In honor of Wilco's new album (Wilco (The Album)) and inspired by Nels Cline I've decided to engage in a bit of musing over the guitarists that have influenced me. Nels has this great list which includes just about everybody to ever pick up the guitar. My list is not as long but it's a bit more involved.
Why might I engage in such an act of seeming vanity? Well, because things don't come from nowhere for starters. "We stand on the shoulders of giants" is one of my favorite quotes of all time (its by Sir Isaac Newton if anyone's asking) and rightly so. I'm also taking a cue from the lists of 15 life-changing albums, specifically Chase's evolving one largely because he includes these interesting discussions about musician growth as well as why the albums themselves are influential. I want to talk about where and why and how what I play comes from and where I want to go or not go again.
I'll start with gear. From as far back as I can remember, I wanted two specific pieces of gear: A black Les Paul Standard guitar and a Marshall Combo amplifier. I've had two Les Paul's now and had and lost a Marshall Combo. Neither of the two were what I originally wanted but one of the things you learn about gear is that they are very particular. The amp sounded great when I got it and I would have had it for a long time had it not gotten stolen. It was a valvestate combo which means that it had a tube preamp but a solid state poweramp. Better than the tiny Peavey I started out with but not as good as what I've played through since. The option for the black Les Paul standard was there but in the end, i ended up going with a Honeyburst Les Paul classic. When all is said and done, guitars come down to feel. The classic felt like my guitar and that feeling has only increased. As I've learned the nuances of the instrument, I've grown to love it for its own voice more and more. There is still no roar quite like digging into a Les Paul.
Gear can have a serious effect on how you play but ultimately, it comes down to how you hold the instrument. Tone is in the fingers as countless guitarists have said and it's true. But knowing what you're working with is important, and it takes time. Some things are immediate, some are surprises, but most take time to learn and appreciate.
So what of the influencers? Chronological, Alphabetical, Depth of Influence-ordered? How about stream-of-consciousness, as in, how they come to mind.
The Edge: Ask anybody who went to GC who knew me and they'd tell you that I like delay...probably too much. As is the case with most christian young men of a certain age, I had my U2 phase. I listened to everything they did and especially the edge. The jangle, the rhythm, the minimalism, and the epicness. The Edge has a sound all his own and like it or not, you know its him when you hear it. I loved the rhythmic part of his playing and the layering of sound. I loved how the guitar didn't just have to strum along but could add a dramatic element through playing less or letting things ring off. I discovered that if you learned about 5 chord shapes and how to match up a certain way of playing those shapes with certain delay times you could basically sound like the Edge (technique-wise). Tone is a whole other matter. I didn't want the thinness of his Strats through AC30's. I wanted "Until the End of the World". The U2 sound was about something epic and huge and heart-on-sleeve which is perfect for a guitarist who cut his teeth playing praise and worship music.
Jim Adkins and Tom Linton (Jimmy Eat World): This was the music that changed my life truly for the first time. It was punkish without being brash. It, like U2, was heart-on-sleeve. It was ballsy and melodic. It was a Les Paul roaring alongside interesting rhythms. Jimmy was my first exposure to Drop-D tuning and to what some have called "emo". (This is not entirely true. I was the owner of The Juliana Theory's first cd way back but I didn't know it was emo and didn't like it because I wanted it to sound more like Audio Adrenaline.) I absorbed their cd "Bleed American" listening to it over and over again, trying to get the thickness that they had in their sound. I still like their sound (mostly Clarity and Futures) but I've moved on. What they gave me was a way of playing rhythmically in a different way. And the power of arpeggios. Playing with a melodic repetitiveness. Its hard to think of them without thinking of the next big influence.
Brian Lee (For All the Drifters, The Rosenfalls): Brian Lee plays how I want to play. At least, when i heard his playing for the first time I knew where I wanted to go guitar-wise. There was the Jimmy influence in his playing to be sure but there was more. It was at times dissonant, and the man knew how to dig into a telecaster and make it scream. I hated his tone at first and then the Drifter EP came out and I was in awe. It was crunchy and precise but branching out in places that I hadn't heard in other emo-influenced music. Brian was able to craft interesting riffs and match them with a theremin solo or a squeal of feedback. I decided to get a Fender DeVille amp because Brian had played one. It was a good choice. I have come to love the sound of my Les Paul through the DeVille, especially dirty. This was how I found the thickness of sound that I had wanted from listening to Jimmy.
