leather bag pumping away like
a pair of lungs or some wild
sexual thing. By the way, I
didn’t actually play the guitar on
that track. It’s my friend Nick
Tremulis, a player from Chicago
who’s got this wonderful, rootsy
style. I told him just to pretend
to be me, so his playing on the
song is an interpretation of what
I do—which is often over-the-top and angular. What you hear
isn’t in the exact same sequence
as he played it, though. This is a
rare example of my using a little
Pro Tools action to move the
guitar parts around a little for a
more powerful arrangement.
I don’t really think about
theory when I play guitar,
as you can probably tell
from my playing. To me,
it’s more about geometry
than anything else—I make
triangles, squares, and
trapezoids on the fret-
board with my fingers and
see what happens.
Did you write out their parts
or did they learn them by ear?
Generally, I don’t write out music
unless I’m working with string or
horn players, so it was all by ear.
I’m sure it was a pain in the ass
for everyone to learn—the music
is much more complex than it
sounds—but they nailed it. The
band was on fire.
Let’s talk about some of the
guitar work you did play. How
did you get that great, vocal-
like sound on the title track?
In my living room, I plugged
my Strat into a Peavey Bandit
and cranked both the amp and
a Rat pedal just before the point
of breaking up. I mic’d the amp
with my favorite mic for elec-
tric guitars—an Electro-Voice
PL76, which has such a warm,
natural sound. I placed the
PL76 off-center and got a bit of
the room sound in there—the
room should always be a part
of the amp, in my opinion. To
record the parts I used an old
Tascam 8-track, which I fed
into a 24-track for a raw sound
that you don’t get when using
digital equipment exclusively.
As for the actual playing, I
made a conscious effort to avoid
the obvious—tired blues lines
between the vocal phrases—so
I tried to create some unusual
nuances there.
Your backing band on The
Naked Flame, Capsula, is
especially hot. How did this
collaboration come about?
Capsula is this Argentinean
band based in Spain. I mixed
their album Rising Mountains
at my studio, and they kept
prompting me to make a new
record. Finally I gave in and
sent them demos of some new
songs for them to play around
with. They rerecorded the songs
and gave them this urgent
treatment that let me know
they really got me and we were
on the same page. I had to do
the record after that.
Let’s talk gear. Which guitars
do you prefer?
My main guitar is a Frankenstein
Strat—a ’ 62 body with a ’ 73
neck. When I first got the guitar, back in the ’70s, it was in
disarray and I nursed it back to
health. As you probably know,
the body has four screws but
the neck only has three. It wobbled all around, so I epoxied
the whole thing together and
it’s been fine ever since. Other
than that, it’s mostly original—including the pickups. In
the ’90s, I had an endorsement
with Fender and they offered
me any guitar I wanted. When
I went out to visit the factory,
I saw a prototype of a really
unusual model—a 12-string
Tele—in progress, and I had
them give me that guitar once
