Joel Kosche onstage with one
of his humbucker-equipped MJ
Guitars. Photo by Joseph Guay
When Collective Soul suddenly
found itself without
a lead guitarist in 2001, the
Georgia-based band with seven
No. 1 singles to its credit didn’t
have to look very far to find a
perfect replacement. Longtime
tech Joel Kosche was a formidable
guitarist and singer/songwriter
who not only knew the
band’s gear and repertoire inside
and out, but had also hot-rodded
its amps to achieve the trademark
guitar sound heard on songs like
the 1993 breakout hit “Shine,” as
well as on subsequent chart-toppers
like “The World I Know,”
“December,” and “Smashing
Young Man.”
Kosche officially filled
Collective Soul’s lead guitar chair
in 2003, and he has since added
his own sound—shaped equally
by metal, progressive rock, and
classical, and distinguished by
masterful use of effects pedals—
to the band’s radio-friendly
repertoire. He’s also joining in
the group’s writing process and
even put his vocal talents to work
on the sardonic “I Don’t Need
Anymore Friends,” a highlight of
Soul’s 2007 album Afterwords.
In addition to playing with
Collective Soul, Kosche recently
concluded three years of tracking
for his debut solo album,
Fight Years, which is available on
iTunes and at
CDBaby.com. The
album’s 14 songs chronicle his
experiences as a musician—from
the frustrating years he spent
toiling in Atlanta bands while
painting cars and motorcycles to
his rocky ascent to the spotlight.
We spoke with Kosche about his
musical evolution as a guitarist,
songwriter, tinkerer, and amp
builder, and in the process discovered
secrets to some of the uncanny
sounds he gets in Collective
Soul and on his own.
Do you remember what first
got you hooked on guitar?
I remember first getting excited
about music when I saw Elvis
playing guitar. There wasn’t a
guitar in the house, so I—like so
many other kids without instruments—
used to walk around
strumming a tennis racket.
One year, my older brother got
a guitar for Christmas, but he
couldn’t really hang with the
lessons, so the guitar just ended
up staying in a closet. My buddies
and I would sometimes
beat on it, trying to play things
like “Smoke on the Water” on
one string, but none of us knew
what we were doing. Then one
day, someone’s cousin came
over, tuned up the thing, and
strummed some chords. That
was the first time I’d actually
seen anyone make music on the
guitar right in front of me, and
I knew right then that I wanted
to get serious about music.
When time period are
we talking here?
This was in the early ’80s—long
before you had the internet and
YouTube—so I got some Mel
Bay books and started teaching
myself how to play chords and
scales. One day I saw Roy Clark
doing this flamenco kind of stuff
on Johnny Carson’s show.
I didn’t realize that was
any different from
classical guitar—it’s
all done with
fingerpicking—so when I was
16 or 17, I started taking classical
lessons at a local community
college. That was a great experience—
it really taught me how to
look at guitar in a different way.
How so?
On the guitar, we don’t have to
really think about the names of
notes—we just move the same
shape to a different fret to play
in a different key. But when I
started playing classical guitar, I
began to read music. I learned
what, say, a G chord looks like
on the staff in different inversions.
A lot of classical guitar
repertoire was originally written
for another instrument, like the
piano, with all these simultaneous
bass lines and melodies.
So I learned a lot about how
harmony works and how music
is structured, and I learned to
approach music for music’s sake
and not to just play the same
old boxes and patterns.