Manzanera onstage with his longtime collaborator Andy Mackay, who is also his creative partner on their new album, AM.PM.
AM.PM, the intriguing all-instrumental release from legendary guitarist/producer Phil Manzanera and equally legendary saxophonist Andy Mackay, is full of unexpected twists and turns. “Somebody said to me recently, ‘I can tell you what it’s not. But I cannot tell you what the hell it is,’” says Manzanera. “And I quite agree. I listened to it and I’ve got no idea what’s coming next. I played the backing tracks once and I could never play it again. I’ve got the chord progressions…. Where did they come from? Instrumental music is a different kind of experience. When you listen to it, you tend to float off into your mind and just drift. There’s a visual aspect to it, to where you’re listening to it. It’s a wonderful, very different experience.”
Manzanera and Mackay have a telepathic working relationship, which shouldn’t be surprising, given they’ve made music together for over half a century. They first connected in 1971 as part of art-rock pioneers Roxy Music, alongside singer/songwriter Bryan Ferry, synth player Brian Eno, bassist Graham Simpson, and drummer Paul Thompson. Roxy Music went on to influence the sound of popular styles that later emerged, like new wave and glam rock. While the band members went their separate ways in 1983, Manzanera and Mackay worked together in various projects, including the Explorers, who were active in the late ’80s.
Mackay also played on Manzanera’s influential solo debut Diamondhead. And in addition to his solo career, Manzanera went on to perform with prog-rock cult heroes 801, has done session work, and, in 2006, began a collaboration with Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, producing the latter’s solo album On an Island and playing onstage with Gilmour for several years, being a part of the Live in Gdańsk concert recording. Roxy Music reunited in 2001 and have toured sporadically since. On March 29, 2019, Roxy Music was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. However, only a few months later the Covid pandemic set in, paving the way for AM.PM.
Manzanera Mackay - "Blue Skies"
“During lockdown, everybody was sort of stuck at home, and most musicians, artists, and photographers were wondering ‘What the hell can we do?’” says Manzanera. “So I was in my garden shed thinking, ‘I need to do music to get through all this.’ I reached out to Tim Finn, the singer from Crowded House and Split Enz, and we started writing songs—loads of songs. And then halfway through, I thought, ‘You know what, I’d like to do something crazy. Nothing to do with songs and structures and stuff like that. I’ll ring up Andy, I’m sure he’s not doing anything [laughs]. I’ll tell him, ‘Get off your ass, we’re going to do some music, and it’s gonna be crazy music. I’m just going to do random stuff, send it to you, and you do random stuff, then send it back to me. We’ll just have no rules, no structure.’”
Music by Painting
With a nebulous concept guided by a “no rules” approach, AM.PM slowly developed over the course of two years. A diverse cast of musicians—Anna Phoebe on violin, Seth Scott on flute, George Goode on tuba, Paul Thompson on drums, Yazz Ahmed on flugelhorn, and Mike Boddy on bass/programming/keyboards—was recruited. They did their parts remotely, sending tracks via email. Manzanera would select and layer bits and pieces into Logic, improvise to it, and then send the updated files to Mackay for his input.
“Instrumental music is a different kind of experience. When you listen to it, you tend to float off into your mind and just drift.”
“It’s like a sort of call and response, but via Zoom, email, or phone. It was a good starting point for me on some of the songs—the ones with the violin, tuba, flute, and the flugelhorn,” says Manzanera. “Those were methods of initiating a track by saying, ‘You just improvise whatever you feel comfortable and I will then make a track out of it.’ I didn’t want anything particularly complicated. What I wanted from them was the beauty of their instrument, the tone of their instrument. And then I wanted to hear that set against the beauty of Andy’s sax tone or combinations of my guitar against a bit of tuba or French horn. It was a series of experiments. I thought, ‘Well, I haven’t heard this before with me, or with me and Andy, so let’s have a go and see what happens.’”
To get what he envisioned out of the musicians, at times Manzanera had to push them far beyond their comfort zones. Classical musicians are among the most highly capable of instrumentalists, and can often read even the most ink-filled pages of music with ease. But if you ask them to improvise, that skill set is sometimes out of their wheelhouse and they’ll freeze up. “I asked the guy who played some tuba to come and play a little bit at the end of one Finn/Manzanera song, and he’d done that. But he played the part very rigidly. Not ‘rigid,’ but you know, the way it was meant to be played,” recalls Manzanera. “And I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, can you now just improvise for one minute. Do whatever you like. Just play whatever you like, I will make a track out of whatever you play.’ Obviously, most classically trained musicians do not like to do that because they like to see dots.”
