
Julian Lage's new Collings signature model has DynaSonic pickups and is fully hollow, with a trestle block, a solid Honduran mahogany body, a maple laminate top, and a Bigsby B3 vibrato tailpiece.
The jazz virtuoso used a new Collings signature model and his stunning command of technique, tone, and composition to craft his new album, Squint, but reflection and intention helped him find its soul.
Getting signed to Blue Note Records—the onetime home of John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, Miles Davis, Kenny Burrell, and many, many other greats—is a high honor in the jazz world. "It's just incredible," says Julian Lage, whose new album, Squint, is his debut for the famed label. "It's thrilling and inspiring and absolutely makes me want to be a better musician." But sometimes, simply being a better musician in a technical sense isn't enough. In the period between when the COVID lockdown began and the start of Squint's sessions with his trio in August, Lage had an epiphany during the "months of playing these songs, hours on end by myself. I wanted to write songs that would be restorative to play.
"Way beyond the shutdown was a global reckoning of racial injustice, systemic racism, social injustice, gender inequality, and all of these things that are ever-present, but now, here, on a very large scale, there's a discussion," he observes.
So Lage determined to craft an album that could be transformative for both himself and his listeners. "Is this positive music that's pretty for the sake of being pretty," he asked himself, "or is it music that holds a space for a little more fuzziness or emotional complexity? And in addition to just shutting up and listening and learning and saying, 'Wow, this is the work of our lifetime,' I think in not making the record [when we expected to], I developed a real appreciation for the role of sound in music and art with regard to healing. It's a method of transmission, and 'What are you transmitting?' became the question … You make music because you need to make it, you play it because you need to play it," he says. "Then it's by the grace of much higher powers that it ever sees the light of day. Squint is about the unknown, but is also celebrating deep gratitude."
Julian Lage - Saint Rose (Visualizer)
The 33-year-old virtuoso's perspective isn't a surprise to anyone who's met him. Lage has earned a reputation for being genuine and humble, and exuding gratitude is part of his way of experiencing life. He lives up to the Zen adage: The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.
But let's rewind to early 2020: Lage and his trio, which includes bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Dave King, were ready to go into the studio when their plans were abruptly upended—and Lage's deep immersion into the nine original compositions for the 11-track Squint began. The results of Lage's reflection reveal a depth not always heard on instrumental albums. Starting with a sharp, delicate solo performance of "Etude" and closing with a cover of Billy Hill's 1940 classic "Call of the Canyon," the pieces are edgy, gentle, smart, and experimental—each an iteration of the album's greater musical personality. Lage notes, "We're putting improvisation right next to composition. These aren't songs that we just take a solo on—you could not hear the melody and just hear the solos. The goal is for you to be able to understand the sentiment."
The Art of Emulating Speech
On Lage's 12th album as leader, there's also the jumpy, swinging title track and the cool, drum-groove-driven "Saint Rose," named after Lage's hometown of Santa Rosa, California. On the quietly chaotic "Familiar Flower," the band members are all "playing different tempos by a few degrees in one direction or another," offers Lage. And the umbral, apprehensive "Quiet Like a Fuse" uses dynamics and varying sections for emotional chiaroscuro. It's not just Lage's guitar that ties them all together, but the feeling that the spirit behind each beat is shared by all three musicians. Surprisingly, part of what guided Lage's process on a technical level were speeches by figures like the poet Nikki Giovanni and novelist James Baldwin. Lage improvised to their words as a way to gain insight into the mode of soloing he envisioned.
TIDBIT: Lage used just two amps to record his Blue Note debut: his Magic Amps Vibro Deluxe, which is based on a mid-'60s black-panel Deluxe Reverb, and a 1959 tweed Fender Champ.
"I think that the way people speak is often more unfettered. There's an urgency which is really striking about speech. There might not be an obvious correlation between the way people speak in a lecture and the notes on the guitar. But it's just a little stretch of the imagination to see that those are pitches, those are rhythms, those are phrases." Lage adds that a seven-to-10-minute lecture might be seen as a correlation to a song's central melody. "The musical version of that is Coltrane's 'My Favorite Things.' It's communication from the second it starts to the second it ends. Lectures help me break it down. And also just recording my own voice talking about something very mundane, then learning the rhythms I use to speak and applying those to the guitar, is really helpful, too.
