In contrast to her new solo album, the music of Screaming Females—especially live—brings the bristling energy and punk/riot grrrl roots of Paternoster to the fore.
The Screaming Females guitarist delves into haunting acoustic/electronic songwriting on her solo album Peace Meter, expanding her sonic palette and typically raging approach—but not without the help of her musical community.
Before she released seven full-length albums with her punk band Screaming Females, another four under her solo moniker Noun, and was listed as one of SPIN’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time,” singer/songwriter Marissa Paternoster didn’t have much hope for musical success.
“I spent a lot, if not all, of my teenage years being very afraid,” she shares. “I thought because of my gender, and then knowing full well that I was gay, that those things were going to keep me from ever being in a band or just being happy. I felt trapped.”
But the all-consuming urge to play guitar and be in a band kept her going. She absorbed every Smashing Pumpkins riff possible at her childhood home in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and then discovered the anarchic punk women of the ’90s riot grrrl scene—which changed everything. She thought, “They exist, they’re out there. Maybe there is this little, tiny chance that I can find those people too.”
Marissa Paternoster - Peace Meter [FULL ALBUM STREAM]
Today, Paternoster has long since found her niche, her people, and her voice. This past December she released Peace Meter, her first album under her own name, co-produced by Andy Gibbs (of Thou) and featuring Shanna Polley (leader of Snakeskin) on background vocals and Kate Wakefield (of the duo Lung) on cello. She says it might as well be a continuation of Noun, and that the main reason that it’s under her name is because it’s more searchable, she laughs, but it does seem like a benchmark in her career. The concise, 31-minute, nine-track album is inexplicably new. It’s subtly supernatural, with Paternoster’s haunting vocals carrying through an acoustic/electronic folk realm, articulating an unfamiliar yet comforting sense of calm.
The project was conceived at the beginning of the pandemic when Paternoster found herself alone in her deceased grandmother’s home and began crafting and sharing her work with Gibbs remotely. In the beginning, she wasn’t sure it was going to become anything, but the more the two collaborated, the more she saw it going somewhere. Maybe it’s the quality of her voice, or maybe it’s the delay effects, or the ineffable chemistry between Paternoster, Gibbs, Polley, and Wakefield, but Peace Meter somehow fills a void none of us knew existed.
“I thought because of my gender, and then knowing full well that I was gay, that those things were going to keep me from ever being in a band or just being happy. I felt trapped.”
In March 2020, Screaming Females was nearly at the end of their tour with Canadian rock band PUP when the rise of the pandemic forced them to cancel their final dates in California. The group then drove their rental gear back to Los Angeles from Eugene, Oregon, and flew home—with Paternoster heading to her grandmother’s house in Union, New Jersey, to be close to her father.
She immediately set up her recording gear in the basement and began making music “like I had done for my whole life,” she says. All she had with her was her Screaming Females gear and a Taylor GS Mini that was at the house. This small-bodied acoustic can be heard on the album as part of the colorful mix of real and virtual instruments underpinning her chocolatey, melismatic voice.
Marissa Paternoster's Gear
Marissa Paternoster hovers over her pedalboard with her main axe: a G&L S-500 that’s her electric workhorse. It played counterpoint to her Taylor GS Mini on Peace Meter.
Guitars
- G&L S-500
- Taylor GS Mini
Strings & Picks
- GHS strings (.009–.042)
- Dunlop Heavy Sharps
Amps
- Sunn Concert Lead
Effects
- Fulltone OCD
- Earthbound Audio Supercollider
- Klon Centaur clone
- Boss DD-6 Digital Delay
- Boss Chromatic Tuner
- TC Electronic Flashback Delay
After putting some rough ideas together, Paternoster sent a draft of “Promises”—which ended up being the last track on the album—to Gibbs, a long-time friend, and asked if he could add some electronic drums to it. (Outside of Thou, Gibbs has a serious interest in electronic production.) “I didn’t have any expectations,” she says, “but what he sent back was really beautiful. I was like, ‘Should we do more? Was this fun for you?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, let’s do more.’”
Paternoster says that the album’s production was basically a 50/50 split between her and Gibbs. He took the originally morose, down-tempo “I Lost You” and infused it with a happier, up-tempo beat—it’s the track Paternoster says she’s most proud of from the collection. Throughout the project, “he would even manipulate the vocals. He used them as an instrument that he could add modulation to, which added texture to the songs.” The weird, Cocteau Twins kind of blurred line between analog and electronic instrumentation, she says, was mostly a product of Gibbs’ influence.