Phil Manzanera's Gear
Phil Manzanera plays his beloved Gibson Firebird VII onstage with Roxy Music in 2022.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
Guitars
- 1964 Gibson Firebird VII
- 2001 Gibson Black Les Paul Custom
- 2001 Gibson Les Paul Custom Gecko
- 1983 Fernandes Strat
- 1951 Fender Telecaster
- Gibson Les Paul Studio
- Fender Strat
Amps
- Two Cornell Voyager 20 heads (main and spare)
- Fender Blues Junior (for solos, with an SM57)
- Universal Audio OX Top Box (stereo return configuration, adding room and ribbon mic modeling on a Fender Bassman)
- Grossman FATBOX isolation cabinet (with a Celestion G12M, with an SM57)
Effects
- Two GigRig G3 controllers
- Two TX RX boxes
- JAM Pedals RetroVibe
- JAM Pedals Harmonious Monk
- JAM Pedals Wahcko
- JAM Pedals Fuzz Phrase
- Fulltone OCD
- TC Electronic Polytune
- Eventide H9
- Strymon TimeLine
- Catalinbread Topanga
- DigiTech Whammy
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Super Slinky (.009–.042)
- Dunlop Custom Roxy Music Tortex Standard
- Vovox Sonorus Cable
The tracks on AM.PM aren’t beholden to traditional concepts of form, like intro, verse, and chorus. Rather, everything just evolved organically. “You give into the structure that exists there,” explains Manzanera. “You look at it—and you can, because if you work on Logic on a computer, quite frankly, you can have a visual view of the thing. You can color up certain sections. You can say, ‘When it goes into the purple, I’m going to play whatever, and when it goes into blue, I’m gonna just go like this.’ So it’s not painting by numbers. It’s music by painting.”
“I tried to send my Firebird to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for them to put up in their museum and they were refused an import license.”
Manzanera’s primary brush was the trusty red Firebird VII that’s been his main guitar for decades. “It’s been my signature guitar, if you like, since I bought it secondhand from an American guy in London in 1973,” he says. “His parents had bought it for him from the factory in Kalamazoo, in cardinal red, which was a custom color. It was the color of a Ford Galaxie ’60s car, because Ray Dietrich, the guy who designed the Firebird, used to design cars. Gibson hired him because he was a car designer and they wanted to compete with Fender. He came up with the Firebird, but obviously it wasn’t as successful. But I loved it because it was red. The pickups are pretty unique because you’re not allowed to use that kind of metal—god knows what’s in it, it’s probably killing me or something. The wood you’re probably not allowed to use. In fact, I tried to send it to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for them to put up in their museum and they were refused an import license [laughs]. It’s banned! I don’t know what kind of wood it is because it’s been painted red on top. I said, ‘It was made in America. What do you mean I can’t send it back to America?’”
Manzanera and Mackay approached AM.PM with very open minds. There was no agenda going into it, and, during the recording process, anything was fair game.
Partners in Crime
The back-and-forth between Manzanera and Mackay was relatively frictionless— without many, if any, disagreements. “We’re like mindless people,” jokes Manzanera. “The thing is that we have played together on and off for 50 years. I like what he does. He likes what I do. I find the spaces around him, he finds the spaces around me. It’s about creating a beautiful picture, a sonic picture. And when it’s done, it’s done. There’s nothing to prove here. We’ve made lots of music, we’re just trying to do something beautiful that satisfies us. We’re simple players. We’re not jazzers; it’s not about technique.”
AM.PM was still a work in progress when the Roxy Music 50th Year Celebration tour suddenly popped up in 2022. Manzanera and Mackay got detoured from AM.PM and had to divert their attention to bringing their chops back up to speed for the shows. Manzanera says, “Me and Andy spent ages practicing. So at the end of the tour, I thought, ‘Why don’t we just go into the studio straightaway and finish off that instrumental album now that our chops are really sort of up to speed.’ So me, Andy, and Paul went in for just three or four days and finished the album off, capturing that moment in time. It was trying to incorporate stuff that maybe had been played by humans and by machines, but then coming back and putting humans on top of it again. Of course, now I haven’t played since we finished it, and I’m rubbish again [laughs].”