"Jazz music is abstract art. And for that reason I love taking something that might feel more literal—like influences from singer-songwriters or lectures or spoken-word things—and just saying, 'Okay, my job is to find how notes and rhythms and tone alone represent in an abstract form what these people are saying with words.'"
Not the What, But the How
Lage spent six months both playing and contemplating the intention of the performances that made their way onto his new album, Squint. "I developed a real appreciation for the role of sound in music and art with regard to healing," he says.
Photo by Alysse Gafkjen
The team for the sessions included singer-songwriter (and Lage's partner) Margaret Glaspy, and multi-instrumentalist/producer Armand Hirsch, as well as Roeder and King. Lage says he's been playing with Roeder, "an extension of his musical world," for all of his adult career, whereas his musical relationship with King has been just for a few years. "Jorge's really able to listen so beautifully to what's going on, and what he contributes is so supportive and adventurous and risky."
Lage explains that what he learns from his bandmates comes less from what they play together and more from how they play together. "The way Dave looks at time in a band is not selfish at all," the guitarist says. "He shares the responsibility with everybody but has a way of influencing it through a virtuosic lens that never feels macho or overbearing."
In addition to being his favorite songwriter, Glaspy is also one of Lage's most relied-upon critics. "She'll offer very specific help, always," he says, "from the microscopic to the macroscopic. We have a nice mutual rapport, where I do it for her and she does it for me." Lage shares how the band went into the studio on the first day without her, and when he later reviewed the session at home, he told Glaspy, "yeah, you need to come to the studio."
One of Hirsch's contributions was offering his breadth of knowledge on the history of guitar tones. "I could be like, 'the guitar tone on this song … it sounds good, but I want it to be more George Barnes and a little more of the reverb from '70s Jim Hall,' and he would be able to translate that to Mark Goodell, who's our longtime engineer."
Julian Lage’s Gear
Guitars
- Collings 470 JL
- 1955 Gibson Les Paul
- Magic Amps Vibro Deluxe
- 1959 Fender Champ
- Strymon Flint Tremolo & Reverb
- Shin-ei B1G 1
- D'Addario NYXL (.011–.049 sets)
- Dunlop Tortex .88 mm picks
Calling on Collings
Lage's signature Collings is fully hollow with a trestle block, a solid Honduran mahogany body, a maple-laminate top, and a Bigsby B3 vibrato tailpiece. It also has a custom hybrid C/V neck profile, and a narrower fretboard in the upper-fret range. Lage says it's "as at home with jazz as with early '50s rock 'n' roll tone, Bo Diddley, early John Lee Hooker, early B.B. King." Collings' luthier Aaron Huff, director of engineering Clint Watson, and manager of artist relations Mark Althans were also involved in creating the 6-string. "The 470 JL is like a blues machine that's used for jazz," Lage sums up. "That's my favorite sound."
For the album's sessions, the guitar was run through two different amplifiers. Most tracks were cut with a Magic Amps Vibro Deluxe, which is based on a mid-'60s black-panel Fender Deluxe Reverb, while the rest feature Lage's '59 tweed Fender Champ. A Strymon Flint Tremolo and Reverb and a Shin-ei B1G 1 Gain Booster completed the signal chain. The result is a lush, old-school tone with crunch when necessary.
Lage's latest batch of tones are largely the product of a collaboration with Collings Guitars. The primary instrument featured on Squint is his new Collings 470 JL signature electric, which was introduced in February 2021. (He also used a 1955 Gibson Les Paul for three songs.) The development of the 470 JL was, Lage explains, centered on Ron Ellis, the great pickup master—and specifically his take on the DynaSonic-style pickup. "DynaSonic pickups are always fascinating to me, because I like playing on the neck pickup primarily for everything. A Tele pickup obviously has pole pieces that are covered by a metal cover and there's that kind of fuzziness that's nice, but I wanted the directness of having no cover, kind of like Stratocaster pickups, but with a much larger diameter. That led us down the road of DynaSonics and all of the complications that go with those pickups—the good, the bad, and the ugly."
With a Little Help from His Friends
Julian Lage plays his prized 1939 Martin 000-18 acoustic at NYC's (Le) Poisson Rouge in 2016.
