
Steve Vai strikes a pose with a stunning black and gold Ibanez PIA, his latest signature guitar, introduced in 2020. The JEM’s signature “monkey grip” is gone, but don’t fret, it’s been replaced by a “petal grip.”
The maestro invents a new instrument, recovers from two surgeries, and releases the barn-burning Inviolate—but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as he reveals the source of his seemingly limitless creative power.
About halfway through my call with Steve Vai, I’m brimming with enthusiasm and feeling energized and inspired. Sure, it’s fun to talk to Vai—he’s a hero to so many of us, so it’s naturally exciting—but there’s more to this: He’s giving me a motivational pep talk.
“There’s a huge secret,” he says, and I’m all ears. “Everybody is inspired within themselves with unique ideas that are perfectly suited for their unique creativity in the world. That is within everybody. When you receive that inspiration accompanied with the feeling of enthusiasm and the belief of ‘I know I can do this, I just gotta put the time in,’ that’s an inspiration that’s tailor-made for you and there’s no way that it’s not gonna happen. The universe gave you that so that you can manifest it. That’s what it wants you to do.”
This empowering rap comes with a warning though: “Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t find it because their minds drift into fantasy about the future and basically create these fictional desires that are impractical and not really right for you. It’s like people saying, ‘I want to be a world-class virtuoso guitar player,’ but they have a completely tin ear. It’s like me saying, ‘I’m going to win Wimbledon.’ It’s a fantasy. And within a fantasy, there’s always a feeling of resistance. You might believe you can do it, but you don’t know you can. So, there’s a huge difference.”
Steve Vai - Little Pretty (Official Visualizer)
This is the kind of stuff that Vai has put out there in his Under It All YouTube series, which includes about 14 or so hours of esoteric content that sometimes veers into self-help territory. But getting the scoop direct from the maestro himself feels even more enlightening when I realize what he’s saying isn’t just a positive-mental-attitude/self-realization fest. It’s the foundational core of Vai’s ethos, going back to his earliest work.
Even casual fans know the story of how young Steve Vai so impressed Frank Zappa with his transcription of the exceedingly complicated rhythmic brainteaser “The Black Page” that Zappa hired him. It goes without saying that the rhythmic and conceptual chops necessary for handling a work like “The Black Page”—or, really, most of Zappa’s catalog—takes a rare kind of brain. But the stars had to align to help the young upstart realize his destiny.
Everybody is inspired within themselves with unique ideas that are perfectly suited for their unique creativity in the world.
While he was a fresh-faced Berklee student, Vai met keyboardist/violinist Eddie Jobson—a former Zappa side musician—at a concert by Jobson’s band, U.K. “He started to explain to me what polyrhythms were and how Frank would write polyrhythms over whole bar lines,” he remembers. “I could immediately envision what a tuplet was, what a nested tuplet was—it all just made sense with regard to the timing of a bar or whatever you place that tuplet over. I was placing tuplets over beats that included tuplet timing in them.” This crucial info helped set Vai on his course. “I had an epiphany and then that just launched an intellectual forensic study of the division of time in musical notation.” Inspired, Vai took on the monumental challenge of transcribing Zappa’s work, and the rest is history.
Nowadays, at 61, Vai has fine-tuned his sixth sense for the whims of the universe and is maintaining an uncanny level of creativity. His latest album, the astounding Inviolate, is a straightforward—inasmuch as that’s a thing for Vai—barnburner, and it’s just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. But as straightforward as Inviolate may be, the path leading to its creation was a winding one. Vai simply followed the cues that presented themselves.
Vai poses with the gargantuan steampunk-inspired Hydra on the cover of Inviolate. It’s a heavy instrument that requires a waist strap. Still, he says, “it gets to your legs after a while” and “throws off your equilibrium completely.” Good thing it looks and sounds so cool!
In early 2020, he decided it was time to make the acoustic record he says “was one of those fantasy projects that I had written down through the years.” With “tons of material” to draw upon and a Paul Reed Smith Angelus acoustic, Vai posted a video of himself playing his song “The Moon and I,” his debut as a solo acoustic singer/songwriter. It’s a revealing performance in which he patiently builds tension in the strum-heavy intro and makes way for the sparse verse. His voice sounds strong, but slightly rough around the edges as he adds a little grit near the end of the song, exposing a different side of the virtuosic performer we’ve become accustomed to hearing play with only the most exacting precision.