“It’s about creating a beautiful picture, a sonic picture. And when it’s done, it’s done. There’s nothing to prove here.”
Beauty in Simplicity
Most instrumental albums released by guitarists will bludgeon you over the head with nonstop 6-string in every nook and cranny. But Manzanera’s never been about guitar pyrotechnics. And his “technical limitations” turned out to be a blessing, in a way, because it led him to explore a more probing and introspective guitar style. “The great thing is that I wouldn’t have played anything more [on AM.PM], because my technique is limited. And I wanted it to be limited because I wanted to enjoy playing music for the whole of my life. I didn’t want to learn everything. And quite frankly, I haven’t learned a lot,” says Manzanera, laughing. “I tell my younger self to ‘Put your batteries in, mate,’ because you should have actually learned a bit more technique.”
While Manzanera loves hearing other people play virtuosic guitar, that’s not the path he chose. “I just want to place notes and hear musical sounds,” he says. “This might be sacrilege to a lot of people, but scales are sort of a dangerous road to go down. I know you’re meant to do it. But I don’t do it. And you know, Robert Fripp would probably turn in his grave because he is incredibly good technically, and when I hear him play, I think, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ But I don’t want to be like that. I’d rather be like the Captain Beefheart school of mad guitar.’”
In the early days of Roxy Music, Manzanera mixes it up with Bryan Ferry—and a goldtop Gibson Les Paul.Photo by Ebet Roberts
Expect the Unexpected
Manzanera and Mackay approached AM.PM with very open minds. There was no agenda going into it, and, during the recording process, anything was fair game. “When Boddy was mixing it, there was this really annoying sound from the drain pipe outside so he recorded it and added it into the track,” says Manzanera. “So I said, ‘Let’s call it ‘Music for French Horn and Drain Pipe.’” That track was later released as an additional album track along with “Lady of the Lake,” an adaptation of a Schubert classical piece.
During the late ’60s, prior to Roxy Music, Manzanera had dipped his toes heavily into improvised music, and that forward-thinking approach permeates AM.PM. “What’s sort of interesting is if you’re working individually like this and you’re not all in the room playing, you haven’t got that possibility like, say, the great Miles Davis with his fantastic quintet. Where you’ve got five incredible musicians and they are sort of improvising, and calling and responding to each other,” says Manzanera. “But because I loved all that kind of music and the whole influence of improvisational stuff in the ’60s, I’m comfortable with that. I embrace that kind of thing. So, when I’m not having to work within song structures, this is the nearest I get to being in that kind of Miles Davis free world.”
“Robert Fripp would probably turn in his grave…. But I don’t want to be like that. I’d rather be like the Captain Beefheart school of mad guitar.’”
“Blue Skies,” the album opener, and tracks like “Ambiente,” immediately strike a nerve with some jazzy, jagged dissonances not dissimilar to what you’d hear in Davis’ music. But Manzanera hears things differently. “You know, dissonance is not necessarily dissonance to me,” he explains. “After all a lot of the music making is a series of choices. ‘Do I do this? Or do I do that? Okay, if I do that, what do I do next? And then, is that it? Do I stop there?’ And all those choices come from your musical DNA—all this music that you’ve listened to. In my musical DNA, I’ve got Captain Beefheart, I’ve got avant-garde jazz. And obviously, mine is different to Andy’s and it’s different to Paul’s. So it’s the way people interact together sometimes. Even though they might play simple things, it adds up to something more than just one person’s idea.”
Full Circle
Having achieved legendary status, at this point, Manzanera can make music without worrying about having to cater to corporate overlords. “It means, I’m able to put out albums like AM.PM,” he says. “It’s all cottage industry, we don’t have multi-nationals with us. We’re free and that makes me happy. The whole point of being a musician was to be free, not to be told what to do by some global company. It’s the hippie thing, I guess from way back in the ’60s. We got brainwashed by that [laughs]. ‘Hey man, I just want to be free.’”
Manzanera’s Failed Audition … for Roxy Music!
