
The Jeff Tweedy collaborator and rising-star chef cooks up a debut of clever, well-crafted tunes inspired by Bowie, Al Green, and the practical concerns of a gigging musician.
"You know, you go into a venue and you're like, 'I know what this place is going to sound like.' Within seconds of hearing the room, you're making adjustments and rolling with the punches of whatever space you're in," explains singer/songwriter Liam Kazar. "That, I feel like, I've definitely taken into food."
When we spoke, Kazar was in the middle of a big 2021. After years on the road as a side musician for artists such as Jeff Tweedy and Steve Gunn, and as a member of the bands Kids These Days and Marrow, he was about to strike out on his own with Due North, his debut solo record.
Due North is an excellent showcase of Kazar's preternatural songwriting. The dry and bouncy groove of "So Long Tomorrow" kicks things off, driven by tight acoustic guitar and funky electric piano, with Kazar's plainspoken voice offering moody counterpoint. Within a couple tracks, it's easy to parse out such influences as Bowie, David Byrne, and George Harrison, all strong flavors that are a feat just to evoke. But what makes Due North an impressive accomplishment is that these sounds never overpower Kazar's own vision. Instead, they coalesce to form the kind of musical whole that is rare on a debut and is surely evidence of great things to come.
Liam Kazar - Frank Bacon (Official Music Video)
But Kazar recently found a new creative outlet and business opportunity when, faced with the early pandemic's dearth of gigs, he turned to his lifelong love of cooking. After taking a culinary deep-dive into his Armenian heritage and cooking his way through recipes found in books and on YouTube, the songwriter wanted to share his food outside of his home. With some posts on Instagram, his Kansas City kitchen quickly became one of the best kept secrets in the culinary world. "I had this ethos of 'I am not waiting for shit to come back. I'm gonna stay right here, right now,'" he says. "The idea of cooking out of my house and selling meals seemed like a good use of my time. I announced it on Instagram in January as a casual thing."
Named Isfahan—after the city in Iran and his favorite Duke Ellington tune—Kazar's side-project quickly became its own dedicated hustle. When the Chicago Eater took notice, business exploded. "I was thinking I would do it just to stay busy and break even, and that went crazy from there," he says. Isfahan has since appeared in The New York Times Style Magazine, and, thanks to this attention, started travelling around the country to run pop-up food events.
I can't work on music at all when I'm doing cooking stuff, which is a bummer, because I'd like to be able to do a couple hours here, a couple hours there.
This is the kind of recognition that a chef could build a successful career on. But when we talked, Kazar had just finished up a series of events in the Northeast and was re-focusing on music in preparation for the release of Due North. It's not that he's hanging up cooking. He'll be back at it shortly. Kazar is simply an artist who has learned his limits and knows that a single-minded focus is what has made both his music and food so special.
"I can't work on music at all when I'm doing cooking stuff, which is a bummer because I'd like to be able to do a couple hours here, a couple hours there," he says. "That's why I would never even consider brick-and-mortar with the cooking thing, because I know I'd never write a song again. I have to do self-imposed breaks with cooking."
Deep Roots and Pragmatic Concerns
The story of Due North stretches all the way back to Kazar's roots growing up in Chicago. He lived around the corner from the Tweedy family and became friends with Spencer Tweedy at around age 10. Since then, he has been close with the Tweedys and even spent time living in their house. Back in high school, when the young songwriter formed Kids These Days—an eight-piece unit where he played R&B-style rhythm guitar and served as lead songwriter and vocalist alongside fellow Chicago music scene up-and-comer Macie Stewart [now of Ohmme]—Spencer's dad, Jeff, served as a mentor and helped the band with recordings.
TIDBIT: Kazar recorded Due North at Foxhall Studio, which is run by his sister, Ohmme's Sima Cunningham, and her partner, Dorian Gehring. Kazar says, "I mostly engineered the record. I would do a bunch, it would get messy, and Dorian would come in and make it nice and neat and fix it all up. Spencer [Tweedy] did a lot as well, particularly miking his own drums."