Bolstered by the warm response the video received, Vai got to work recording 15 acoustic songs, all, he says, chock full of “beautiful, lush vocal melodies” and “rich chords.” But playing so much acoustic guitar posed some new physical challenges. “There’s one song where I have to fingerpick and I’m just not good at that,” he explains. “I was holding this obtuse kind of a chord way up high on the neck and there’s a lot of pressure on your thumb to hold your hands in place when your fingers are stretching. I just sat there meditating on this, holding the same chord while I was getting my fingerpicking together, and when I took my hand off, it felt like I sprained my thumb.” About a month later, his left thumb froze—a condition called trigger finger.
That wasn’t the only injury he sustained during the recording process. “There was one song that required strumming that was so fierce, so fast, that it would take me three weeks to build up to be able to get to the right tempo,” he says. “I worked on it, worked on it, worked on it, just about got it to where it needed to be—and I would have 14 guitar parts in the can and about three vocals. Unfortunately, that was as far as he’d get because his shoulder, which he’d injured a year prior, “just blew up.” He tore two tendons, which required surgery.
I had an epiphany and then that just launched an intellectual forensic study of the division of time in musical notation.
In December 2020, Vai underwent corrective surgery on his right shoulder, and surgery on his left hand followed in January 2021. Through his recovery, Vai wasn’t content to watch Netflix and chill. He simply couldn’t keep his hands off a guitar. So, with his right arm in a sling called a Knappsack—after Dr. Thomas Knapp, who performed his surgery and invented the device—and his left thumb still in a bandage, he got to work on a new one-handed guitar piece, “Knappsack.”
It was a simple idea. “I’m just gonna write a song with one hand,” he says, and insists “it wasn’t that hard. I just knew instinctively that I could get a tune out of just my left hand.” Donning his sling and bandage, Vai made a play-through video for his YouTube channel. It’s a dramatic look that does indeed contribute to the performance, but “Knappsack” retains the musically thrilling hallmarks of the maestro’s personal style, and its singable melody is bursting at the seams with expertly executed legato arpeggios and scale runs.
Once fully recovered, Vai was itching to get a tour booked. He decided to keep his acoustic project on ice and leaned into the idea of a new electric album. With “Knappsack” in the can, he created a series of musical challenges to overcome. He “set up parameters with the guitar that were somewhat out of my comfort zone” by using a hardtail Strat with a clean tone and playing without a pick for “Candlepower,” and he grabbed a Gretsch 6118 Anniversary on “Little Pretty,” which includes a difficult set of solo section chord changes. “It put up quite the fight but achieved what I was looking for.”
Steve Vai’s Gear
"Who else would do a three-neck guitar like that? I’m a total ham and I love it."
Photo by Michael Mesker
Guitars
- Bruno Urban custom 6-string
- Fender Stratocaster
- Gretsch G6118T-60 Vintage Select Edition ’60 Anniversary Hollowbody
- Ibanez Hydra
- Ibanez JEM “Bo”
- Ibanez JEM “Flo III”
- Ibanez JEM “Evo”
- Ibanez PIA
- Ibanez Universe 7-string
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball super Slinky Cobalt (.009–.042)
- Ibanez heavy
Amps
- Ampeg SVT Classic
- Carvin Legacy
- Lazy J 80
- 1980 Marshall with high-gain Jose Mod
- Marshall JCM2000
- Marshall JMP
- Paul Reed Smith Archon 50
- Synergy BMAN Preamp
- Synergy Vai Signature Preamp Module
- Victory V130
Effects
- Digitech Whammy
- Dunlop Cry Baby
- Fractal Audio FM3 Amp Modeler/FX Processor
- Ibanez Steve Vai Jemini Distortion
- MXR Phase 90
Despite his one-handed post-surgical musical opus, Vai says the biggest challenge on Inviolate can be heard on “Teeth of the Hydra,” where he debuts his newest creation, the steampunk-inspired Hydra, a three-neck beast that includes a 12-string neck that’s half fretless, a bass neck that has fretless E and A strings, a 7-string neck, harp strings, and a guitar synthesizer. Vai says the instrument, a five-year collaboration with Ibanez, “was a downloaded inspiration that came specifically for me because when it came I knew I could do it.”
When the Hydra was delivered, “I opened up the case and it was awesome and it was intimidating,” Vai says. “It had a big gnarly smile on its face. I propped it up in the studio and walked past it probably 20 or 30 times a day for a year, year-and-a-half, and every time I did it, it would go, ‘You know, you gotta play me. You gotta write that song.’ Finally, I carved out six weeks and I sat behind the Hydra and thought, ‘What was I thinking? What was wrong with me? What have I got myself into? People are gonna see me with the guitar and say, ‘He can get any guitar made he wants, but it’s all a gimmick.’’
