When I was growing up, shredding was the highest possible goal you could aspire to if you picked up an electric guitar — compressed, efficient mindfuckery of the highest order, the goal of which was to overwhelm and short-circuit the brain. Play fast and clean enough, and you too can cast this spell. What I take from shredding is its belief that magic is real, and that the subtle manipulation of these meager tools can give us a glimpse into something bigger.
When I was 12, I would lie in the dark and play the acoustic guitar that I lifted from my grandparents’ basement until I got too sleepy, and then I would put it on the ground and pass out. That particular guitar died when I fell out of bed in the middle of the night and smashed it to pieces, in the process gashing open my side. I’ve been improvising ever since. I see improvisation as being akin to inventing your own traditions, creating complex systems out of thin air. Musicians have been fighting to find freedom within musical forms probably for as long as there has been music. I’m just as interested in finding musical forms within freedom, exploring unmarked places and reporting back.
My friend Dawn once gave me a tarot reading. I had no expectations going into it, but I was surprised at how useful it was, not at predicting my future but rather in its ability to give me a new way of looking at my life. It was vague enough that my imagination could use the reading to actually create solutions to real problems. I think music can be like that, too. We hear ourselves in music. We also hear critiques of ourselves and suggestions for other possible ways to live. Music contains codes that we will all hear in different ways. I’ve always been into the idea that you could embed your beliefs not only in, say, lyrics, but also in the way you play or the way you organize your band.
My family used to occasionally take the four-hour road trip to Illinois to visit my grandparents. I remember sitting in silence and struggling to come up with games for myself, something to keep myself occupied for the drive. One of them went like this: For each car that we passed going the other way, I would blink. If it was a semi, I would blink twice. And I would just blink . . . and blink blink . . . and blink. For hours. That’s the game. At some point, I started imagining a pulse, or maybe the radio would be going in the car. At first, it would be very difficult to not be swayed by the music and blink on the beat. But, over the years, I started to be able to just blink freely, regardless of the pulse in my head or the song on the radio. Those blinks by themselves were nothing more than a bored tic. The moment a second element was added, though, it was rhythm, and that rhythm could be fractured and tenuous, but it always carried with it a unique logic and sense of possibility. Many years later, I discovered Senegalese sabar music, and it was the first time I heard music that communicated the feeling I had all those years before, blinking at cars on the highway. All of these complex subdivisions of time I had discovered accidentally as part of a solution to childhood boredom were suddenly there in front of me, described in waves of ear-shattering drums and virtuosic dancing, part of a musical tradition going back hundreds of years.
If there is one thing that I wish I could teach my younger self, it would be that accessing your creativity is a skill, and it can be developed and improved upon. The practice of working creates the result that you become more able to work. like to work, and I know when I work best (morning, by a long shot). I also know that when I am fried or confused, it’s good to have people around that I like.
I think the future of the guitar is the same as the future of all music, or maybe even all culture, which is to say it’s there to express whatever it is that’s unique about people in any given place or time. The guitar is simply a conduit for ideas. Most of my favorite guitar players are the people I’ve played with, who I’ve been lucky enough to get to know through their music and see how their music expresses who they are as people. The idea that these rhythms, notes and chords that come out of us express something unquantifiable and possibly even unknowable about us is what I love most about music. As a performer, it’s also what’s scariest about it. I sometimes vocalize when I’m playing guitar, not intentionally but as a byproduct of playing, of getting into the music. I often end up hoarse at the end of a concert, barely able to talk. It’s a pretty disconcerting feeling. Some part of me is speaking, and I have no idea what it is saying.