Brian Eno was already an established figure in Britain’s avant-garde music scene when he decided to begin writing pop music and form a rock band. He had already found singer-songwriter Bryan Ferry and saxophonist Andy Mackay, and they had been working on demos for about nine months when they put an ad in Melody Maker, a now-defunct music magazine, looking for a guitar player and a drummer. Manzanera and drummer Paul Thompson, answered the ad. However, Manzanera failed the audition.
“I had a terrible cold that day, but actually, we got on really well, and I thought these guys are really special and different,” recalls Manzanera. “But they were kind of looking for someone with a famous name to help launch the band. They got a guy called David O’List, who had been in a band called the Nice—who toured in America already. They were on the famous tour with Jimi Hendrix and stuff, and early Pink Floyd—and they thought, ‘Right, actually we need to go with the name.’”
While disappointed, Manzanera didn’t really argue with that decision. “When I heard he got the gig, I thought, ‘Well, fair play, because he’s great.’ I saw him play at the Albert Hall with the Nice. This guy’s really good,” reflects Manzanera. As time went on, fate slowly intervened. “Things [with O’List] didn’t work out because, I think, on the first tour that he did in the States, he’d been spiked with some acid so he was just like ‘away with the fairies.’ And they couldn’t cope with his not turning up on time and things like that.”
When Roxy Music brought Manzanera back into their world, it was somewhat on the sly. “They said, ‘Oh, do you want to come and mix the sound?’ And I said, ‘I’ve got no idea how to mix the sound.’ They said, ‘Don’t worry, Eno will teach you.’” And when Manzanera turned up to the rehearsal room, mysteriously, there was a guitar lying around, and they asked him to play. It was, in effect, a secret audition.
“That was a good idea,” says Manzanera. “I probably would have been nervous. But then, you know, I joined, and then a week later, we signed the first contract. And a month later, we were recording the first album, six months later it was number four in the charts. So I was just in the right place at the right time. You know, lucky them because they could have not had me [laughs]. You gotta laugh really. It’s fate.”YouTube It
Phil Manzanera is a proponent of the “less is more” approach. Throughout AM.PM, the guitar is used as only one piece of a bigger compositional puzzle. In the haunting “Newanna”—written around violinist Anne Phoebe—the guitar is used very sparingly in the opening section, mostly to add to the mysterious vibe. After a long and simmering buildup, 6-string finally features more prominently, with Manzanera’s bending phrases starting around 3:42—more than halfway through the track. Yet here he still plays minimally and tastefully, displaying great maturity and patience.
Making a quiet, contemplative album allows Isbell to reflect on the material in a new way and to really explore the relationship between his guitar and voice, which he’d recently lost and reclaimed.
Would you be excited? Would you be petrified?
This is the challenge that Jason Isbell voluntarily took on for his 10th and latest album, Foxes in the Snow. There were some extenuating circumstances. He was sorting through the aftermath of a very public breakup with his longtime partner in life and music, singer/violinist Amanda Shires, and the new songs reflected that situation, sometimes uncomfortably. Music this personal needed a personal approach. And so, when Isbell entered Electric Lady Studios in New York City for five days of recording last October, none of the members of his regular band the 400 Unit were there. He was accompanied only by co-producer/engineer Gena Johnson, who’s worked with him regularly for the past eight years.
Soundstream
“It was difficult to pull off,” Isbell acknowledges via Zoom from his Nashville homebase, “but it didn’t require me to look for ways to make the record sound weird. And that’s important to me, because what I don’t want to do is write a bunch of songs and then go in the studio and intentionally try to make them sound strange, just so they don’t sound like things I’ve done in the past. It made sense to me to just walk into a studio with a guitar and a notebook and make a record that way. First of all, because I can, and I’m grateful for the fact that I can. And I also thought that it would be really hard. And it was.”
Although Foxes in the Snow is Jason Isbell’s first solo acoustic album, acoustic guitars have long been a part of his onstage 6-string regimen.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
Making it especially hard was Isbell’s insistence on not overdubbing his vocals. “I didn’t want [the album] to sound like anything that could have been replicated or fabricated,” he explains. “I wanted it to sound like somebody playing a guitar and singing. To me, the only way to do that was just to go in there, sit down, and play it. And it’s hardto play the guitar and sing at the same time in the studio. Normally, that’s something you wouldn’t do; you’d be in a really controlled environment with mics on the guitar, everything would be isolated, and you’d have to play very carefully, not the way you play live. The idea of doing that while singing master vocal takes … well, it was tough, because if you screw up, well, you just screwed up. But the good news is you don’t have to make everybody else start over, and I liked that. I liked the fact that if I messed up, I could just stop and immediately try another take.”