But the Hydra was the product of his own brain, so Vai knew he could rise to the occasion. “I’m sitting there thinking ‘I’m in trouble,’” he admits. “And then that other voice came in and said, ‘You got this, you knew you had it all along, shut up and do it.’ And I sat down behind that thing and started motoring away slowly. I put a beat down and I started imagining.”
In late 2020 and early 2021, Vai had surgery on his right shoulder and left thumb. Injury is nothing new to the guitarist: “Through the 41 years of touring that I’ve done, you could probably name anything and I’ve had it. I’ve toured with slipped discs in my neck, right out of neck surgery. I’ve toured with slipped discs in my spine and had to get surgery … structurally I might be a little compromised because I grew up hunched over a guitar.”
Photo by Larry DiMarzio
The biggest challenge Vai created for himself wasn’t just to use the Hydra for a song, but to do so without looping or overdubbing. Although he learned he needed to record the harp strings separately because of how sensitive they are, Vai otherwise tracked “Teeth of the Hydra” in a linear fashion, performing one section at a time. “‘Candlepower’ and ‘Knappsack’ were probably two of the most challenging things I’ve recorded in my catalog, and they’re a walk in the park compared to the Hydra,” he says.
Any skeptics who might think that the Hydra is a gimmick should quickly be silenced by just how rippin’ “Teeth of the Hydra” is. Yeah, it’s a complete shred-fest, but it’s also tuneful and fun. That said, Vai is realistic and grounded about the concept of the song and of the instrument. “I’m an entertainer. It’s in my blood,” he says. “I love performing. Who else would do a three-neck guitar like that? I’m a total ham and I love it.”
When you’re engaged in those perfectly constructed inspirations that came to you for you, you’re in a state of enjoying what you’re doing right now, and life is only a series of right nows.
When we spoke, Inviolate was finished and Vai had an approaching tour (which has now been rescheduled). But he was planning to complete his acoustic record while travelling. In the summer, he’ll be heading to Holland to spend a month recording orchestral music with the Metropole Orkest. “I’m still keeping that side of my career going, because I love it,” he says. “I don’t expect my fans to go crazy for it, but some people will like it. At the end of the recording date with the orchestra, I should have about four albums in the can of new orchestral music. So, I’ll be balancing that with the acoustic record.”
And if that’s not dizzying enough, he just received a completed mix of an archival record from around 1990. “It’s my answer to the kind of music that I’d like to listen to when I’m out riding my motorcycle—when I was a teenager,” he says. “It’s kind of like ’80s rock with a biker edge. I found this singer, his name’s Gash, and the guy could sing like I never heard anybody. I wrote this stuff in a stream of consciousness and recorded it in about a week.”
Vai with Evo, the Ibanez JEM he’s been playing since before he recorded 1993’s Sex and Religion.
Photo by Larry DiMarzio
As we get off the call, my head is spinning just thinking about how Vai is going to split his time between a full-on rock tour, producing an acoustic record, and recording hours of orchestral music. It’s mind-boggling on a technical and creative level—not to mention his time-management skills must be seriously on point. Plus, he’s maintained this high level of activity for so long, sustaining his drive, motivation, and quality of work.
When I inevitably find myself wondering “how does he do it,” I keep coming back to this one nugget of wisdom he shared: “When you’re engaged in those perfectly constructed inspirations that came to you for you, you’re in a state of enjoying what you’re doing right now, and life is only a series of right nows.” If that’s the case, Vai seems to be making the most out of every one of them.
Steve Vai - "Candle Power"
For his 60th birthday, Steve Vai challenged himself to record a track on a hardtail S-style guitar with a clean tone and no pick. He ended up inventing a multi-string bending technique he calls joint shifting, which he uses in this play-through video for “Candlepower” (from Inviolate) to thrilling—and funky—effect.
- Steve Vai: “My Secret Weapon Is the Same As Everyone Else's ... ›
- PG Exclusive! Devin Townsend Interviews Steve Vai - Premier Guitar ›
- Rig Rundown - Steve Vai - Premier Guitar ›
- Vai on Vai: “That’s Me—Obtuse and Quirky” - Premier Guitar ›
- Steve Vai Rig Rundown 2023 - Premier Guitar ›
Samantha Fish: “Leaning into the Edges—That’s Where the Real S**t Lies.”
In recent years, Samantha Fish’s most often-used guitar was this alpine white Gibson SG, but it ran into some issues last summer—“I ended up having to reglue the neck”—and it is now on hiatus.
