is me playing my ’ 57 Gibson
ES- 125 with a single P- 90 at
the neck. I love that guitar.
I also played the chugging,
blues-type rhythm on my early
’70s Strat through a tweed
Fender Bassman.
I hear a Phillip Glass-type repetition going on in there, too.
Yes, there is. I did the arpeggio-type fingerpicking on a Gretsch
Country Gentleman from Brian
Deck’s Engine studio in Chicago.
The warbly sound comes from a
Moogerfooger pedal, again.
Do you use a claw-hammer
or Travis-style fingerpicking
technique?
I wish I knew how to do those
styles [laughs]! I just use my thumb
and index finger: The thumb plays
the low end and the index finger
does the higher stuff, which fills
up a lot of space. The first thing I
do when it comes time to overdub
with the rest of the band is get
rid of my original guitar track,
because it usually doesn’t leave
enough sonic space for the band.
“Rabbit Will Run” has a
kalimba-sounding part that’s
doubled on guitar. It sounds
kind of like ’80s Peter Gabriel.
Wow, Peter Gabriel? Thanks
for the compliment! That
was a Jerry Jones JJ Original
Shorthorn reissue—a really
well-made copy of an old ’60s
Danelectro. The lipstick pickups have enough of that tic-tac
bass sound to fool you into
thinking it’s a baritone guitar.
“Your Fake Name Is Good
Enough for Me” sounds
like finger tapping rather
than picking.
No, its not finger tapping. It’s
basically just me fingerpicking
a blues riff on the Gretsch
Country Gentleman. Then a
clave track kicks in and it all
sort of mixes together. I like
throwing a bunch of differ-
ent instruments together and
processing them until you’re
not sure which instrument is
creating a particular sound and
you can just sit back and enjoy
the noise.
besides the Fulton Webb, do
you use any other amps?
Oh yeah. I have a Fender
Tremolux from the ’60s that I
used for its nice clean sound. I
also have a little tweed Champ
that I can crank for sustain. I
also have an old tweed Bassman
I used a lot, too. There are
also tons of amps at Engine.
I used an old Vox AC30 and
Cambridge Reverb. There were
a couple of blackface Fender
Twins, a Super Reverb, and
a ’ 67 Marshall Super Lead. I
plugged into each of these at
some point.
Do you mix it up with mic
setups and techniques?
Brian Deck showed me a
great mic’ing technique—
a Shure SM57 dead center
on the speaker cone and a
Beyerdynamic M 160 off axis,
but pointing at the cone. We
used that setup on almost all
the guitar tracks.
A lot of times, mixing genres
yields horrible results—like
country rap. but your work
doesn’t sound incongruous.
As a guy who got noticed
as an acoustic player, what
inspired you to start incorporating synths?
Well, just because I played
acoustic guitar for the past
several years doesn’t mean I
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