Jeff went on to hire Kazar to play guitar and keys in the band Tweedy—which includes Spencer on drums—and took him on the road, where he gained loads of inspiration and learned deep musical lessons. "Jeff's acoustic guitar playing, his rhythm guitar playing, is a big influence on me," Kazar shares. "The whole song is there in his guitar and everyone's just sort of hopping onboard. The engine is his right hand. Spencer is so tuned into Jeff's right hand. He has live solo arrangements and you figure out how to fit into that. Don't worry about what's on the record. It's a whole thing that he's figured out how to translate live and you figure out how to fit into that. That was a huge influence on me—watching how he builds the song on acoustic guitar."
Tweedy helped Kazar begin to conceptualize just what his solo music should sound like. "When I started thinking about making a solo record, Jeff pointed out to me, 'It sounds like you're writing for other people and you're not writing for yourself,'" he details. "That was a huge moment of, 'Oh shit, I need to go figure out who I am,' so I could write for myself."
Jeff's acoustic guitar playing, his rhythm guitar playing, is a big influence on me.
Kazar estimates that process took about a year-and-a-half of considering the possibilities as he waded through a bevy of influences, from various country artists to Al Green's The Belle Album to Bowie's Berlin Trilogy. This seemed like an overwhelming task at first, but he found help close at hand from fellow Tweedy band member James Elkington, who would go on to produce the album.
Kazar explains: "After the show, Jeff might hit the hay or whatever kind of quickly, and he [Elkington] and I would start talking. He was just so invested in whatever I was trying to do." These talks helped the young songwriter suss out how to navigate his inspirations and successfully find his own voice.
Liam Kazar's Gear
Kazar's go-to electric is an early 2000s Tele, souped-up with a pair of Seymour Duncans and a Bigsby, which he pairs with a simple set of pedals and a Fender Deluxe Reverb.
Photo by Hannah Sellers
Guitars
Amps
- Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb Reissue
Effects
- JHS Colour Box
- MXR Carbon Copy
- Xotic EP Booster
Strings and Picks
- .010 sets on electric, no brand preference
- .012 sets on acoustic, no brand preference
- Dunlop 1.0 mm Tortex picks
Another big inspiration was a practical lesson from his experience as a side musician. "I have done so many one-offs where I'm playing people's music where they flew into town and they need a band and I need to get 15 songs in my head with one rehearsal," he says. Kazar realized that as a young solo artist, his own roster of collaborators could be in constant flux, so he chose to leave space in his songs for musicians to contribute their own voices, which meant not overwriting or over-arranging. "I should be able to show anyone a song in one minute," he explains. "There's a couple tunes that are a little annoying to get right. But 90 percent of the record, I can talk you through the song in a minute."
Simple Ingredients
Kazar's voice and songwriting take center stage on Due North, but his guitar playing really helps sell it. "The stuff that piques my ear on records now is really oddball rhythmic guitar playing," he enthuses, noting that his favorite player these days is longtime Bowie guitarist Carlos Alomar. "I'm always looking at what he's doing. I respect the Fripp stuff and the Adrian Belew stuff, but it's not who I am. I'm trying to be the lead singer. I find it much more valuable for me as a songwriter to deep-dive down what Carlos Alomar is doing with a two-chord song. He's an incredible guitar player and everything he did from Young Americans through Scary Monsters is my peak R&B style guitar playing."
I find it much more valuable for me as a songwriter to deep-dive down what Carlos Alomar is doing with a two-chord song.
For his own funky electric guitar sound, Kazar uses an early-2000s Mexico-made Tele with a Seymour Duncan P-90-style pickup in the neck and a Seymour Duncan Tele bridge pickup, and a Bigsby. His signal chain is simple and most commonly includes only an MXR Carbon Copy and a JHS Colour Box, which he employs for leads on songs such as "Shoes Too Tight" and "So Long Tomorrow." He keeps an Xotic EP Booster nearby, which he calls a "contingency plan if I can't get my amp to sound right or if my amp is having a bad day, as they do. I'll just set that right and leave it on the whole show."
For practical reasons, Kazar uses a Fender Deluxe Reverb. "At some point, I was like 'This is the amp that people are handing me anyway, so I might as well learn how to use this thing,' and that's what I did, and I love it. I know how to get the Deluxe to do what I want to do."
For live shows, Kazar keeps his gear as simple as possible, down to the mic stand. "I started using a straight stand," he says, and adds that it allows him to go "as far to the front of the stage as I can."
