
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.
We chat with Molly about Sister Rosetta’s “immediately impressive” playing, which blends jazz, gospel, chromaticism, and blues into an early rock ‘n’ roll style that was not only way ahead of its time but was also truly rockin’.
In the early ’60s, some of the British guitarists who would shape the direction of our instrument for decades to come all found themselves at a concert by Sister Rosetta Tharpe. What they heard from Tharpe and what made her performances so special—her sound, her energy—must have resonated. Back at home in the U.S., she was a captivating presence, wowing audiences going back to her early days in church through performing the first stadium rock ‘n’ roll concert—which was also one of her weddings—and beyond. Her guitar playing was incendiary, energetic, and a force to be reckoned with.
On this episode of 100 Guitarists, we’re joined by guitarist Molly Miller, who in addition to being a fantastic guitarist, educator, bandleader, and performing with Jason Mraz, is a bit of a Sister Rosetta scholar. We chat with Molly about Sister Rosetta’s “immediately impressive” playing, which blends jazz, gospel, chromaticism, and blues into an early rock ‘n’ roll style that was not only way ahead of its time but was also truly rockin’.
PG's demo master quickly (and easily) drops in an H-S-S setup into his 1994 40th Anniversary Stratocaster that needed help. Find out what happens when gets his first taste of active pickups.
EMG SL20 Steve Lukather Signature Pre-wired Pickguard with 3 Pickups - Black Pearl
SL20 Steve Lukather Pre-wired PG - Blk PearlBarry Little’s onstage rig.
How you want to sound and what makes you happy are both highly subjective. When it comes to packing and playing gear for shows, let those considerations be your guide.
I was recently corresponding with Barry Little, aPG reader from Indiana, Pennsylvania, about “the One”—that special guitar that lets us play, and even feel, better when it’s in our hands. We got talking about the gear we bring to gigs, and Barry sent me the photo that appears with this column.
“I’m mostly old school and take quite the amp rig, and usually two or three Strats or ‘super strats,’ plus some Teles,” he wrote. “Some are in different tunings.” Barry also has a rack, built with famed guitar-rig designer Bob Bradshaw’s help, that he says holds a Bad Cat preamp bearing serial number one. For his ’70s/’80s rock outfit and his country band, this covers the waterfront.
I love Barry’s rig; it looks awesome! So … why do I feel guilty about the substantial amount of gear I take to gigs where my five-piece band will be playing a concert-length set? Onstage, my setup looks fantastic—at least to me. It’s the gear I’ve always wanted. But packed inside cases and ready to load into the Honda Odyssey with a rooftop carrier that all five of us and our instruments travel in for away dates … it seems excessive. Currently, I take three guitars: my customized reissue Fender Esquire “Dollycaster,” my Zuzu one-off Green Monster, and a Supro Conquistador, plus a 1-string electric diddley bow made from a crawfish-boiling pot. They start every show in open G octave (D–G–D–G–D–G), open D, standard tuning, and A, respectively. There’s also a Sony GLXD6+ wireless, and a pedalboard with 13 effects stomps, a tuner, and two power boxes, along with a Brown Box. That board is the launchpad for the stereo signal that runs into two Carr 1x12 combos: a Vincent and a Telstar. In addition, there’s a big black bag with spare cables, fuses, capos, strings, extension cords, microphones, straps, duct tape, and just about anything else you might need. After all that, miraculously, there is also room for my bandmates–another guitarist, bass, drums, and theremin—and their gear, plus light luggage.
I admit that’s a lot, but it used to be more—at least by the pound. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, I often played through two Marshall 4x12s with a Mesa/Boogie Duel Rectifier Trem-O-Verb on one and a ’72 Marshall Super Lead atop the other. And before that, it was the Marshall with a 4x12 plus a ’66 Fender Twin Reverb. I kept a waist back-support belt in the van, but spent a decent chunk of that era living with regular back pain.
“I admit that’s a lot, but it used to be more—at least by the pound.”
Where am I going with this? Besides a desire for you to absolve me of my guilt, I feel like all of this gear is … um … necessary? It’s the recipe for the sound I want to hear, for the versatility of the material, and for me to play from my happiest place—onstage in the middle of a glorious stereo field of my own making. It’s not really about gear and it’s not about somebody else’s definition of practicality. It’s about joy. Ideally, you should be able to bring whatever gives you joy to a gig. Period.