The rising blues-rock star has made a dozen records, topped roots-music charts, played 150 dates a year, and opened for the Rolling Stones. Now her new album, Paper Doll, finds her at a hard-playing creative pinnacle.
Samantha Fish is moving in new circles these days—circles occupied by the kind of people you see a lot on classic-rock radio playlists. First there was the invitation from Eric Clapton to play at his 2023 Crossroads Guitar Festival in L.A. Then there was the summer ’24 slot on Slash’s S.E.R.P.E.N.T. tour, followed by the Experience Hendrix tour, on which she dug into Jimi classics in the company of Eric Johnson, Dweezil Zappa, and other luminaries. And, oh yeah, she opened for the Stones in Ridgedale, Missouri, on the final date of their Hackney Diamonds jaunt. That’s right, the Rolling Stones.
If you’re already a fan of Fish’s tough Delta-mama singing and high-temperature guitar work, you’ll probably think that all this is just as it should be. You gotta reap what you sow eventually, right? And Fish has been sowing for a long time, from her bar-band days in Kansas City 15 years ago through eight rootsy, eclectic albums as a leader (not counting the two early-2010s discs she cut with Dani Wilde and Victoria Smith as Girls with Guitars, or her 2013 outing with Jimmy Hall and Reese Wynans in the Healers, or 2023’s tangy swamp-rock collaboration with Jesse Dayton, Death Wish Blues) to her current tour schedule of about 150 dates per year in North America, the U.K., Europe, and Australia.
Still, even with such a solid career foundation to draw on, mixing and mingling in the flesh with folks you’ve known all your life as names on record covers could be a little intimidating. Is it? “You know, I don’t ever think about it in those terms,” Fish says on the phone from her home in New Orleans. “So when you lay it all out there like that, it feels like, ‘Aw shit, that’s crazy.’ I mean, it is crazy. When I think about the goals that I’ve made over the years … honestly, I’ve crossed off a bunch of things that I thought were even ironic being on the list, because they just seemed so far-fetched. Every interview I’ve ever done, they were like, ‘If you could ever open up for somebody, who would it be?’ And I always said the Stones, ironically. Cause when the hell’s that gonna happen? I’m a guitar player from Kansas. That’s nuts.”With her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, heavy hitting style, and wide array of blues and rock influences, Fish is an artist of a different stripe.
Photo by Jim Summaria
Fish spits out the sentences above in a fast, excited spray, one word tumbling over another. Then she pauses for a second, and it’s clear that wheels are turning in her head. Her voice gets more playful. “I’m gonna start speaking some even wilder things into existence just to see what happens,” she cracks, her grin nearly audible over the line. “A billion dollars!No, money’s evil, but you know what I mean.”
“I wanted to lean into superpowers.”
Given her formidable chops, it’s not that daring a leap to suggest that Fish could be capable of playingsome wilder things into existence, too. She’s certainly off to a good start with the just-released Paper Doll, her ninth solo album overall and third for Rounder Records. Whether your personal taste leans more toward nasty string-snapping riffs (the aptly titled “Can Ya Handle the Heat?”), sizzling slide escapades (“Lose You”), or high lonesome twang (“Off in the Blue”), you can’t deny that the album’s loaded with prime guitar moments. And its two longest tracks, “Sweet Southern Sounds” and “Fortune Teller”—“longest” being a purely relative term (they’re both under six minutes)—offer listeners just a taste of the neo-psychedelic fantasias that can occur when Fish stretches out in concert.
“People always come up to me and say, ‘You’ve got to figure out a way to capture the live feeling on a record,’” she reports. “Sometimes you go into the studio and it’s like, ‘Shit, I gotta make the song work for vinyl, so let’s cut it down,’ and you end up hacksawing away some of these parts that are kind of the feeling and heartbeat of the song. This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Fish made her recording debut in 2009 as the leader of the Samantha Fish Blues Band, with the punny-titled in-concert indie album Live Bait.
Photo by Curtis Knapp
That’s one way in which Paper Doll differs dramatically from its predecessor, 2021’s Faster, which delved into a poppier territory of synths, beats, and high-tech production (and, in this writer’s opinion, did so with great effectiveness; one of Faster’s highlights, “Hypnotic,” sounds like it could have been recorded at a late-night dance club hang with Prince and the Pointer Sisters). In contrast, obviously electronic sounds are nowhere to be heard on the new disc, and the music referenced stays firmly in the American roots category: soul, rock, country, juke-joint blues. For some artists, a stylistic shift like this could be seen as a retrenchment, but for Fish, it’s the result of a major departure. This is the first time she’s ever used her road band—keyboardist Mickey Finn, bassist Ron Johnson, and drummer Jamie Douglass—to make a studio album.
“Everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
“Usually,” Fish explains, “I’ve worked in studio situations where there’s been a producer and they want to put the people they know together. So it was cool to bring in the band that I’ve been playing with for the last couple of years instead of session musicians. I feel like the dynamic was different—the familiarity, and just kind of knowing where the others were gonna go. It might be a minute difference to a listener, but for the players in the room, it helped breed another sensibility.”
Also helping in that department was producer Bobby Harlow, late of Detroit garage-rock revivalists the Go. Paper Doll is the second Fish album that Harlow’s produced; the first was 2017’s Chills & Fever. But whereas that album was all covers, the focus this time was on original songs, more than half of them co-written by Harlow with Fish before he was even considered to produce the album.
“Last March, Bobby came out to a show we did in Detroit,” Fish recalls. “We went out to lunch, and because I was working on writing songs, I asked him to do some co-writing with me, because I love the songs he wrote for the Go. He’s really fun to be in a room with when you’re making something, because he’s incredibly devoted to it. So we started writing, and then a few months later the label was like, ‘We gotta make this album, who’s gonna produce it?’ Well, we’re on the road all summer, so I don’t know when y’all expect us to do this record. But Bobby was available, and it was like the universe bringing us back together. He was passionate about the kind of songs I was writing, and he understood where I wanted to go with it.”
Samantha Fish's Gear
Before finding her SG, Fish’s main guitar was her Delaney signature model thinline style, with a fish-shaped f-hole.
Photo by Frank White
Guitars
- Alpine white Gibson SG
- Gibson Custom Shop ES-335
- Delaney 512
- Stogie Box Blues 4-string
- Danelectro baritone
Amps
- Category 5 Andrew 2x12
- Fender Hot Rod DeVille
Effects
- Dunlop volume pedal
- Analog Man King of Tone
- JHS Mini Foot Fuzz
- Electro-Harmonix Micro POG
- MXR Carbon Copy
- Boss PS-5 Super Shifter
- Voodoo Lab Pedal Power ISO-5
Strings, Picks, & Slides
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinkys (.010-.046)
- 1.0 mm picks (any brand)
- Various brass and ceramic slides
And where was that? “I wanted to lean into superpowers,” Fish quickly answers. “What are my strengths, what are the things that people know me for and recognize me for, and what can I amplify to make this a real statement record? It’s funny, because everybody’s scratching their heads about what genre this falls into, but I know where every song started—with a blues riff.”
Born out of the blues it may have been, but when the Paper Doll material reached the studio (actually, two studios: the Orb in Austin and Savannah Studios in L.A.), it went through some changes, partly due to the band’s contributions, partly due to Harlow’s conceptual leaps. “Bobby’s like a musicologist,” Fish says approvingly. “He’s deep. He pulls from so many different spaces, and he’s definitely introduced me to some things that I wasn’t hip to over the years. That’s done a lot to shape my musical tastes.” If you’ve had the significant pleasure of attending one of the many gigs in which Fish breaks out proto-punk nuggets like the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams” and Love’s “7 and 7 Is,” well, now you know the guy to thank.
“This time we set out to make something that felt live.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of Paper Doll’s best tracks, “Rusty Tazor,” is a similar romp through the garage. In a rare case (for this album) of the producer bringing in someone he knows, Harlow tapped Mick Collins of cult faves the Gories and the Dirtbombs for backing vocals. “He adds such a personality to that song,” Fish says. “And I’m a punk rock fan. I love that whole era. I just love this raw, uninhibited way of playing. There’s nothing precious about it. Leaning into the edges—that’s where the real shit lies.”
Because the Paper Doll sessions took place in between periods of touring, Fish only brought her road instruments, including a new white Gibson SG and Stogie Box Blues 4-string cigar box guitar (see sidebar for more on her personal collection). But both the Austin and L.A. studios presented plenty of other options. “A ton of guitars,” Fish remembers with a laugh, “in varying degrees of disrepair. I used a rather unruly [Gibson ES-] 335 in Savannah for ‘Sweet Southern Sounds.’ You know how some guitars fight you when you play them? Well, I like a little bit of fight, but not so much that I’m pulling the strings out of the saddle, and it was fighting me like that. It was hard to push the strings down, I could only bend in certain places. But that just made the performance more intense, and it sounded good. There was also a Tele and a Strat that they had at the Orb. We had so many tools at our disposal, it was like, ‘Let’s go nuts and play with everything we can.’”That choice of m.o. also sounds like a positive way to respond to a career moment that Fish calls “an incredible ride. Especially in the last year-and-a-half, two years, it’s just upped the ante even more. There’s nothing more to do, really. I went out, I played to the best of my ability and I did the thing that I’ve been working hard to do for the last 15 years or so. And it’s awesome to be able to show up in that capacity and perform alongside people that I’ve really looked up to. I just feel grateful. I know I’m lucky.”