Photo by Alexa Viscius
He cites Al Green's guitar playing on The Belle Album as the inspiration for much of the acoustic work on Due North. "The acoustic at the beginning of 'Shoes Too Tight' or all of that chugga-lugga stuff that I'm doing on a lot of the songs—that was me trying to mimic that sound." For that sound, he reached for a Yamaha FG-110E, as well as a Martin 00-18 for "the country folk sort of vibe" on the songs "No Time For Eternity," "I've Been Where You Are," and "On a Spanish Dune." Live, Kazar uses a 1971 Gibson LG-1 that he's owned since he was 14 years old, although it didn't make it onto the record. "It's still what I write everything on," he notes, "it just doesn't record the way I want it to for that sound, so I don't use it in the studio, but I'll use that live."
This refined set of tools allows Kazar to focus on the things that matter most while performing and recording. "It comes from wanting to be the lead singer guy in the band. That's what I want to be doing with this solo stuff. That's the goal: to focus on me singing to the audience, and the guitar playing, the gear, is all out of sight."
For Kazar, keeping things simple and having an open mind fuels the creative process—and if there's one thing that applies to all parts of his creative life, musical or culinary, this seems to be it. "A recipe is essentially an idea. A song is also an idea, or at least that's the way I think about them," he muses. "I feel like I respect that fact by allowing myself to be surprised by a dish based on what oven I'm cooking it in or what prep cook prepped it with me—what their skill set was. That's really similar to a song that you're playing with some new musicians, and just letting it be what it is, and finding the beauty of that."
“Shoes Too Tight” by Liam Kazar - Union Pool, Brooklyn, NY, August 31, 2021
This bouncy trio version of "Shoes Too Tight" has it all: tight but airy grooves courtesy of a well-tuned and responsive rhythm section, and searing, tasteful leads from Kazar's Rickenbacker.
Whitman Audio introduces the Decoherence Drive and Wave Collapse Fuzz, two innovative guitar pedals designed to push the boundaries of sound exploration. With unique features like cascading gain stages and vintage silicon transistor fuzz, these pedals offer musicians a new path to sonic creativity.
Whitman Audio, a new audio effects company, has launched with two cutting-edge guitar pedals, the Decoherence drive and Wave Collapse fuzz. Combining science and art to craft audio effects devices, Whitman Audio aims to transcend the ordinary, believing that magic can occur when the right musician meets the right tool.
Delivering a solution for musicians looking to explore a wide range of sounds, each pedal offers a unique path to finding your own voice. The Decoherence drive injects a universe of unique saturation into your music arsenal while the Wave Collapse fuzz takes you to uncharted sonic territories.
Decoherence features include:
- Cascading stages (Gain A > Gain B) each with a unique sound and saturation character
- Gain A - Medium to high gain stage with a mid focus for clear articulation and punch
- Gain B - Low to Medium gain with a neutral EQ that compliments and expands Gain A
- G/S Toggle - Selects the clipping diodes for Gain B (NOS Germanium or NOS Silicon)
- Tone Knobs (H & L) - Tuned active Baxendall style EQs that boost or cut Highs and Lows
- True bypass switching, accepts standard 9V DC power supplies (does not accept battery)
Introducing: Decoherence Drive - YouTube
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.Wave Collapse features include:
- Vintage Silicon transistor fuzz that goes from vintage clean to doom metal mean
- Buffered input and pickup simulation ensure it sounds great anywhere in your chain
- Bias Knob - Allows for a huge range of texture and response in the pedals gain structure
- Range and Mass Toggles - Provide easy access to three diverse bass and gain ranges
- Filter Knob - A simple-to-use tilt EQ enhanced by the Center toggle for two mid responses
- True bypass switching, accepts standard 9V DC power supplies (does not accept battery)
The Decoherence drive and Wave Collapse fuzz pedals carry retail prices of $195.00 each.
For more information, please visit whitmanaudio.com.
Introducing: Wave Collapse Fuzz - YouTube
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.With authentic stage-class Katana amp sounds, wireless music streaming, and advanced spatial technology, the KATANA:GO is designed to offer a premium sound experience without the need for amps or pedals.
BOSS announces the return of KATANA:GO, an ultra-compact headphone amplifier for daily jams with a guitar or bass. KATANA:GO puts authentic sounds from the stage-class BOSS Katana amp series at the instrument’s output jack, paired with wireless music streaming, sound editing, and learning tools on the user’s smartphone. Advanced spatial technology provides a rich 3D audio experience, while BOSS Tone Exchange offers an infinite sound library to explore any musical style.