Explosions in the Sky: Almost unparalleled influence. EITS was a band that knocked me on my rear from the moment I first heard them. Here was guitar music so pure that no words were needed. It was fenders played through fenders. It was expansive and cinematic. It was moving. And the sound was so unique. I started to pick up licks from them on purpose. I started working on my right-hand speed. I started playing with more reverb. I learned to craft my tone all over again. Rather than learning how to shape my dirty sound and then worry about clean, I did the reverse. Start with a great clean sound and then add the rest. This is the mentality that led me not to buy a strat and a twin reverb but to get a jaguar and an AC15. Clean done well is a rare thing indeed. I guess you could throw Sigur Ros into this influence as well. Jonsi's guitar playing was unlike any I had heard as well. It was long and droney and had a lot of bite to it dynamically if not tonally. The droneyness and the desire to let the notes ring out...to let the instrument breathe (as it were), was the goal here. These post-rock guys taught me to slow down and listen to the spaces between the notes.
Johnny Greenwood (Radiohead): Only the good Lord knows how much I wish I could play like him. Nobody can. But somehow I feel that Matt could do it better than I could. Most people think of Radiohead guitars as just making noise or playing "weird". There is certainly that element to the playing of Johnny and Ed but there is so much more. Paranoid Android changed the way I thought about the guitar as a music maker. But it was not until I started learning stuff off of Hail to the thief that I began to realize what Johnny was doing besides playing aggressively. His playing on "There, There" as well as the spacey stuff he did on OK Computer are what really get to me. The aggressive angular stuff is what I long to play but what I hear in what I try to play is far more arpeggiated and textured than it is jagged.
Dan Hoerner (Sunny Day Real Estate): There's this one Amnesty Letters song where the part that I play was trying to be like Dan's work on "Every Shining Time You Arrive." That and his tone. I'm a tone guy what can I say. But the sound of Sunny Day's later work was really influential on me. It was mostly listening to Dan in the background teaching me how to be a sideman. How to play a simple riff and compliment a song. Sunny Day influenced a bigger influence of mine but Dan's playing remains something I turn to for ideas (aka licks to steal).
Mike Weiss (mewithoutYou): Torches Together hit me like a bullet in the stomach. Tone was there. Creative use of reverb too. And a way in which the guitar could be less thick than in Jimmy or FATD's work but was nonetheless aggressive. Mike and his co-guitarist also used feedback really well. There were times when the rhythm section would drive the song and the guitars would sit back and create atmosphere. I really liked that and decided to try it. There was another Amnesty Letters song where I aped this idea from Mike (Monsters, I think). Also, my first mewithoutYou show was in Reading PA where, after the show, my bandmate Mike and I talked with Mike Weiss for about 45 minutes about gear and style and life I guess. He was all about letting the guitar shape the sound. Listening to the new record, I have to say that I love how Mike has moved more into the background and adds to the songs rather than driving them with riffs. And his tone is even better now.
That's all I can think of at the moment. I have this blues influenced classic rock jumble in my memory that occasionally comes out in what I play but I can't pin down any specifics. And I love the playing of sideman guitarists on over the rhine's "Changes Come Live" disc and "Cold Roses" by Ryan Adams and The Cardinals. But I don't know what else I sound like. Hopefully myself I guess.
where does your playing come from? Come on music nerds, lets discuss.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
The Bug Saga pt. 2
this is from a few days ago when I got sick and couldn't sleep. After the break is when I resumed post-sickness.