Photo by Peter Gannushkin
Lage's interest in making music from an informed perspective often leads him to seek the counsel of musicians he respects. He shares an anecdote about learning from composer and performer Gabriel Kahane that songs need "terms of engagement, reasons to exist." He also relates flying from his New York City base to Chicago to ask for feedback from Wilco's Jeff Tweedy on a slew of new music he'd written. Tweedy explained that, on an album, you "have to tell the listener's ear where to focus and when to focus" through subtle instrumental cues. But it was on a pre-pandemic tour with Bill Frisell that Lage embraced the concept of bringing both attention and intention to music before performing it—which helped fuel his strategy for Squint.
He and Frisell sat down to rehearse Johnny Mandel and Johnny Mercer's "Emily," one of the two covers that ended up on the album, for four nights in a row before Frisell finally approved of playing it in their set. The first night, it was for 10 minutes. The second, 20. The third, 40. And the fourth, a full hour. "No talking, just play the tune and don't look up for an hour. And he's like, 'Okay, we're ready to play it.'
I think it was on the last day of recording—we were about to pack up—and it was like, 'Can we record one more, just in case we need an extra track?' I showed it to Jorge really fast and we played it and that's the one take of 'Emily.' It kind of sums everything up, in a way."
YouTube It
Even before the lockdown, Julian Lage exhibited a talent for turning melodies into conversations. For evidence, check out his 2016 live performance of "Nocturne" by Spike Hughes, Britain's earliest jazz composer. Lage is playing his 1954 Telecaster, which was his No. 1 before the new Collings signature 470 JL.
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The Mick Ronson Cry Baby Wah, meticulously recreated from his own pedal, offers fixed-wah tones with a custom inductor for a unique sound.
The Mick Ronson Cry Baby Wah taps into the vibrant, melodic character of one of rock ’n’ roll’s most gifted songwriters. Few guitar players have been able to combine a keen musical instinct with a profound grasp of how to bring a composition together like Mick Ronson. Laden with expressive resonance, his arrangements layered deliberately chosen tones and textures to build exquisite melodies and powerful riffs. The Cry Baby Wah, set in a fixed position to serve as a filter, was key to the tone-shaping vision that Ronson used to transform the face of popular music through his work with David Bowie and many others as both an artist and a producer.
We wanted to make that incredible Cry Baby Wah sound available to all players, and legendary producer Bob Rock—a friend and collaborator of Ronson’s—was there to help. He generously loaned us Ronson’s own Cry Baby Wah pedal, an early Italian-made model whose vintage components imbue it with a truly singular sound. Ronson recorded many tracks with this pedal, and Rock would go on to use it when recording numerous other artists. With matched specs, tightened tolerances, and a custom inductor, our engineers have recreated this truly special sound.
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Slayer announces a one-night-only show just added to the band’s handful of headline concerts set for this summer. Marking the band’s only U.S. East Coast performance in 2025, Slayer will headline Hershey, PA’s 30,000-seat Hersheypark Stadium on Saturday, September 20, 2025.
The concert will be hosted by WWE Superstar Damian Priest, a well-known “metalhead” and a long-time Slayer fan. Priest's signature “finisher” is Slayer’s “South of Heaven,”and Slayer’s Kerry King provided guitar for Priest’s “Rise For The Night” Theme.
This exclusive concert brings together a multi-generation, powerhouse line up:
Slayer
Knocked Loose
Suicidal Tendencies
Power Trip
Cavalera (performing Chaos A.D. - exclusive)
Exodus (performing Bonded by Blood)
All confirmed Slayer 2025 concert dates are as follows:
JULY
3 Blackweir Fields, Cardiff, Wales, UK
Line-Up: Slayer, with Special Guests Amon Amarth , Anthrax, Mastodon, Hatebreed and Neckbreakker
5 Villa Park, Birmingham, UK • Black Sabbath • Back to the Beginning
6 Finsbury Park, London
Line Up: Slayer, with Special Guests Amon Amarth , Anthrax, Mastodon, Anthrax, and Neckbreakker
11 Quebec Festival d'été de Québec City, Quebec
Direct Support: Mastodon
SEPTEMBER
18 Louder Than Life @ Highland Festival Grounds, Louisville, KY
20 Hersheypark Stadium, Hershey, PA
Over the decades with Hüsker Dü, Sugar, and solo, Bob Mould has earned a reputation for visceral performances.
The 15th studio album from the legendary alt-rocker and former Hüsker Dü singer and 6-stringer is a rhythm-guitar record, and a play in three acts, inspired by sweaty, spilled-beer community connection.
