Hagstrom Super Swede—which plays really
well. Those are my three touring guitars this
time out. I’ve been playing through a Music
Man bass amp from the ’80s that has a lot
of really specific EQ controls—like, 1. 6 kHz
or 510 Hz—which I really like.
Are you using that in addition to
the Princeton?
No, I use the Princeton in the studio, and
I’ve been using the Music Man live. But I
may switch that up. The Music Man has
a limiter in it that you can turn on and
off, but I feel like it’s on no matter what—
which is not good. [Ed note: At press time,
Clark had switched from the Music Man to
two handwired TRVR amps for live playing. See the “Annie Clark’s Gearbox” sidebar on p. 130 for details.]
We’re running this article in our annual
pedal issue, so I wondered if you could
talk a little about your philosophy on
getting interesting sounds?
I think probably the best distortion still is
overdriving a tube amp, or—in the studio—
going straight into the console and getting
board distortion. That’s a very satisfying distortion. But if you’re touring and you need
to be practical and you have to have a lot of
different colors in your guitar palette, you
probably shouldn’t just bring, like, a Fender
tweed amp for a great overdrive sound—
that’s just not going to happen.
Clark digs in on her go-to 1967 Harmony H15V Bobkat at a 2009 gig at the El Rey Theatre in Los
Angeles. Photo by Lindsey Best
… the [1967 hArmony] BoBkAt hAs
thIs AmAzIng vIBrAto BAr thAt’s super
sensItIve—you cAn dIve BomB on It
And It wIll stAy In tune.
You mean because it’s too limited, tonally?
Just logistically. Even if it’s my ideal sound,
in my current configuration I’d need a
pedalboard that could switch between two
amps on a dime. Y’know, it’s like, “Okay,
here’s the distorted part, but the chorus is
really clean, so I’ve got to go over here.” It’s
just tricky.
in terms of how much space they take
up versus what they can give you. I really
like them because, if you’re not needing
to travel with rack gear—like the Edge
or something—you can get a whole lot of
mileage out of these pedals that don’t take
that much space on your pedalboard.
and adventurous riffery that you do. Why
do you think that is?
I think the idea of women being virtuosos at
an instrument is really not new at all. If you
look at classical music, there are tons and tons
of really technical, virtuosic women.
So the main reason you’re using the Music
Man is for clean headroom, and then you
can use pedals for your distortion.
Exactly. As far as the effects philosophy
… in my former years, I was traveling
with a pedalboard that was huge. It had
Moogerfoogers and I was controlling them
with expression pedals, and I had two or
three distortions, and this and that and
the other, but I’ve come around to having a fuzz and a distortion, and then a lot
of flexibility in a couple other pedals. The
Eventide pedals are really great for that,
I have to be careful how I say this,
because it could come across the wrong
way, but one thing that’s interesting
about your work is that very few singer-
songwriters are brave enough to put an
off-the-wall riff or solo into a song with
commercial appeal like you do. And it’s
notable for a couple of reasons: First,
you’re writing these songs and playing
the riffs and solos yourself. Second, for
whatever reason, it seems that on the
whole, women who play guitar are less
likely to get into the type of tone alchemy
That’s totally true. But I don’t mean in a
virtuosic sense—I’m talking more about
the visceral approach you have. In “indie”
music it’s certainly more common, but
across the wider musical field it doesn’t
seem like it’s there as much with women
who play guitar. I don’t know if it has
anything to do with gender or not, but I
do know that, for instance, women are a
lot less likely to read a guitar website or
subscribe to a guitar magazine that focuses
on those things.
Rather than talking in really tricky general-
izations that get really hairy, really fast, I just