Pt. 2: The Hinterland’s Song
(In a few months you’ll be beggin’ for this weather)
Once or twice, in my more wise moments of clarity, I determined that one should not attempt to write or to make important decisions while either a) sleepy or b) sickly. It is June right now and it is 56 degrees outside but it feels colder. It feels like a cold that has set up in my bones. Perhaps this is the mark of a week and a half spent attempting to sleep on a terrible mattress that leaves me sore when I wake up. Perhaps my fridgidity is the result of a sudden sickness that has sprung upon me without remorse. Either way, I will attempt to recount the origins of my struggle with the bugs—against my better judgement to be sure—by working through the discomfort. I do not have high hopes for this part of the story for it began in what seems like years ago although it was only a mere four months or so when the actual troubles began. Nevertheless, I will see if I can recount all of the shock and naivite that comes with the beginnings of a great struggle. Pray my effort is sustained throughout this ordeal.
As early as September, my roommate Kevin (this is Kevin no. 1 for those in the know) noticed a peculiar looking insect perched upon the tweed exterior of his guitar amp. It was flat and brown and slothful in its gait but it nonetheless aroused his curiosity. This curiosity quickly waned as he remembered the crucial early fall survival mechanism known as the open and be-fanned window in our room. Figuring the bug had come from the outside and knowing nothing about its origins save for what his intuition relayed to him, Kevin #1 smooshed the bug and discarded it into our trash can. And for the entirety of the fall, that was all that was thought of regarding the bug. No freakouts or panicked calls to the landlords; no home-made remedies either. Simple forgetfulness and nothing more. It’s strange to look back on this singular little event and realize that it was still very much the beginning of our stay in this apartment that we enjoyed but it was also a harbinger of the coming storm that would ravage the simple structures and routines of our urban existence.
You don’t see these little things as big things without having knowledgable eyes. The eyes of experience would tell you that there was trouble brewing if, in the middle of a room and for no good reason, a bug decided to crawl on top of an amplifier. In fact, coming from an undergraduate environment where the houses that we lived in were not what one might call ‘without spot or wrinkle’—indeed, quite the opposite—you might say that we were predisposed to overlook such a peculiar scene as a flat little brown bug crawling on a Fender. Far too much has been said about the wisdom of hindsight and the fortune of misfortune but these words are often lost on the young. And if this experience has taught me anything, it is that vestiges the old Achilles’ heel of youthful invincibility remain longer than anyone thinks they have. Scarier still, invincibility seems to be subtly bolstered when manifested in numbers. The more youthful men you get together, the more apt they are to believe in their capacity for world domination, or at least entertain serious doubts about the stability of their own lives. In spite of all the shifty-ness of the urban-dwelling twenty-something American male, it should be well known that his ability to blind himself to his true weaknesses knows few bounds.
----------------------------------------
And then there is the first bite. The first blood drawn. It does not happen in September when the first of these tiny monsters is discovered. No, in the dead of a Boston winter, when it is frigid and the world has gone completely gray, that is when they choose to strike. Little Kevin is bitten thrice on the arm and the rest of us are unmarked. What creature would bite three times? What mosquito would be alive this late into February? We wonder collectively but lack the ability to diagnose the problem. So the Kevins ask around and the horrible words are brought up: bed bugs. Could it be something that bad? ‘No’, we say, ‘it must be spiders.’
There is something terrifying when those things we young Americans incorrectly recognize as being clichéd rather than repetitive start to happen to you. It couldn’t be X, that wouldn’t happen to us. It can’t be that bad, can it? Those sorts of things are terrifying because you know the answer before you even give voice to the dismissive words. And you dismiss the awful anyway because, let’s face it, it really could be worse. Lumberjack Kevin (I assure you there are only 2 Kevins) was sitting at his desk built into his lofted bed reading a book. As he turned the page he noticed an odd little shape moving along the spine of the book. It was small and brown and more circle-shaped than most insects. And he knew. He just knew. There wasn’t a question in his mind that this could be anything other than the worst that could happen to us. We had the bugs. They had corrupted the sacredness of our apartment with their bloodlust and we were doomed.
“We have bugs” Kevin said with a stoic certainty. He looked like someone who had returned from the DMV after giving a little too much blood at a red cross event. Defeat is too light a word to apply to the gravity with which those three words and his stony visage brought themselves down upon the rest of us in that apartment. I tried to remain optimistic. “We’ve just got to tell the property managers. They’ll take care of this.” Such acceptance of authorities in my life to solve the problems that would appear to be within their responsibility is lost on me now. Then, back when the bugs were first an issue, I believed that landlords could handle a problem like ours. Oh the naïveté of the uninitiated.