“I brought an old D-18 into the studio, like a ’36 or ’37, and it sounded beautiful, but it didn’t sit in the right spot. It ate up so much space, and it was so big.”
Being aware of the difficulties and doing it anyway—that can’t help but be a vote of confidence in one’s own ability as a musician. And it should come as no great surprise that Isbell’s confidence was well-founded. Foxes in the Snow shines a bright spotlight on his guitar playing, and the playing proves eminently worthy of such a showcase. From the bluegrass-tinged solo on “Bury Me” to the Richard Thompson-esque fingerpicking at the end of “Ride to Robert’s” and the bouncy, almost Irish-reel-like hook of “Open and Close,” Isbell always gets the job done, coming up with tasty parts and executing them with panache. It’s been easy to forget in recent years amid all the critical accolades and Grammy wins that when Drive-By Truckers brought Isbell into their fold in 2001—his first major-league gig—they didn’t do it because of his singing or songwriting, which were still unknown quantities at the time; they did it because of his considerable skills as a guitarist. By putting those skills on display, Foxes in the Snow helps rebalance the Isbell equation.
Isbell says his new album was “difficult to pull off, but it didn’t require me to look for ways to make the record sound weird.”
Jason Isbell’s Gear
Acoustic Guitars
- 1940 Martin 0-17
- Martin Custom Shop 000-18 1937
- Two Martin OM-28 Modern Deluxes
- Martin D-35
- 1940s Gibson J-45
- Fishman Aura pickup systems
Electric Guitars
Amps
- 1964 Fender Vibroverb
- Dumble Overdrive Special
- Tweed Fender Twin
Strings, Picks, & Capos
- Martin Marquis phosphor bronze acoustic lights (.012–.054)
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinkys (.010–.046)
- Dunlop Tortex 1.14 mm picks
- McKinney-Elliott capos
And it does so while employing one guitar and one guitar only: an all-mahogany 1940 Martin 0-17, purchased within the past couple of years at Retrofret Vintage Guitars in Brooklyn. “My girlfriend [artist Anna Weyant] lives in New York,” Isbell notes, “and I didn’t want to keep bringing acoustics back and forth. I’ve got a lot of old Martins and Gibsons, and I don’t love to travel with them and subject them to air pressure and humidity changes. So I needed a guitar that could just stay in New York. As far as pre-war Martins go, it’s about the least special model that you could possibly find. But it sat perfectly in the mix. I brought an old D-18 into the studio, like a ’36 or ’37, and it sounded beautiful, but it didn’t sit in the right spot. It ate up so much space, and it was so big. The sonic range of that guitar was overpowering for what I was trying to do, and with the little single-0 I could control where it was in relation to my vocal.”
“There’s Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney all staring at me, and I knew that I had to sing in front of them with a busted voice.”
That control was important, because Isbell’s voice is spotlighted even more brightly on the new album than his guitar work. If you hear more strength in his singing these days, it’s not your imagination; he hired himself a vocal coach last year—out of necessity. “My voice failed,” he says simply. “I didn’t have any nodules or anything, but for some reason, anything above the middle of my range was gone. It was painful and embarrassing. I was doing the MusiCares tribute to Bon Jovi [in February 2024] and my voice was gone and I knew it. I was singing ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ on stage, and I looked down and there’s Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney all staring at me, and I knew that I had to sing in front of them with a busted voice.” He pauses and sighs. The sense of humiliation is palpable.
“You know, I did it,” he continues after a few seconds. “I did my best, and it was not good. And then after that I started working with this coach, and it made a huge difference. I figured out that I hadn’t been singing in a way that was anatomically correct. I’d been squeezing and pushing all these notes out, and [the coach] was good enough to manage to keep my vocal quality the same; I didn’t have to change the way I sounded, I just gained a wider range and a lot more stability. Now I’m able to sing more shows in a row without having vocal trouble. It’s been really, really nice.” He pauses again, this time to laugh. “And I made fun of people for so many years for blowing bubbles and, you know, doing all the lip trills and everything backstage … but here I am doing it myself.”
While recording sans band, Isbell said, “I liked the fact that if I messed up, I could just stop and immediately try another take.”