Fish’s Favorites
Fish has a brawling style of playing slide, often on her cigar box. “Lose You,” on her new album, is especially representative of her approach to the classic blues technique.
Photo by Jim Summaria
For nearly a decade, Samantha Fish’s primary stage axe has been a 2015 alpine white Gibson SG that she bought new online. She’s still got it, but last year it ran into some trouble. “I ended up having to reglue the neck over the summer,” she says, “and it’s been having tuning issues. So Gibson sent me another white SG that’s just beautiful, in great shape. The neck’s a bit fatter, which is cool, different from mine. I’ve been using that one a lot”—indeed, the new SG is all over Paper Doll. “I’ve hung onto it, and I feel bad about that. I don’t want to be the person who borrows a guitar and keeps it. But it just played so great, and it was like, ‘I need this thing. What can I do to keep it?’ Luckily, the people at Gibson have been so good to me over the years.”
An even more recent addition to Fish’s electric arsenal is a Custom Shop Gibson ES-335 in silver sparkle finish, purchased in the fall at Eddie’s Guitars in St. Louis. “Because I played a 335 on ‘Sweet Southern Sounds’ in the studio, I was like, ‘Well, I’m gonna need one live, so of course I have to get this one!’ I’ve always wanted a silver sparkle, and this one is pristine. I’m so scared of the first scratch I get on it, or buckle rash. I’m probably gonna cry!”
Fish hasn’t been playing her Delaney SF1 Tele-style “Fish-o-caster” so much recently, but another Delaney model, the hollowbody 512, is still getting lots of action (often tuned to open D for slide use), as is her Stogie Box Blues 4-string, equipped with a P-Bass pickup. Her Danelectro baritone, Bohemian oil-can guitar, and clutch of Fender Jaguars are also safe at home, along with her current acoustic main squeeze, a new Martin D-45.
YouTube It
Samantha plays Jimi in this September 2024 performance from the most recent Experience Hendrix tour. The selection: “Fire.”
After eight years, New Orleans artist Benjamin Booker returns with a new album and a redefined relationship to the guitar.
It’s been eight years since the New Orleans-based artist released his last album. He’s back with a record that redefines his relationship to the guitar.
It is January 24, and Benjamin Booker’s third full-length album, LOWER, has just been released to the world. It’s been nearly eight years since his last record, 2017’s Witness, but Booker is unmoved by the new milestone. “I don’t really feel anything, I guess,” he says. “Maybe I’m in shock.”
That evening, Booker played a release celebration show at Euclid Records in New Orleans, which has become the musician’s adopted hometown. He spent a few years in Los Angeles, and then in Australia, where his partner gave birth to their child, but when he moved back to the U.S. in December 2023, it was the only place he could imagine coming back to. “I just like that the city has kind of a magic quality to it,” he says. “It just feels kind of like you’re walking around a movie set all the time.”
Witness was a ruminative, lonesome record, an interpretation of the writer James Baldwin’s concept of bearing witness to atrocity and injustice in the United States. Mavis Staples sang on the title track, which addressed the centuries-old crisis of police killings and brutality carried out against black Americans. It was a significant change from the twitchy, bluesy garage-rock of Booker’s self-titled 2014 debut, the sort of tunes that put him on the map as a scrappy guitar-slinging hero. But Booker never planned on heroism; he had no interest in becoming some neatly packaged industry archetype. After Witness, and years of touring, including supporting the likes of Jack White and Neil Young, Booker withdrew.
He was searching for a sound. “I was just trying to find the things that I liked,” he explains. L.A. was a good place for his hunt. He went cratedigging at Stellaremnant for electronic records, and at Artform Studio in Highland Park for obscure jazz releases. It took a long time to put together the music he was chasing. “For a while, I left guitar, and was just trying to figure out what I was going to do,” says Booker. “I just wasn’t interested in it anymore. I hadn’t heard really that much guitar stuff that had really spoke to me.”