It was a frigid time of the year and we were trapped with these things. There were many ashes and much gnashing of teeth.
Pt. 2: The Hinterland’s Song
(In a few months you’ll be beggin’ for this weather)
Once or twice, in my more wise moments of clarity, I determined that one should not attempt to write or to make important decisions while either a) sleepy or b) sickly. It is June right now and it is 56 degrees outside but it feels colder. It feels like a cold that has set up in my bones. Perhaps this is the mark of a week and a half spent attempting to sleep on a terrible mattress that leaves me sore when I wake up. Perhaps my fridgidity is the result of a sudden sickness that has sprung upon me without remorse. Either way, I will attempt to recount the origins of my struggle with the bugs—against my better judgement to be sure—by working through the discomfort. I do not have high hopes for this part of the story for it began in what seems like years ago although it was only a mere four months or so when the actual troubles began. Nevertheless, I will see if I can recount all of the shock and naivite that comes with the beginnings of a great struggle. Pray my effort is sustained throughout this ordeal.
As early as September, my roommate Kevin (this is Kevin no. 1 for those in the know) noticed a peculiar looking insect perched upon the tweed exterior of his guitar amp. It was flat and brown and slothful in its gait but it nonetheless aroused his curiosity. This curiosity quickly waned as he remembered the crucial early fall survival mechanism known as the open and be-fanned window in our room. Figuring the bug had come from the outside and knowing nothing about its origins save for what his intuition relayed to him, Kevin #1 smooshed the bug and discarded it into our trash can. And for the entirety of the fall, that was all that was thought of regarding the bug. No freakouts or panicked calls to the landlords; no home-made remedies either. Simple forgetfulness and nothing more. It’s strange to look back on this singular little event and realize that it was still very much the beginning of our stay in this apartment that we enjoyed but it was also a harbinger of the coming storm that would ravage the simple structures and routines of our urban existence.
You don’t see these little things as big things without having knowledgable eyes. The eyes of experience would tell you that there was trouble brewing if, in the middle of a room and for no good reason, a bug decided to crawl on top of an amplifier. In fact, coming from an undergraduate environment where the houses that we lived in were not what one might call ‘without spot or wrinkle’—indeed, quite the opposite—you might say that we were predisposed to overlook such a peculiar scene as a flat little brown bug crawling on a Fender. Far too much has been said about the wisdom of hindsight and the fortune of misfortune but these words are often lost on the young. And if this experience has taught me anything, it is that vestiges the old Achilles’ heel of youthful invincibility remain longer than anyone thinks they have. Scarier still, invincibility seems to be subtly bolstered when manifested in numbers. The more youthful men you get together, the more apt they are to believe in their capacity for world domination, or at least entertain serious doubts about the stability of their own lives. In spite of all the shifty-ness of the urban-dwelling twenty-something American male, it should be well known that his ability to blind himself to his true weaknesses knows few bounds.
----------------------------------------
And then there is the first bite. The first blood drawn. It does not happen in September when the first of these tiny monsters is discovered. No, in the dead of a Boston winter, when it is frigid and the world has gone completely gray, that is when they choose to strike. Little Kevin is bitten thrice on the arm and the rest of us are unmarked. What creature would bite three times? What mosquito would be alive this late into February? We wonder collectively but lack the ability to diagnose the problem. So the Kevins ask around and the horrible words are brought up: bed bugs. Could it be something that bad? ‘No’, we say, ‘it must be spiders.’
There is something terrifying when those things we young Americans incorrectly recognize as being clichéd rather than repetitive start to happen to you. It couldn’t be X, that wouldn’t happen to us. It can’t be that bad, can it? Those sorts of things are terrifying because you know the answer before you even give voice to the dismissive words. And you dismiss the awful anyway because, let’s face it, it really could be worse. Lumberjack Kevin (I assure you there are only 2 Kevins) was sitting at his desk built into his lofted bed reading a book. As he turned the page he noticed an odd little shape moving along the spine of the book. It was small and brown and more circle-shaped than most insects. And he knew. He just knew. There wasn’t a question in his mind that this could be anything other than the worst that could happen to us. We had the bugs. They had corrupted the sacredness of our apartment with their bloodlust and we were doomed.