“I never felt confused about what I wanted to do with my life until I discovered punk. Then I wanted to be in a band so bad I thought that if I wasn’t in a band I would die.”
Paternoster enjoys effects—a lot of them—to the point where she’s had to limit her options just to prevent herself from going overboard. “If it were up to me, there’d be phaser on everything, and that’s not good,” she laughs. “As I’ve grown as a musician, I’ve removed a lot of flangers and phasers and octave pedals from my board. Now it’s just gain-staging and a delay pedal and that’s it.”
One piece of gear that ended up being central to the album’s guitar sounds was her TC Electronic Flashback Delay pedal. “I do really like this crystal delay function that it has,” she elaborates. “It has a nice little whistle tone as the delay trails off. It’s very dreamy. You can hear that a lot on the record.”
Marissa Paternoster: “My Secret Weapon Is My Unrelenting Anxiety!”
When asked if Peace Meter is a result of Paternoster’s personal evolution as a songwriter, she shares that the real change in her life has been that she now has access to a broad network of friends, contemporaries, and peers whom she admires, and who want to work with her. “I never had that before,” she comments. She hates having the album under her name, because she says she needs other people to make music—and the project gave her the opportunity to reach out to them.
Paternoster has always felt that art was her calling, even when she was just a child who loved to draw. “There was no question in my mind that someday I was going to be an artist,” she expresses. But that aspiration shifted when she entered her teenage years and found music. “I never felt confused about what I wanted to do with my life until I discovered punk. Then I wanted to be in a band so bad I thought that if I wasn’t in a band I would die.”
TIDBIT: Paternoster’s new album is a classic Covid project—recorded remotely and crafted via file sharing. However, thanks to her haunting vocals, a wide sonic palette, and her emotional songwriting, it’s far from standard fare.
While riot grrrl taught her that she was capable of being a punk rocker, she says that the biggest influence on her guitar playing was undoubtedly Billy Corgan. Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream is still her favorite album, and it was that type of music that she used to teach herself to play when she was in high school—alongside the songs of bands like Bratmobile and Bikini Kill. Though technically demanding guitar solos didn’t exactly fit her tastes, she did feel as though she needed to learn how to improvise, despite being a songwriter at heart.
“In the early ’00s, most of my peers who played music were men,” she shares. “And I thought that if I could rip a solo in a way that would impress these young boys, they might let me play in their band. But my focus has always been on songwriting, making interesting sounds, creating engaging art, and not really on shredding or whatever. I really don’t care about that at all.”
Rig Rundown - Screaming Females
When describing why she makes music, Paternoster delves into the topic of mental health. She lives with anxiety and depression, and, as she puts it, has had frank and open discussions about her mental well-being since she started going to therapy at age 14. “[For me, making art and music is mostly] born out of the compulsion to quell my anxiety in some way. And it’s been that way ever since I was very, very small. It was my coping mechanism for everything and anything.” She continues, “Your mental health affects your body, it affects you, and it affects absolutely everyone around you. It’s important to take care of yourself because in turn you take care of everyone around you.”
“My focus has always been on songwriting. Songwriting, making interesting sounds, creating engaging art, and not really on shredding or whatever. I really don’t care about that at all.”
Paternoster brings that self-awareness to all aspects of her life, including collaborating with fellow musicians. Working with others comes naturally to her, as she’s been doing it essentially from the beginning, but she does confess to having some shortcomings when it comes to bandleading. “I have a tendency to be a bit bossy when it comes to logistics,” she says. “I don’t want to let that intensity go, but I also don’t want to waste time worrying. You have to leave some things to the chaos that is our reality.
In her room: Paternoster created the bones of her new album alone, in the home of her late grandmother. Then she shared the files with co-producer Andy Gibbs and her other collaborators, vocalist and Snakeskin leader Shanna Polley and cellist Kate Wakefield.
“To be honest, I never really wanted to have full control,” she admits. “There is a lot to be said about relinquishing some aspects of creative control to people that you trust and admire. When you trust people who you know already do good work, they’re probably going to show up and do good work.”