Sure, naysayers will yap that after a guitar, a cable, and an amp, nothing else is necessary. And on a certain misguided, intolerant level, they are right. We can all play a show with just the basics, but I, for one, don’t want to—unless maybe it’s a solo gig. Neither did Jimi Hendrix. There is a universe of tones out there waiting to be discovered and explored. There are improvisational paths that only a pedalboard can suggest. (Of course, if you’re playing a small stage, traveling in too tight quarters, or claiming turf that impinges on bandmates, those considerations apply. “Be kind” is a good rule of thumb for life, including band life.)
Remember, the naysayers are not in your bones, and onlyyour bones know what you need and want. Don’t let the voices—even in your own head—nag you. (I, too, must take this advice to heart.) Bring whatever you want to bring to gigs, as long as you can get it there. Do it guiltlessly. Have fun. And listen to your bones.Kim Deal on Failure: “There’s a Sweetness to Seeing Somebody Get Their Ass Kicked"
While creating her new solo record, Kim Deal was drawn to exploring the idea of failure.
The veteran musician and songwriter steps into the spotlight with Nobody Loves You More, a long-in-the-making solo record driven by loss, defeat, and friendship.
While Kim Deal was making her new album, she was intrigued with the idea of failure. Deal found the work of Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared at sea in 1975 while attempting to sail by himself from the U.S. to England in a 13-foot sailboat. His boat was discovered wrecked off the southern coast of Ireland in April 1976, 10 months after Ader departed the Massachusetts coast. Ader’s wife took one of the last photos of him as he set off on the doomed journey from Chatham Harbor: Ader, wearing a blue tracksuit and a bright orange life jacket cinched around his neck, is beaming.
Deal isn’t smiling on the cover of Nobody Loves You More, her new album, but the art bears some similarities: Deal is floating on a platform in an expanse of gentle, dark blue waves, accompanied only by a few pastel-colored amps, her guitar, a stool, and a flamingo. It’s an unmistakably lonely image, but for Deal, failure doesn’t mean loneliness. It’s not even necessarily a bad thing.
“I mean, at least something magnificent was tried, you know?” says Deal. “At least there was something to fail. That’s an endearing thing. I think there’s a sweetness to seeing somebody get their ass kicked, because they were in it. It warms my heart to see that, just people getting out there. Maybe it gives me the courage and confidence to try something. It’s okay if I get my butt kicked. At least you’re trying something.”
“I think there’s a sweetness to seeing somebody get their fucking ass kicked, because they were fucking in it.”
Nobody Loves You More feels at least a little like Van Ader’s journey: an artistic project so long in the making and so precious to its creator that they’re willing to break from all conventions and face the abject terror of being judged by the world. That might seem like nothing new for Deal, who’s played music professionally for over 35 years, first with Pixies, then with the Breeders. But this LP marks her first proper solo album under her own name—a thought that mortified her for a long time. (“I like rock bands,” she says.) Even when she recorded and released what could be called “solo” music, she released it under a pseudonym. Initially, it was to be Tammy and the Amps. “I still was so uncomfortable, so I created Tammy and the Amps,” explains Deal. “I’m Tammy, who are my band? It’s the amplifiers downstairs in my basement. But the Tammy thing sort of got on my nerves so I just dropped it, so it was called the Amps.” She also assembled a band around that concept and released Pacer under the Amps’ name in 1995.
The cover art for Nobody Loves You More echoes the doomed last voyage of Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader.
This new record hums with the soft-loud energetic alchemy that defines much of Deal’s previous works. The opening title track is a slow, romantic strummer with string arrangements, while “Coast” is faintly ska-indebted with horns and a ragged Blondie chord progression. “Crystal Breath” gets weirder, with distorted drums, synthy bass, and a detuned, spidery guitar lead. “Disobedience” and “Big Ben Beat” continue the darker and heavier trajectories with fuzzy stompers interspersed with ambient, affective interlude tracks like “Bats in the Afternoon Sky.” It’s a patient, sensitive, and unmistakably scrappy record.
Some of the songs on Nobody Loves You More are as up-close and personal as solo records get. One in particular that’s drawn attention is “Are You Mine?,” a sleepy-eyed, lullaby ballad. At first listen, it could be taken for a love song. (In fact, Deal encourages this interpretation.) But it’s a song about her mother, for whom Deal cared in her home while she died from Alzheimer’s. The song title comes from a gut-wrenching moment.