“We have bugs” Kevin said with a stoic certainty. He looked like someone who had returned from the DMV after giving a little too much blood at a red cross event. Defeat is too light a word to apply to the gravity with which those three words and his stony visage brought themselves down upon the rest of us in that apartment. I tried to remain optimistic. “We’ve just got to tell the property managers. They’ll take care of this.” Such acceptance of authorities in my life to solve the problems that would appear to be within their responsibility is lost on me now. Then, back when the bugs were first an issue, I believed that landlords could handle a problem like ours. Oh the naïveté of the uninitiated.
It was a frigid time of the year and we were trapped with these things. There were many ashes and much gnashing of teeth.
Monday, June 8, 2009
The Bug Saga Pt. 1
In Which Our Narrator Begins His Narrations or Nostalgia Just Ain't What It Used To Be
For being positioned directly in front of a semi-conductor, the view from Fitzpatrick 203 is not bad. There is enough tree cover to hide the massive cylinder of galvanized steel and the protrusions of black cable carrying power to the rest of campus. Nature is used to conceal technology, as if the control of electricity were something to be ashamed of. But they have used nature as technology too. Technology to hide technology. As if nature and technology were radically opposed to one another at their very core.
Still, the view is not bad. Better, in fact, than the view I had of the carwash my roommates and I thought was a front for drugs or the shouts of drunken Allstonians as they staggered towards their dilapidated abodes. I am, in many ways, miles and years away from that place, from that vista. And the funny thing is, I don’t know which direction—further back or further ahead—those miles and years have taken me. There is a circularity to life which is attested to in Nietzsche’s writings (although he is not the only one to speak of such things) that I have come to experience on more than a few occasions. Right now, in this present moment, the moment stretched just long enough to be perceivable before being consumed by the growling stomach of memory, I am once again in a new place that is far too familiar to keep me settled. In the present moment, I sit in my dorm room—the aforementioned Fitzpatrick 203—located on the upper campus of Boston College. I sit here and I stare out my window through the trees at the semi-conductor. I sit here at the top of this “city on a hill” as pretentious and crazy as that notion is.
Five years after I left the dorms for good I have returned. In the interim I have lived in one shed-like cabin, three houses, two apartments, and countless friends couches. I have toured, recorded, made all manner of latte, bound books, written papers, completed around 20 grad school applications, presented at a conference, studied and stressed more than I ever thought was possible, and gotten (well almost) a master’s degree. All of this happened outside of living in a dorm room. And yet, absurdly, here I am in Fitzpatrick 203. There is a crazy journey that led to feeling like such an adult with all the responsibilities and certainly all the bills to being a dorm resident. I, of course, still have the bills but lack all the perks.
From this dorm room perched high atop the city on a hill that is a light to the nations I must tell my tale. My main task right now is to open the story. It is to introduce you to the characters and somehow make you care about them as if they were real people (which they are—most of them). I have to lay down the setting for you with all the appropriate metaphorical flourishes that allow for you to see what is coming up ahead thematically. "Oh I get it, the transformation of the trees into technology is a metaphor for the effects of industrialization on the purity of the earth" you might say. And you wouldn't be wrong. You just wouldn't be thinking what I'm thinking when I tell this story. For the record, the setting is not the dorm room. This is where it kind of ends. Where it begins, well, that origin is found in the view of drunken Allstonians wandering the frigid streets in February.
This is not a story that has heroes or wise old sages of the ‘mystical wisdom (insert non-anglo ethnicity here)’ variety. It is not a romance nor is it merely a tragedy or merely a comedy. Well, any romance that happens in this story certainly doesn’t involve me. Although the tragedy and the comedy, they most certainly include me. And I guess there might be a mystical wisdom pastor or professor or janitor scattered throughout but I wouldn’t count on it. But there are vampires. Lots of blood-sucking little vampires.