Aside from being motivated by anxiety and compulsion, Paternoster describes how she often finds inspiration in silly simplicity. “I’m a big fan of like, general tomfoolery,” she comments, telling a story about how she’d seen two separate giant carrots graffitied on buildings in Providence, Rhode Island, where she’s been staying. It gave rise to a lot of questions. “What happened that night? Why did they paint the carrots so big? Why have they never done it again? Who are they, where are they, can we hang out?” she says, laughing.
That playful spirit ties into a sense of humility both about herself and her musicianship. She reflects on the one music theory course she took in college, during which she “mostly took naps,” and the pros and cons of being self-taught. “I mean, at age 35 I still am often like, ‘Man, I wish I could take guitar lessons or singing lessons.’ I think that would be really fun, but I only have so many hours in the day.”In the meantime, she feels that sticking with music might be a good idea. “This is my comfort zone … and other people tell me that I do this well, so I think I ought to do it more.”
LAVA Broken Roof Sessions: Marissa Paternoster (Screaming Females/Noun)
Around the time she was working on Peace Meter, Marissa Paternoster climbed atop a West Philly roof to record this intimate acoustic performance featuring several of the album’s songs. Be sure to catch a glimpse of her DIY guitar strap.
- Rig Rundown: Screaming Females - Premier Guitar ›
- Marissa Paternoster: “My Secret Weapon Is My Unrelenting Anxiety ... ›
- Robot Killers: Screaming Females' Marissa Paternoster and “King ... ›
- Laura Jane Grace’s Folk-Punk Acoustic Journey ›
- Saying Goodbye to Los Angeles Punks X - Premier Guitar ›
The country virtuoso closes out this season of Wong Notes with a fascinating, career-spanning interview.
We’ve saved one of the best for last: Brad Paisley.The celebrated shredder and seasoned fisherman joins host Cory Wong for one of this season’s most interesting episodes. Paisley talks his earliest guitar-playing influences, which came from his grandfather’s love of country music, and his first days in Nashville—as a student at Belmont University, studying the music industry.
The behind-the-curtain knowledge he picked up at Belmont made him a good match for industry suits trying to force bad contracts on him.
Wong and Paisley swap notes on fishing and a mutual love of Phish—Paisley envies the jam-band scene, which he thinks has more leeway in live contexts than country. And with a new signature Fender Telecaster hitting the market in a rare blue paisley finish, Paisley discusses his iconic namesake pattern—which some might describe as “hippie puke”—and its surprising origin with Elvis’ guitarist James Burton.
Plus, hear how Paisley assembled his rig over the years, the state of shredding on mainstream radio, when it might be good to hallucinogenic drugs in a set, and the only negative thing about country-music audiences.
Tom Bedell in the Relic Music acoustic room, holding a custom Seed to Song Parlor with a stunning ocean sinker redwood top and milagro Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
As head of Breedlove and Bedell Guitars, he’s championed sustainability and environmental causes—and he wants to tell you about it.
As the owner of the Breedlove and Bedell guitar companies, Tom Bedell has been a passionate advocate for sustainable practices in acoustic guitar manufacturing. Listening to him talk, it’s clear that the preservation of the Earth’s forests are just as important to Bedell as the sound of his guitars. You’ll know just how big of a statement that is if you’ve ever had the opportunity to spend time with one of his excellently crafted high-end acoustics, which are among the finest you’ll find. Over the course of his career, Bedell has championed the use of alternative tonewoods and traveled the world to get a firsthand look at his wood sources and their harvesting practices. When you buy a Bedell, you can rest assured that no clear-cut woods were used.
A born storyteller, Bedell doesn’t keep his passion to himself. On Friday, May 12, at New Jersey boutique guitar outpost Relic Music, Bedell shared some of the stories he’s collected during his life and travels as part of a three-city clinic trip. At Relic—and stops at Crossroads Guitar and Art in Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, and Chuck Levin’s Washington Music Center in Wheaton, Maryland—he discussed his guitars and what makes them so special, why sustainability is such an important cause, and how he’s putting it into practice.
Before his talk, we sat in Relic’s cozy, plush acoustic room, surrounded by a host of high-end instruments. We took a look at a few of the store’s house-spec’d Bedell parlors while we chatted.
