In certain ways I still feel like I'm finding my way. I feel pretty comfortable playing acoustic guitar and singing, but then I feel pretty good sitting on a reggae groove as well.
Going to high school in rural Florida, we always partied down in the woods. Somebody - one of the rednecks - would leave class and mow a path out to a field, and we'd drive out there. Dude, every party I went to was lit by a bonfire. Acoustic guitar.
The best way to do that is to pick up a new instrument or an instrument that you don't typically write on and see where it takes you. Whether it's using an acoustic guitar, or piano, or electronics as tools, all of these lead to creating different types of songs and I used all of these methods for this record.
You know, there's times when you should play and there's times when you gotta hold back.
In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot.
Like, when I write a song, the song comes first before production. Everything is written on an acoustic guitar so you can strip away everything from it and have it be equally as entertaining and good without the bells and whistles.
I try to influence this improvisation in two ways. One is by centering on reflections, in both senses of the word: acoustic reflections as well as visual reflections from a mirror or surface, and then reflecting on the material in a contemplative way. The other influence is listening to the tails of the sounds that you make.
I honestly and truly love and believe in what I'm making, and it's not a joke, whereas some people would take a singer-songwriter sitting behind an acoustic guitar as sincere.
I collaborated with a brilliant young sound designer named Anthony Mattana, who enriched the sound of the total production with vocal effects, percussive and other sounds. He also mixed the sound effects and the music, using the theater's first rate sound system to complement the theater's acoustics. This completed my score.
Our times seem to be so much about redefining where we are physical and where we're not. For me, it is really exciting to take the cutting edge technology and take it as far as it can get virtually, use it to describe/control the musicology or the behavior of raw natural elements, and then plug it with a sound source which is the most acoustic one there is - like gamelan and pipe organ. So you get the extremes: very virtual and very physical. In that way you shift the physicality.
I've always written songs that were confessional, acoustic, wordy - my writing style matches my personality. The music always has to match the mouth it comes out of.
When I'm writing with just an acoustic guitar, it can be for anyone.
I'd love to do a live record, I'd love to do an acoustic record, I'm already thinking about what I may want to do with the next studio record.
My sound is super hybrid; the acoustic sounds are there and the electronic sounds are there.
I think for me, I had a long-standing desire to orchestrate the sunrise, and never came up with the right thing on piano. So at a certain moment, I had the revelation that the whole thing would be electronic, not traditional acoustic.
After an initial solo album in which the young [Bob] Dylan was just finding his voice (i.e., reinventing himself from the middle-class Robert Zimmerman into a pseudo-hobo Woody Guthrie), Dylan put out two acoustic albums that forever changed popular music.
I'm very proud of all the bluegrass-oriented albums. It just reminded me and my fans that I should always record acoustic music and country records, along with anything else that I might want to do.
An electronic instrument is just harboring a natural element the same way that a guitar is harboring an acoustic element. It's all nature, really.
I started playing the acoustic guitar for more singer-songwriter type stuff. I bet if I would have gotten more approval for my "rock playing", I might be a world class shredder.
I suppose ever since I was about 14, I remember listening to "Sgt. Pepper's," and I remember thinking, "how do you possibly write songs like that?" I remember starting to try and write songs around that age, but just sitting around with an acoustic guitar, and try to come up with ideas for songs, and that's just what I've done ever since. I just never really stopped doing that, I suppose.
Write great songs that sound amazing if sung and played on the piano or acoustic guitar. Always encourage sing-alongs! Be prolific! Say "Yes" to new collaborations because you never know where it could lead.
I've always been interested in finding out more about the properties of acoustics.
I really enjoy playing solo acoustic. I think it's good for me as a songwriter to stay in touch with what it takes to make a song work by yourself.
I was a grill cook at McDonalds for a little bit. I did landscape for a little bit. I played a lot in the bar scene, I played countless sets of acoustic songs in that arena.
If anything, I don't have any intention of recording music that's just me playing acoustic guitar singing a song anytime soon.
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