“For a while, I left guitar, and was just trying to figure out what I was going to do. I just wasn’t interested in it anymore.”
LOWER is Booker’s most sensitive and challenging record yet.
Among the few exceptions were Tortoise’s Jeff Parker and Dave Harrington from Darkside, players who moved Booker to focus more on creating ambient and abstract textures instead of riffs. Other sources of inspiration came from Nicolas Jaar, Loveliescrushing, Kevin Shields, Sophie, and JPEGMAFIA. When it came to make LOWER (which released on Booker’s own Fire Next Time Records, another nod to Baldwin), he took the influences that he picked up and put them onto guitar—more atmosphere, less “noodly stuff”: “This album, I was working a lot more with images, trying to get images that could get to the emotion that I was trying to get to.”
The result is a scraping, aching, exploratory album that demonstrates that Booker’s creative analysis of the world is sharper and more potent than ever. Opener “Black Opps” is a throbbing, metallic, garage-electronic thrill, running back decades of state surveillance, murder, and sabotage against Black community organizing. “LWA in the Trailer Park” is brighter by a slim margin, but just as simultaneously discordant and groovy. The looped fingerpicking of “Pompeii Statues” sets a grounding for Booker to narrate scenes of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Even the acoustic strums of “Heavy on the Mind” are warped and stretched into something deeply affecting; ditto the sunny, garbage-smeared ’60s pop of “Show and Tell.” But LOWER is also breathtakingly beautiful and moving. “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar” and “Hope for the Night Time” intermingle moments of joy and lightness amid desperation and loneliness.
Booker worked with L.A.-based hip-hop and electronic producer Kenny Segal, trading stems endlessly over email to build the record. While he was surrounded by vintage guitars and amps to create Witness, Booker didn’t use a single amplifier in the process of making LOWER: He recorded all his guitars direct through an interface to his DAW. “It’s just me plugging my old Epiphone Olympic into the computer and then using software plugins to manipulate the sounds,” says Booker. For him, working digitally and “in the box” is the new frontier of guitar music, no different than how Hendrix and Clapton used never-heard-before fuzz pedals to blow people’s minds. “When I look at guitar players who are my favorites, a lot of [their playing] is related to the technology at the time,” he adds.
“When I look at guitar players who are my favorites, a lot of [their playing] is related to the technology at the time.”
Benjamin Booker's Gear
Booker didn’t use any amps on LOWER. He recorded his old Epiphone Olympic direct into his DAW.
Photo by Trenity Thomas
Guitars
- 1960s Epiphone Olympic
Effects
- Soundtoys Little AlterBoy
- Soundtoys Decapitator
- Soundtoys Devil-Loc Deluxe
- Soundtoys Little Plate
“I guess I have a problem with anything being too sugary. I wanted a little bit of ugliness.”
Inspired by a black metal documentary in which an artist asks for the cheapest mic possible, Booker used only basic plugins by Soundtoys, like the Decapitator, Little AlterBoy, and Little Plate, but the Devil-Loc Deluxe was the key for he and Segal to unlock the distorted, “three-dimensional world” they were seeking. “Because I was listening to more electronic music where there’s more of a focus on mixing than I would say in rock music, I think that I felt more inspired to go in and be surgical about it,” says Booker.
Part of that precision meant capturing the chaos of our world in all its terror and splendor. When he was younger, Booker spent a lot of time going to the Library of Congress and listening to archival interviews. On LOWER, he carries out his own archival sound research. “I like the idea of being able to put things like that in the music, for people to just hear it,” says Booker. “Even if they don’t know what it is, they’re catching a glimpse of life that happened at that time.”
On “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar,” there are birds chirping that he captured while living in Australia. Closer “Hope for the Night Time” features sounds from Los Angeles’ Grand Central Market. “Same Kind of Lonely” features audio of Booker’s baby laughing just after a clip from a school shooting. “I guess I have a problem with anything being too sugary,” says Booker. “I wanted a little bit of ugliness. We all have our regular lives that are just kind of interrupted constantly by insane acts of violence.”
That dichotomy is often difficult to compute, but Booker has made peace with it. “You hear people talking about, ‘I don’t want to have kids because the world is falling apart,’” he says. “But I mean, I feel like it’s always falling apart and building itself back up. Nothing lasts forever, even bad times.”
YouTube It
To go along with the record, Booker produced a string of music videos influenced by the work of director Paul Schrader and his fascination with “a troubled character on the edge, reaching for transcendence.” That vision is present in the video for lead single “LWA in the Trailer Park.”