Isbell’s voice has made gains in both upper and lower range, as the Foxes in the Snow ballad “Eileen” demonstrates. In a clever touch, he pairs an unusually deep vocal part with a high, chimey guitar line, produced by placing a capo on the 0-17’s 5th fret. “Now that I’ve learned how to sing after just hollering for my whole career, I’ve got the ability to support a vocal in that low a key,” he says. “Having a vocal coach made it possible for me to sing a song like that. And the 5th-fret capo is a little tricky sonically, too. People usually go between two and four [the 2nd and 4th frets]. At least I do. Matter of fact, when I was a kid, my grandfather didn’t like for me to capo up over the third fret. I remember he’d tell me that would damage the guitar. I’ve never found a way that it would damage the guitar,” he adds with a grin. “I think it just irritated him.”
“My grandfather didn’t like for me to capo up over the third fret. I remember he’d tell me that would damage the guitar.”
Growing up in northern Alabama in the 1980s, Isbell took to music in large part because of his multi-instrumentalist grandfather. “He was a Pentecostal preacher, and he played every day. When I’d stay over with him, he’d play mandolin or banjo, fiddle sometimes, and I would have to play rhythm guitar. And then my dad’s brother, who’s a lot closer to my age, had a rock band. He taught me to play the electric guitar and rock ’n’ roll songs. I feel like I just got lucky that I loved it so much. That’s really at the heart of it—the fact that I’ve never had to sit down and practice because I just think about it all the time.”
Isbell is typically found onstage with his fleet of electric guitars, including vintage Telecasters, Les Pauls, Stratocasters, and his ’59 Gretsch Jet Firebird with a Bigsby.
Photo by Matt Condon
This is not to say that Isbell doesn’t practice; quite the contrary. Indeed, one of the most moving segments of Sam Jones’ excellent 2023 documentary on Isbell for HBO, Running With Our Eyes Closed, is when he recalls just how crucial practicing became to him as a child. The guitar was a refuge, a way to literally drown out his parents’ vicious arguments in the next room. (Another poignant aspect of Jones’ film, shot mostly in 2019 and 2020, is the delicacy with which it captures the often tenuous state of the Isbell/Shires relationship, prefiguring their breakup.)
When asked what exactly it is about the guitar that makes it so special to him, Isbell doesn’t hesitate. “The guitar is the best instrument,” he says. “It’s the smallest, most portable instrument that you can make full chords on. You can’t take a piano to a dinner party, you can’t accompany yourself on a clarinet, and you need something that’s big enough to where the volume of it can fill a room. In the days when everyone had acoustic instruments, like in the 1920s, there was nothing else like the guitar that you could carry on your back and travel from place to place and entertain people with."
“I realized pretty early on in the solo experiment that when you’re playing with the band, you don’t have a chance to work with tempo or volume in the same way.”
With that question answered, all that remains is to inquire, now that Isbell’s done the solo acoustic thing once—both in the studio for Foxes in the Snow and live for his tour to promote the album—whether he’d ever consider doing it again. “I don’t see why not,” he responds. “It’s not in any kind of plan right now, but I enjoyed the challenge of it. And I think anything that makes me turn off the ‘Don’t fuck this up’ switch is good for me, because if you sit there and spend the whole time thinking, ‘Don’t fuck this up,’ you’re not ever gonna get into that zone where you’re communicating with the work, and you’re not ever gonna get to a point where you can deliver it comfortably. This has been a really good opportunity for me to just practice letting all of that go.
“Obviously I miss the horsepower of the band,” he adds. “I miss the people individually, being on stage and communicating musically with them. But I realized pretty early on in the solo experiment that when you’re playing with the band, you don’t have a chance to work with tempo or volume in the same way. Usually you’re just trying to count a song off at the same tempo you recorded it in or the way you’ve been playing it lately, but when it’s just me, I can intentionally speed up and slow down within a song. And with respect to the volume, I can drop the bottom out soquickly, whereas it’s more like steering a ship when I’ve got the whole band up there—it happens more slowly, no matter how good they are. I would not enjoy this as much if I had to do it all the time,” he concludes. “But it’s nice to have both sides.”YouTube It
In this version of “Ride to Robert’s,” Jason Isbell demonstrates the flexibility of playing solo by picking up the tempo of this song from Foxes in the Snow.