Some might say that the vampires are the most important part; that they are the whole story. I got bugs, they made a nice apartment unlivable, and then I moved. Finished product. This take on things would be to leave out all of the little eccentricities that make this a good story. The vampires are, in all honest, very flat characters. They do one thing and one thing only: suck blood. It is in the reactions, the quiet desperations, the breakdowns, the untimeliness of it all that this story has any worth in telling.
So that is my charge. To tell the bug saga. The rise of an empire of vampire bugs who devastated the lives of four men who chose to live together and the chaos that ensued.
For being positioned directly in front of a semi-conductor, the view from Fitzpatrick 203 is not bad. There is enough tree cover to hide the massive cylinder of galvanized steel and the protrusions of black cable carrying power to the rest of campus. Nature is used to conceal technology, as if the control of electricity were something to be ashamed of. But they have used nature as technology too. Technology to hide technology. As if nature and technology were radically opposed to one another at their very core.
Still, the view is not bad. Better, in fact, than the view I had of the carwash my roommates and I thought was a front for drugs or the shouts of drunken Allstonians as they staggered towards their dilapidated abodes. I am, in many ways, miles and years away from that place, from that vista. And the funny thing is, I don’t know which direction—further back or further ahead—those miles and years have taken me. There is a circularity to life which is attested to in Nietzsche’s writings (although he is not the only one to speak of such things) that I have come to experience on more than a few occasions. Right now, in this present moment, the moment stretched just long enough to be perceivable before being consumed by the growling stomach of memory, I am once again in a new place that is far too familiar to keep me settled. In the present moment, I sit in my dorm room—the aforementioned Fitzpatrick 203—located on the upper campus of Boston College. I sit here and I stare out my window through the trees at the semi-conductor. I sit here at the top of this “city on a hill” as pretentious and crazy as that notion is.
Five years after I left the dorms for good I have returned. In the interim I have lived in one shed-like cabin, three houses, two apartments, and countless friends couches. I have toured, recorded, made all manner of latte, bound books, written papers, completed around 20 grad school applications, presented at a conference, studied and stressed more than I ever thought was possible, and gotten (well almost) a master’s degree. All of this happened outside of living in a dorm room. And yet, absurdly, here I am in Fitzpatrick 203. There is a crazy journey that led to feeling like such an adult with all the responsibilities and certainly all the bills to being a dorm resident. I, of course, still have the bills but lack all the perks.
From this dorm room perched high atop the city on a hill that is a light to the nations I must tell my tale. My main task right now is to open the story. It is to introduce you to the characters and somehow make you care about them as if they were real people (which they are—most of them). I have to lay down the setting for you with all the appropriate metaphorical flourishes that allow for you to see what is coming up ahead thematically. "Oh I get it, the transformation of the trees into technology is a metaphor for the effects of industrialization on the purity of the earth" you might say. And you wouldn't be wrong. You just wouldn't be thinking what I'm thinking when I tell this story. For the record, the setting is not the dorm room. This is where it kind of ends. Where it begins, well, that origin is found in the view of drunken Allstonians wandering the frigid streets in February.
This is not a story that has heroes or wise old sages of the ‘mystical wisdom (insert non-anglo ethnicity here)’ variety. It is not a romance nor is it merely a tragedy or merely a comedy. Well, any romance that happens in this story certainly doesn’t involve me. Although the tragedy and the comedy, they most certainly include me. And I guess there might be a mystical wisdom pastor or professor or janitor scattered throughout but I wouldn’t count on it. But there are vampires. Lots of blood-sucking little vampires.
Some might say that the vampires are the most important part; that they are the whole story. I got bugs, they made a nice apartment unlivable, and then I moved. Finished product. This take on things would be to leave out all of the little eccentricities that make this a good story. The vampires are, in all honest, very flat characters. They do one thing and one thing only: suck blood. It is in the reactions, the quiet desperations, the breakdowns, the untimeliness of it all that this story has any worth in telling.
So that is my charge. To tell the bug saga. The rise of an empire of vampire bugs who devastated the lives of four men who chose to live together and the chaos that ensued.
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