Blackstar Amplification unveils its new AIRWIRE i58 wireless instrument system for guitar and bass.
The AIRWIRE i58 enables wireless connection for guitars, basses and other musical instruments with ¼” audio outputs and delivers low noise and less dropouts. The majority of wireless systems on the market operate within the 2.4 GHz range whereas the AIRWIRE i58 operates within the 5.8 GHz which is a less crowded frequency band that is immune to WiFi interference.
The AIRWIRE i58 also has an optimised antenna design and anti-interference algorithm – this gives players a robust, reliable and most importantly worry-free performance. The low latency and accurate frequency response ensures authentic tone and feel without the need for cables.
Never worry about running out of battery or losing your signal; AIRWIRE i58 offers up to 9 hours play time at full charge and features a transmission distance of 35 metres. Up to four AIRWIRE i58s can be used simultaneously for a full band setup without interference.
AIRWIRE i58 offers wireless high-res signal transfer, so there is no treble loss which can occur when using a long cable. However, the system offers a switchable CABLE TONE feature to simulate the tonal effects of a traditional instrument cable if players desire that sound.
AIRWIRE i58 is the ideal wireless system for every musician – for cable-clutter-free home use or freely roaming on stage.
AIRWIRE i58 Wireless Instrument System
- Wireless Instrument System
- Frequency Band: 5.8GHz
- Transmission Channels: 4 independent channels
- Transmission Distance: Up to 35 metres (100 feet)
- Latency: <6ms
- Frequency Response: 20Hz~20kHz
- Output Impedance: 1kΩm
- Connectors: ¼” mono
- Power: Rechargeable lithium-ion battery
- Charging: USB-C 5V input (cable included)
- Charging Time: <2.5 hours
- Operation Time: 9 hours when fully charged
- Illuminated star logo
- Dimensions: L 67.0mm, W 37.2mm, H 20.5mm
- Weight: 45g (each transmitter or receiver, single unit)
Blackstar’s AIRWIRE i58 carries a street price of $169.99.
PG’sJohn Bohlinger caught up with Moak at his Nashville studio known affectionately as the Smoakstack.
Grammy-nominated session guitarist, producer, mixer, and engineer Paul Moak stays busy on multiple fronts. Over the years he’s written, played, produced and more for TV sessions (Pretty Little Liars, One Tree Hill) and artists including Third Day, Leeland, and the Blind Boys of Alabama. But most recently he’s worked with Heart and Ann Wilson and Tripsitter.
Time Traveler
Moak is most loyal to a 1963 Stratocaster body that’s mated to a 1980s-vintage, 3-bolt, maple, bullet-truss-rod, 1969-style Fender Japan neck. The bridge has been swapped as many as four times and the bridge and neck pickups are Lindy Fralins.
Cool Cat
If there’s one guitar Moak would grab in a fire, it’s the Jaguar he’s had since age 20 and used in his band DC Talk. When Moak bought the guitar at Music Go Round in Minneapolis, the olympic white finish was almost perfect. He remains impressed with the breadth of tones. He likes the low-output single-coils for use with more expansive reverb effects.
Mystery Message Les Paul
Moak’s 1970 L.P. Custom has a number of 1969 parts. It was traded to Moak by the band Feel. Interestingly, the back is carved with the words “cheat” and “liar,” telling a tale we can only speculate about.
Dad Rocker
Almost equally near and dear to Moak’s heart is this 1968 Vox Folk Twelve that belonged to his father. It has the original magnetic pickup at the neck as well as a piezo installed by Moak.
Flexi Plexis
This rare and precious trio of plexis can be routed in mix-and-match fashion to any of Moak’s extensive selection of cabs—all of which are miked and ready to roll.
Vintage Voices
Moak’s amps skew British, but ’60s Fender tone is here in plentitude courtesy of a blonde-and-oxblood Bassman and 1965 Bandmaster as well as a 2x6L6 Slivertone 1484 Twin Twelve.
Guess What?
The H-Zog, which is the second version of Canadian amp builder Garnet’s Herzog tube-driven overdrive, can work as an overdrive or an amp head, but it’s probably most famous for Randy Bachman’s fuzzy-as-heck “American Woman” tone.
Stomp Staff
While the Eventide H90 that helps anchor Moak’s pedalboard can handle the job of many pedals, he may have more amp heads on hand than stompboxes. But essentials include a JHS Pulp ‘N’ Peel compressor/preamp, a DigiTech Whammy II, DigiTech FreqOut natural feedback generator, a Pete Cornish SS-3 drive, Klon Centaur, and Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man.