“The story of this guitar is the story of the world,” Bedell explained to me, holding a Seed to Song Parlor. He painted a picture of a milagro tree growing on a hillside in northeastern Brazil some 500 years ago, deprived of water and growing in stressful conditions during its early life. That tree was eventually harvested, and in the 1950s, it was shipped to Spain by a company that specialized in church ornaments. They recognized this unique specimen and set it aside until it was imported to the U.S. and reached Oregon. Now, it makes the back and sides of this unique guitar.
A Bedell Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides.
As for the ocean sinker redwood top, “I’m gonna make up the story,” Bedell said, as he approximated the life cycle of the tree, which floated in the ocean, soaking up minerals for years and years, and washed ashore on northern Oregon’s Manzanita Beach. The two woods were paired and built into a small run of exquisitely outfitted guitars using the Bedell/Breedlove Sound Optimization process—in which the building team fine-tunes each instrument’s voice by hand-shaping individual braces to target resonant frequencies using acoustic analysis—and Bedell and his team fell in love.
Playing it while we spoke, I was smitten by this guitar’s warm, responsive tone and even articulation and attack across the fretboard; it strikes a perfect tonal balance between a tight low-end and bright top, with a wide dynamic range that made it sympathetic to anything I offered. And as I swapped guitars, whether picking up a Fireside Parlor with a buckskin redwood top and cocobolo back and sides or one with an Adirondack spruce top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides, the character and the elements of each instrument changed, but that perfect balance remained. Each of these acoustics—and of any Bedell I’ve had the pleasure to play—delivers their own experiential thumbprint.
Rosette and inlay detail on an Adirondack spruce top.
Ultimately, that’s what brought Bedell out to the East Coast on this short tour. “We have a totally different philosophy about how we approach guitar-building,” Bedell effused. “There are a lot of individuals who build maybe 12 guitars a year, who do some of the things that we do, but there’s nobody on a production level.” And he wants to spread that gospel.
“We want to reach people who really want something special,” he continued, pointing out that for the Bedell line, the company specifically wants to work with shops like Relic and the other stores he’s visited, “who have a clientele that says I want the best guitar I can possibly have, and they carry enough variety that we can give them that.”
A Fireside Parlor with a Western red cedar top and Brazilian rosewood back and sides.
A beautifully realized mashup of two iconic guitars.
Reader: Ward Powell
Hometown: Ontario, Canada
Guitar: ES-339 Junior
I’ve always liked unusual guitars. I think it started when I got my first guitar way back in 1976. I bought a '73 Telecaster Deluxe for $200 with money I saved from delivering newspapers.
I really got serious about playing in 1978, the same year the first Van Halen album was released. Eddie Van Halen was a huge influence on me, including how he built and modded guitars. Inspired by Eddie, I basically butchered that Tele. But keep in mind, there was once a time when every vintage guitar was just a used guitar—I still have that Tele, by the way.
I never lost that spirit of wanting guitars that were unique, and have built and modded a few dozen guitars since. When I started G.A.S.-ing simultaneously for a Les Paul Junior and a Casino, I came up with this concept. I found an Epiphone ES-339 locally at a great price. It already had upgraded CTS pots, Kluson tuners, and the frets had been PLEK’d. It even came with a hardshell case. It was cheap because it was a right-handed guitar that had been converted to left handed and all the controls had been moved to the opposite side, so it had five additional holes in the top.
Fortunately, I found a Duesenberg wraparound bridge that used the same post spacing as a Tune-o-matic. I used plug cutters to cut plugs out of baltic birch plywood to fill the 12 holes in the laminated top. I also reshaped the old-style Epiphone headstock. Then, I sanded off the original finish, taped the fretboard, and sprayed the finish using cans of nitro lacquer from Oxford Guitar Supply. Lots of wet sanding and buffing later, the finish was done.
I installed threaded insert bushings for the bridge, so it will never pull out. The pickup is a Mojotone Quiet Coil P-90 and I fabricated a shim from a DIY mold and tinted epoxy to raise the P-90 up closer to the strings. The shim also covers the original humbucker opening. I cut a pickguard out of a blank and heated it slightly to bend it to follow the curvature of the top.
All in all, I'm pretty happy how it turned out! It plays great and sounds even better. And I have something that is unique: an ES-339 Junior.
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- 9V DC / 300mA (center negativ) / power supply, sold separately
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