Offering all the features of the previous generation in a refreshed external design, KATANA:GO delivers premium sound for everyday playing without the hassle of amps, pedals, and computer interfaces. Users can simply plug it into their instrument, connect earbuds or headphones, call up a memory, and go. Onboard controls provide access to volume, memory selection, and other essential functions, while the built-in screen displays the tuner and current memory. The rechargeable battery offers up to five hours of continuous playing time, and the integrated 1/4-inch plug folds down to create a pocket-size package that’s ready to travel anywhere.
KATANA:GO drives sessions with genuine sounds from the best-selling Katana stage amp series. Guitar mode features 10 unique amp characters, including clean, crunch, the high-gain BOSS Brown type, two acoustic/electric guitar characters, and more. There’s also a dedicated bass mode with Vintage, Modern, and Flat types directly ported from the Katana Bass amplifiers. Each mode includes a massive library of BOSS effects to explore, with deep sound customization available in the companion BOSS Tone Studio app for iOS and Android.
The innovative Stage Feel feature in KATANA:GO provides an immersive audio experience with advanced BOSS spatial technology. Presets allow the user to position the amp sound and backing music in different places in the sound field, giving the impression of playing with a backline on stage or jamming in a room with friends.
The guitar and bass modes in KATANA:GO each feature 30 memories loaded with ready-to-play sounds. BOSS Tone Studio allows the player to tweak preset memories, create sounds from scratch, or import Tone Setting memories created with stage-class Katana guitar and bass amplifiers. The app also provides integrated access to BOSS Tone Exchange, where users can download professionally curated Livesets and share sounds with the global BOSS community.
Pairing KATANA:GO with a smartphone offers a complete mobile solution to supercharge daily practice. Players can jam along with songs from their music library and tap into BOSS Tone Studio’s Session feature to hone skills with YouTube learning content. It’s possible to build song lists, loop sections for focused study, and set timestamps to have KATANA:GO switch memories automatically while playing with YouTube backing tracks.
The versatile KATANA:GO functions as a USB audio interface for music production and online content creation on a computer or mobile device. External control of wah, volume, memory selection, and more are also supported via the optional EV-1-WL Wireless MIDI Expression Pedal and FS-1-WL Wireless Footswitch.
For more information, please visit boss.info.
In our third installment with Santa Cruz Guitar Company founder Richard Hoover, the master luthier shows PG's John Bohlinger how his team of builders assemble and construct guitars like a chef preparing food pairings. Hoover explains that the finer details like binding, headstock size and shape, internal bracing, and adhesives are critical players in shaping an instrument's sound. Finally, Richard explains how SCGC uses every inch of wood for making acoustic guitars or outside ventures like surfboards and art.
We know Horsegirl as a band of musicians, but their friendships will always come before the music. From left to right: Nora Cheng, drummer Gigi Reece, and Penelope Lowenstein.
The Chicago-via-New York trio of best friends reinterpret the best bits of college-rock and ’90s indie on their new record, Phonetics On and On.
Horsegirl guitarists Nora Cheng and Penelope Lowenstein are back in their hometown of Chicago during winter break from New York University, where they share an apartment with drummer Gigi Reece. They’re both in the middle of writing papers. Cheng is working on one about Buckminster Fuller for a city planning class, and Lowenstein is untangling Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s short story, “Three Paths to the Lake.”
“It was kind of life-changing, honestly. It changed how I thought about womanhood,” Lowenstein says over the call, laughing a bit at the gravitas of the statement.
But the moment of levity illuminates the fact that big things are happening in their lives. When they released their debut album, 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance, the three members of Horsegirl were still teenagers in high school. Their new, sophomore record, Phonetics On and On, arrives right in the middle of numerous first experiences—their first time living away from home, first loves, first years of their 20s, in university. Horsegirl is going through changes. Lowenstein notes how, through moving to a new city, their friendship has grown, too, into something more familial. They rely on each other more.
“If the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band, without any doubt.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“Everyone's cooking together, you take each other to the doctor,” Lowenstein says. “You rely on each other for weird things. I think transitioning from being teenage friends to suddenly working together, touring together, writing together in this really intimate creative relationship, going through sort of an unusual experience together at a young age, and then also starting school together—I just feel like it brings this insane intimacy that we work really hard to maintain. And if the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band without any doubt.”
