that there’s no really rhyme or reason to it. I like the way it sounds. I like music.”

The accordion goes everywhere he goes: all 22 pounds of it. A keyboard lines one side, and 120 buttons — each representing a different chord — line the other. The interior houses a marvel of analog engineering that’s remained more or less unchanged since its invention 200 years ago.

“It’s all mechanical,” Pattugalan said. “Some people have approached me asking if I could turn it on for them to try. But it’s not about turning it on. It’s about pumping it. It’s air.”

Pattugalan said he’s been learning how to play as he goes; it wasn’t until mid-August this year that he even met another accordion player. A lot of his music is improvised or self-written, but he’s partial to covers as well. 

Some songs, like ones he knows on the piano, are easy to transfer to the accordion. Others take time to master — he’s currently working his way through the Aggie War Hymn so he’ll be able to play it in time for the football game against Texas in November. 

One of Pattugalan’s favorite songs to play, especially on a sunny afternoon when he has no place to be, is “My Way” by Frank Sinatra. He said it was one of his grandfather’s favorites; the two of them were close, and his grandfather’s passing when Pattugalan was in seventh grade threw him in a “slump.” Playing his favorite song is one of the ways Pattugalan remembers him.

To Pattugalan, music is as much an emotional experience as an auditory experience — and he’s not the only one.

“I started sitting down on Military Walk because sometimes people would join me,” Pattugalan said. “What I heard is that not a lot of people will be asked, ‘How are you doing?’ or, ‘How are you feeling?’ And of course, the first answer is, ‘I’m fine.’ But recently I learned that, statistically, that’s one of the largest lies that are told. And so I want to make sure — ‘Are you actually fine?’ Because some people are going through a lot of stuff that not everyone will get to hear about.”

Pattugalan is trying to fix a problem he too is a victim of: the attention he receives is never deeper than surface-level.

“Sometimes it bothers me a little bit that I’m just the Accordion Guy, and people aren’t willing to get to know me more than that,” Pattugalan said. “It’s not the worst. It’s not bad at all, but it does make me wish that I spent more time showing them that I was, you know, Joshua, not Accordion Guy.”

Sometimes, Pattugalan said, he wonders if becoming Accordion Guy was the right path for him. A few weeks ago he was asked for the first time if he liked being Accordion Guy. He had to think about it. Being that kind of person was nothing new to him; growing up, he said he wound up making a name for himself in some way or another.

“I had a huge insecurity that I wouldn’t be worth anything if I had nothing to bring to the table,” Pattugalan said. “So I always brought something to the table, whether I was the Accordion Guy or the harmonica kid, or the art kid, or the smart guy in math class, or the funny one who developed an odd sense of humor at an early age. But now that doesn’t really matter too much to me, and it kind of became a detriment building all those up, because I want people to see, not the labels, because who cares what I bring to the table?”

Pattugalan goes back and forth about whether he’s using his accordion to get close to people or if he’s just falling back into those same habits. Either way, he said being Accordion Guy has allowed him to connect with people in a way he never had before. So who is Joshua? Who really is the face behind the music?

“I’m a very family-first kind of person,” Pattugalan said. “I don’t really aspire for anything huge, just, you know, God willing, wife, kids. Put them through school, hopefully, be a good husband, be a good father. I like gardening. I like cooking and baking. I tend to be more on the artistic side, much to my STEM-wanting father’s disappointment, but not really … I like to bike. I love sunsets more than sunrise. Love photography. I photograph sunsets. I used to paint them too.”

Originally, Pattugalan came to A&M to work towards an engineering degree, but his love for the humanities won out. With a new goal of law school on the horizon, Pattugalan has focused on effective communication in his own life — and during his time as Accordion Guy as well. 

“One thing I encourage for most of the people that I talk to is that, well, two things: You need to be able to communicate, and you need to be able to be honest,” Pattugalan said. “If you’re honest with yourself, then you can’t regret living your life because you’re living your truth. And if you’re living your truth, then you have nothing to hide. So if you can live a life where you’re open, where you’re not hiding anything about yourself, or you’ve become content with who you are — even if you’re not quite there, even if you’re working towards that — just telling yourself every day that ‘I’m enough’ is enough.”

What is Pattugalan’s truth? He’s not sure, but from all his interactions with the people he meets, he believes he’s starting to learn.

“The more people talk to you, the more you can learn,” Pattugalan said. “You can get their wisdom. You can learn from them. Maybe, if you’re the right person at the right time, maybe you can help them with what they’re going through. Or, if anything, be a shoulder for them to lean on, catch their breath on, before they head back out. What I learned a lot from being this way is that for a lot of people’s problems, they already know what they have to do, but they just don’t know how to get there — which is really off topic from accordion, but that’s what this is about.”