Bob Mould wrote his last album, Blue Heart, as a protest record, ahead of the 2020 American election. As a basic rule, protest music works best when it's shared and experienced communally, where it can percolate and manifest in new, exciting disruptions. But 2020 wasn’t exactly a great year for gathering together.
Mould’s album landed in a world of cloistered listeners, so he never knew how it impacted people. For a musician from punk and hardcore scenes, it was a disquieting experience. So when he got back out on the road in 2023 and 2024, playing solo electric sets, the former Hüsker Dü and Sugar frontman was determined to reconnect with his listeners. After each show, he’d hang out at the merch table and talk. Some people wanted their records or shirts signed, some wanted a picture. Others shared dark stories and secret experiences connected to Mould’s work. It humbled and moved him. “I’m grateful for all of it,” he says.
These are the in-person viscera of a group of people connecting on shared interests, versus, says Mould, “‘I gotta clean the house today, so I’m going to put on my clean the house playlist that a computer designed for me.” “Everything has become so digitized,” he laments. “I grew up where music was religion, it was life, it was essential. When people come to shows, and there’s an atmosphere, there’s volume, there’s spilled drinks and sweat–that’s what music ritual is supposed to be.”
His experiences on tour after the pandemic heartened Mould, but they also gave him traction on new ideas and direction for a new record. He returned to the simple, dirty guitar-pop music that spiked his heart rate when he was young: the Ramones’ stupid-simple pop-punk ecstasy, New York Dolls’ sharp-edged playfulness, Pete Townshend’s epic, chest-rattling guitar theatrics. In other words, the sort of snotty, poppy, wide-open rock we heard and loved on Hüsker Dü’s Flip Your Wig and Candy Apple Grey.
Mould’s time on the road playing solo in 2023 sparked the idea for Here We Go Crazy.
Photo by Ryan Bakerink
Mould started writing new songs in the vein of his original childhood heroes, working them into those electric solo sets in 2023 and 2024. Working with those restraints—guitar chords and vocal melodies—put Mould on track to make Here We Go Crazy, his new, 15th solo record.
Lead single and opener “Here We Go Crazy” is a scene-setting piece of fuzzy ’90s alt-rock, bookended by the fierce pounding of “Neanderthal.” “When Your Heart is Broken” is a standout, with its bubblegum chorus melody and rumbling, tense, Who-style holding pattern before one of the album’s only solos. Ditto “Sharp Little Pieces,” with perhaps the record’s chewiest, darkest guitar sounds.
“It’s a very familiar-sounding record,” he continues. “I think when people hear it, they will go, ‘Oh my god, this is so Bob Mould,’ and a lot of that was [influenced by] spending time with the audience again, putting new stuff into the set alongside the songbook material, going out to the table after the show and getting reactions from people. That sort of steered me towards a very simple, energetic, guitar-driven pop record.”
Of his new album, Mould says, “I think when people hear it, they will go, ‘Oh my god, this is so Bob Mould.’”
Mould recorded the LP in Chicago with longtime bandmates Jason Narducy and Jon Wurster at the late, great Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio. Then Mould retreated to San Francisco to finish the record, chipping away at vocals and extra guitar pieces. He mostly resisted the pull of “non-guitar ornamentation”: “It’s a rhythm guitar record with a couple leads and a Minimoog,” he says. “It’s sort of cool to not have a 64-crayon set every time.”
Mould relied on his favorite, now-signature late-’80s Fender Strat Plus, which sat out on a runway at O’Hare in 20-below cold for three hours and needed a few days to get back in fighting shape. In the studio, he ran the Strat into his signature Tym Guitars Sky Patch, a take on the MXR Distortion+, then onto a Radial JD7. The Radial split his signal and sent it to three combo amps: a Fender Hot Rod DeVille, a Fender ’68 Custom Deluxe Reverb reissue, and a Blackstar Artisan 30, each with a mic on it. The result is a brighter record that Mould says leaves more room for the bass and kick drum. “If you listen to this record against Patch the Sky, for instance, it’s night and day,” he says. “It’s snug.”
Mould explains that the record unfolds over three acts. Tracks one through five comprise the first episode, crackling with uncertainty and conflict. The second, spread over songs six to eight, contrasts feelings of openness with tight, claustrophobic tension. Here, there are dead ends, addictions, and frigid realities. But after “Sharp Little Pieces,” the album turns its corner, barreling toward the home stretch in a fury of optimism and determination. “These last three [songs] should give us more hope,” says Mould. “They should talk about unconditional love.”
