NEWSLETTER

PHOTOS BY ANGELA BOATWRIGHT
STYLING BY ANNETTE LAMOTHE-RAMOS

Mike: Surface to Air sweater, APC shirt, Helmut Lang pants; JR: Fremont dress

Everyone who commits to being a great guitar player has to go through a period when it’s all they do, all day long. You have to become like a guitar-nerd hermit. That comes and goes in spurts for me. When I was 19 and 20, that was a big time. What was your life like then? I was coming out of being wild. I’d lived in New York City for a few years and burned out on raging every night, going out to bars, staying out till really late in the morning… The drugs I was taking changed and I started to stay home more. I basically played guitar for two years straight, all day and all night. Is it a secret that you were a heroin addict? Well, I don’t talk about it all that much… Is it off the record then? Come on! No, no. People who are creative who get into that shit go one of two ways. They either work on their thing constantly, like you did, or they drop it all and then years later start up with the “I coulda been a contender” stuff. Yeah, all I did was play. But I dropped everything else. So something good came out of it then. Totally. But if things were different and I never started doing drugs, maybe I would have ended up playing all day for a couple years anyway. It just happened to happen in that time. That’s when I came into my own. When did you first start writing songs? I was drawn toward American music like blues and country—genres where there was a formal way you wrote a song. For a long time, the songs that I wrote were performed in a very strict style. They used a language and phrases and topics that weren’t my own, but I related to them. Like who are we talking about here? Hank Williams, Skip James… there’s millions. There was a while of doing that and not being happy with the songs I wrote or thinking that they were mine. It was more like I was adding to the canon of that kind of songwriting. It helped though. All the songs I write are still in a modified country/blues tuning, but they don’t have that down-home American vibe anymore. I took the ways I learned of playing from all those old records and simplified or twisted it a little bit. Didn’t you spend some time down South learning from some cool old guys? I’d made friends with this band from Memphis called Lucero, so I went down and stayed with them in the summer a few years ago. They knew all these older guys who sort of came up through blues, rock and roll, and R&B. I recorded an album’s worth of songs with the Lucero guys. It was all the kind of stuff I just told you about. I think I had to do that stuff to figure out… Get it out of your system? Well, not really, because I didn’t know I was getting it out of my system when I was doing it. Once I got back to New York, I realized that I had made this really Southern record. But the thing about playing down there is, like, everyone just takes their time. It was so hot. You didn’t really get started doing anything until seven or eight at night. That way of being laid-back and spread out kind of tempered the New York uptightness that I generally have.

TO BE CONTINUED:
GUITAR TEACHER | 1 | 2 | 3 |

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