“I was in the house, she doesn’t know my name,” explains Deal. “She’s still walking, she can form words, but she doesn’t know what a daughter is or anything. She passes me in the hallway, stops, grabs my arm and says, ‘Are you mine?’ She doesn’t know my name, she doesn’t know who I am, but there was a connection. I knew she was asking if I was her baby. I said, ‘Yeah, mama, I’m yours.’ I’m sure five seconds later, she forgot that conversation even happened. It was just a flicker, but it was so sweet. To have her not see me in so long, and then for one brief second, be recognized in some capacity…. She was such a sweet lady.”
Deal’s mother wasn’t the only loss that went into this collection of songs. Her father passed, too, after a prolonged illness. “My dad was this big bravado sort of personality and watching them get extinguished a little bit every day… I don’t know,” she says. “They both died at home. I’m very proud of that.” But writing “Are You Mine?” wasn’t painful for Deal; she says it was a comforting experience writing the gentle arpeggio on her Candelas nylon-string acoustic.
Deal assembled the bulk of Nobody Loves You More in her Dayton, Ohio, basement, recording with Pro Tools and a particularly pleasing Electrodyne microphone preamp. (Some of the songs date back more than a decade—versions of “Are You Mine?” and “Wish I Was” were initially recorded in 2011 and released as part of a series of 7" singles.) Deal recorded a good part of the record’s drums, bass, and guitar from home, but other contributions came in fits and spurts over the years, from old faces and new. Her Breeders bandmates, including Mando Lopez, Jim MacPherson, Britt Walford, and sister Kelley Deal, all pitched in, as did Fay Milton and Ayse Hassan from British post-punk band Savages, and the Raconteurs’ Jack Lawrence.
Kim Deal cared for her parents in their Dayton, Ohio, home until their passing, an experience that colors the music on her new solo record.
Photo by Steve Gullick
Kim Deal's Gear
Guitars
- '90s Fender Stratocaster
- '70s goldtop Gibson Les Paul
- Candelas nylon-string acoustic
Amps
- Marshall JCM900
- 4x12 cabinet
- Kalamazoo combo
Strings & Picks
- .011-gauge strings
- Dunlop Tortex Standard .60 mm
One day, ex-Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Josh Klinghoffer stopped by the studio to see what Deal was working on. He listened to “Wish I Was,” and scrambled together a lead idea. Deal kept the part and expanded it over time, leading to Klinghoffer’s writing credit on the record.
Deal used her trademark red ’90s Fender Stratocaster HSS along with a ’70s goldtop Gibson Les Paul for most of the electric work, pumped through either her long-time Marshall JCM900 or a tiny vintage Kalamazoo combo. Deal has never been a gearhead—at one point on our video call, she uses a tooth flosser as a pick to demonstrate some parts on her Candelas. “Kelley is a pedal person,” she says. “I’m not doing leads. I’m just doing a rhythm that needs to sound good.”
“I don’t think I’m taking it very well still, actually, or I’m a sociopath because I don’t even talk about [Steve Albini] in the past tense.”Over the years, Deal’s sonic thumbprint has been tied up in the work of her good friend and frequent collaborator Steve Albini, the producer, engineer, and musician who died unexpectedly in May 2024. (Deal quips, “Steve’s the lead character in my own life.”) Albini and Deal began working together in 1988, on Pixies’ debut LP Surfer Rosa. Their friendship continued over decades—Deal even performed at Albini’s wedding in Hawaii, for which he gifted her a ukulele—and the final sessions for Nobody Loves You More were under Albini’s watch. His parting hasn’t been easy.
“I got a text: ‘Call me,’” remembers Deal. It was a mutual friend, telling Deal that Albini had passed. “He told me and I just said, ‘You’re absolutely wrong. That didn’t happen.’ I don’t think I’m taking it very well still, actually. I don’t even talk about him in the past tense. I say, ‘What he likes to do is this.’ I never think, ‘What Steve used to like to do.’ My head never goes there. I wanted to record a song that wasn’t working and I said, ‘I need to do it from top to bottom at Albini’s.’ That’s not going to happen.”
YouTube
Along with Rob Bochnik and Spencer Tweedy, Kim Deal plays two tracks from Nobody Loves You More for a holiday fundraiser in November 2024 in Chicago.