Horsegirl recorded their sophomore LP, Phonetics On and On, at Wilco’s The Loft studio in their hometown, Chicago.
These changes also include subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in their sophisticated and artful guitar-pop. Versions of Modern Performance created a notion of the band as ’90s college-rock torchbearers, with reverb-and-distortion-drenched numbers that recalled Yo La Tengo and the Breeders. Phonetics On and On doesn’t extinguish the flame, but it’s markedly more contemporary, sacrificing none of the catchiness but opting for more space, hypnotic guitar lines, and meditative, repeated phrases. Cheng and Lowenstein credit Welsh art-pop wiz Cate Le Bon’s presence as producer in the studio as essential to the sonic direction.
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little.”–Nora Cheng
“We had never really let a fourth person into our writing process,” Cheng says. “I feel like Cate really changed the way we think about how you can compose a song, and built off ideas we were already thinking about, and just created this very comfortable space for experimentation and pushed us. There are so many weird instruments and things that aren't even instruments at [Wilco’s Chicago studio] The Loft. I feel like, definitely on our first record, we were super hesitant to go into territory that wasn't just distorted guitar, bass, and drums.”
Nora Cheng's Gear
Nora Cheng says that letting a fourth person—Welsh artist Cate Le Bon—into the trio’s songwriting changed how they thought about composition.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Devices Plumes
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- TC Electronic Polytune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex .73 mm
Phonetics On and On introduces warm synths (“Julie”), raw-sounding violin (“In Twos”), and gamelan tiles—common in traditional Indonesian music—to Horsegirl’s repertoire, and expands on their already deep quiver of guitar sounds as Cheng and Lowenstein branch into frenetic squonks, warped jangles, and jagged, bare-bones riffs. The result is a collection of songs simultaneously densely textured and spacious.
“I listen to these songs and I feel like it captures the raw, creative energy of being in the studio and being like, ‘Fuck! We just exploded the song. What is about to happen?’” Lowenstein says. “That feeling is something we didn’t have on the first record because we knew exactly what we wanted to capture and it was the songs we had written in my parents’ basement.”
Cheng was first introduced to classical guitar as a kid by her dad, who tried to teach her, and then she was subsequently drawn back to rock by bands like Cage The Elephant and Arcade Fire. Lowenstein started playing at age 6, which covers most of her life memories and comprises a large part of her identity. “It made me feel really powerful as a young girl to know that I was a very proficient guitarist,” she says. The shreddy playing of Television, Pink Floyd’s spacey guitar solos, and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan were all integral to her as Horsegirl began.
Penelope Lowenstein's Gear
Penelope Lowenstein likes looking back at the versions of herself that made older records.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Westwood
- EarthQuaker Bellows
- TC Electronic PolyTune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex 1.0 mm
Recently, the two of them have found themselves influenced by guitarists both related and unrelated to the type of tunes they’re trading in on their new album. Lowenstein got into Brazilian guitar during the pandemic and has recently been “in a Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey zone.”
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument,” Lowenstein says. “And hearing what the bass in those guitar parts is doing—as in, the E string—is kind of mind blowing.”
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little,” Cheng adds. “And also Lizzy Mercier [Descloux], mostly on the Rosa Yemen records. That guitar playing I feel was very inspiring for the anti-solo,[a technique] which appears on [Phonetics On and On].”This flurry of focused discovery gives the impression that Cheng and Lowenstein’s sensibilities are shifting day-to-day, buoyed by the incredible expansion of creative possibilities that setting one’s life to revolve around music can afford. And, of course, the energy and exponential growth of youth. Horsegirl has already clocked major stylistic shifts in their brief lifespan, and it’s exciting to have such a clear glimpse of evolution in artists who are, likely and hopefully, just beginning a long journey together.
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“In your 20s, life moves so fast,” Lowenstein says. “So much changes from the time of recording something to releasing something that even that process is so strange. You recognize yourself, and you also kind of sympathize with yourself. It's a really rewarding way of life, I think, for musicians, and it's cool that we have our teenage years captured like that, too—on and on until we're old women.”
YouTube It
Last summer, Horsegirl gathered at a Chicago studio space to record a sun-soaked set of new and old tunes.