The record closes on the ballad “Your Side,” which starts gentle and ends in a rush of smashed chords and cymbals, undoubtedly one of the most invigorating segments. “The world is going down in flames, I wanna be by your side/We can find a quiet place, it doesn’t need to be the Albert Hall,” Mould starts. It’s a beautiful portrait of love, aging, and the passage of time.
Bob Mould's Gear
Mould paired his trusty Fender Strat Plus with a trio of smaller combo amps to carve out a more mid-focused rhythm-guitar sound in the studio.
Photo by Mike White
Guitars
- Late 1980s Fender American Standard Strat Plus (multiple)
Amps
- Fender Hot Rod DeVille
- Blackstar Artisan Series amps
- Fender '68 Custom Deluxe Reverb
Effects
- Tym Guitars Sky Patch
- TC Electronic Flashback
- Electro-Harmonix Freeze
- Wampler Ego
- Universal Audio 1176
- Radial JD7
Strings, Picks, & Power Supply
- D'Addario NYXLs (.011-.046)
- Dunlop .46 mm and .60 mm picks
- Voodoo Labs power supply
And though the record ends on this palette of tenderness and connection, the cycle is likely to start all over again. Mould understands this; even though he knows he’s basking in act three at the moment, acts one and two will come along again, and again. Thankfully, he’s figured out how to weather the changes.
“When things are good, enjoy them,” he says. “When things are tough, do the work and get out of it, somehow.”
- YouTube
Many of the tracks on Here We Go Crazy were road-tested by Mould during solo sets. Here, accompanied only by his trusty Fender Strat, he belts “Breathing Room.”
Reader: Federico Novelli
Hometown: Genoa, Italy
Guitar: The Italian Hybrid
Reader Federico Novelli constructed this hybrid guitar from three layers of pine, courtesy of some old shelves he had laying around.
Through a momentary flash, an amateur Italian luthier envisioned a hybrid design that borrowed elements from his favorite models.
A few years ago, at the beginning of Covid, an idea for a new guitar flashed through my mind. It was a semi-acoustic model with both magnetic and piezo pickups that were mounted on a soundboard that could resonate. It was a nice idea, but I also had to think about how to make it in my tiny cellar without many power tools and using old solid-wood shelves I had available.
I have been playing guitar for 50 years, and I also dabble in luthiery for fun. I have owned a classical guitar, an acoustic guitar, and a Stratocaster, but a jazz guitar was missing from the list. I wanted something that would have more versatility, so the idea of a hybrid semi-acoustic guitar was born.
I started to sketch something on computer-aided design (CAD) software, thinking of a hollowbody design without a center block or sides that needed to be hot-worked with a bending machine. I thought of a construction made of three layers of solid pine wood, individually worked and then glued together in layers, with a single-cutaway body and a glued-in neck.
For the soundboard and back, I used a piece of ash and hand-cut it with a Japanese saw to the proper thickness, so I had two sheets to fit together. Next, I sanded the soundboard and bottom using two striker profiles as sleds and an aluminum box covered in sandpaper to achieve a uniform 3 mm thickness. A huge amount of work, but it didn't cost anything.
“It was a nice idea, but I also had to think about how to make it in my tiny cellar without many electric tools and out of old solid-wood shelves I had available.”
The soundboard has simplified X-bracing, a soundhole with a rosewood edge profile, and an acoustic-style rosewood bridge. For the neck, I used a piece of old furniture with straight grain, shaped it to a Les Paul profile, and added a single-action truss rod. The only new purchase: a cheap Chinese rosewood fretboard.
Then, there was lots of sanding. I worked up to 400-grit, added filler, primer, and transparent nitro varnish, worked the sandpaper up to 1,500-grit, and finally polished.
Our reader and his “Italian job.”
For electronics, I used a Tonerider alnico 2 humbucker pickup and a piezo undersaddle pickup, combined with a modified Shadow preamp that also includes a magnetic pickup input, so you can mix the two sources on a single output. I also installed a bypass switch for power on/off and a direct passive output.
I have to say that I am proud and moderately satisfied both aesthetically and with the sounds it produces, which range from jazz to acoustic and even gypsy jazz. However, I think I will replace the electronics and piezo with Fishman hardware in the future.