For Marcus King, sharing about his music comes with a powerful openness about his mental health struggles and substance abuse.
Such war stories aren’t uncommon among musicians, especially rock ’n’ soul road warriors like King. But the good-natured 28-year-old isn’t smiling, or laughing, or inviting flattery. He isn’t reminiscing so much as taking inventory of past traumas. By the time he was 11, King shares, he’d started experiencing what he now recognizes as panic attacks; once, in an effort to soothe a nasty cough, he drank an entire bottle of Robitussin, which led to a hallucinatory episode that frightened him deeply, intensifying these bouts of anxiety. “I would just get worked up,” he says. “I’m still learning how to address those and recognize them.”
“I struggled with that. Bipolar disorder ran in the family,” he adds, “I’ve had abandonment issues and poor attachment styles—all the things that I research now [while trying] to become the best partner that I can be.”
This is, of course, the language of mental-health maintenance, of therapy sessions and self-help reading lists, and King speaks it with equilibrium, like a man for whom sharing or purging means healing. (How’s this for metaphor: King joined our interview from a sauna.) Today, he’s found love and remains committed to both his own wellness and his opportunities as an artist to advocate for mental-health awareness.
Marcus King - F*ck My Life Up Again (Lyric Video)
Yet, he is also keenly aware that the kind of transparency that he expresses himself with isn’t much of a Dixie tradition. “I grew up in a Southern household, and men just didn’t really share their emotions openly,” says King, who was raised by his father, Marvin, a blues guitarist and singer. “Only through music would they even get close.”
King’s new album, Mood Swings, produced by Rick Rubin, is a kind of “open diary,” the guitarist explains, “for everybody to be able to open it up and have a look, have a read.” It chronicles the nadir of those long-running struggles with mental illness and substance abuse, as well as the redemption that arrived in the form of Mrs. Briley King, whom Marcus married last year in Nashville.
Following the vintage boogie rock of 2022’s Young Blood, the new record sounds especially bold, even brazen. At times it features King—a last bastion of guitar-driven integrity amongst late-millennial smartphone culture—performing atop programmed or sampled beats and high-tuned snares, Philly-soul strings, and stirringly modern vocal backing. It summons up an ambiance of contemporary R&B, pop and folk, and the smartly grooving studio-centric vibe that descends from Prince, as well as the artier psychedelic soul of songwriters like Brittany Howard. Sampled dialogue, from the landmark 1959 documentary The Faces of Depression and from one of King’s own elated, drunken voicemails, crops up as candid experimental touches. Mood Swings also finds the guitar god streamlining his solos into concise melodic delights of varying textures, placing the song and the sentiment before the Allmans-styled flights with which he made his name. “If you stay in your wheelhouse and you do something just like you’ve done before, you don’t lose any fans, but you don’t gain any,” King says. “I wanted to do something new and venture my own path and take the guitar along with me.
“[So why not] try to pitch [my instrument] in a way that’s more digestible to a generation who didn’t grow up with guitar-prominent music?”
“I’ve had abandonment issues and poor attachment styles—all the things that I research now [while trying] to become the best partner that I can be.”
Those newer generations, currently facing down historic mental-health crises, should have plenty to connect with in King’s album-length act of catharsis: “Mood Swings,” “F*ck My Life Up Again,” “Soul It Screams,” “Save Me,” “This Far Gone,” “Bipolar Love.” Even “Cadillac,” its namesake an icon of goodtime American songwriting, is a haunting exploration of suicidal ideation. “Not a lot of metaphor in the song; it’s just kind of straight up,” King says. “It is what it is: Cadillac, garage—just kind of my exit strategy, as it were. And not in any way trying to condone, or trying to glorify or romanticize that in any way. Just trying to be truthful as to where I was at the time.”
The recording sessions for Mood Swings started at Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, then later moved to Rubin’s facility in Tuscany, where King would pull 14-hour days working on the record.
Where had King been? To hear him recount the musician’s life that culminated in his version of rock bottom, he was in a kind of fever dream, shuttling between tour dates and writing and recording sessions, as his torment expanded and his ability to take care of himself withered. “I’m a mental patient, technically,” King says. “I seek treatment for mental, chemical imbalances.” But the day-to-day of a touring blues rocker didn’t square with what a therapist might call doing your homework. “I was medicated and then would be improperly medicated, because you’re not really home enough to see someone consistently,” he explains. “If you’re eating at all, you’re eating really shitty food and you’re just drinking your dinner, so your gut health is terrible, [and your] mental health is struggling as a result of it.” On the road nearly 300 days a year, King’s life was largely unfolding inside a van, without “a lot of shit to see between Colorado and St. Louis,” he says. “So you’re just kind of driving, and there’s a lot of ways to numb that—not only the pain, but the mundane as well.”
A few years ago, King started writing in Los Angeles, trapped in a soured relationship he was documenting in real time as new songs, some of which would end up on Mood Swings. He wrote about the “codependent nature of our relationship,” King says, “and the substance abuse that came with it and the excess in everything, passion included.” Later, after his partner suddenly moved thousands of miles away, a debilitating sense of isolation set in. “I couldn’t write; I couldn’t handle it,” he says. Idle time meant indulgence and the wrong kind of company. When concert schedules started up again following the pandemic, King had designs on the most desperate kind of farewell tour. “I had unfortunately made up my mind to check out of here in my own way,” he says, “on my own timeline.”
“I grew up in a Southern household, and men just didn’t really share their emotions openly. Only through music would they even get close.”
In 2019, prior to those writing sessions, the guitarist began talking to Rick Rubin. The super-producer had seen King perform “Goodbye Carolina,” an affecting midtempo rocker off 2018’s Carolina Confessions, in his Grand Ole Opry debut, and decided to make a cold call. “We spoke for quite a while about mental health and about viewing it as a writing partner,” King says, “allowing it to help me speak my truth.” A studied music fan whose knowledge belies his age, King had “always revered Rick,” he says. He recalls how Rubin’s late-career recordings of Johnny Cash were some of the last music that King and his grandfather, a country fan and performer, absorbed together. As a tween, the guitarist started digging into hip-hop, eventually making his way to the pioneering LPs that Rubin helmed for Def Jam, by the likes of Public Enemy, Beastie Boys, and Run-D.M.C. He especially appreciated Rubin’s beaten-path-detour efforts to combine rap and rock. “I really liked the phrasing,” he says, “and the way [hip-hop MCs] would rhythmically say what they needed to say over breakbeats. And I loved James Brown, and everybody [in hip-hop] was sampling ‘Funky Drummer,’ so everything just kind of came full circle in those moments.”
Marcus King's Gear
The 28-year-old King grew up listening to Johnny Cash, then later, hip-hop artists like Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys.
Guitars
- “Big Red”: 1962 Gibson ES-345 originally purchased by King’s grandfather
- Gibson Custom Shop Marcus King 1962 ES-345 with Sideways Vibrola
- 1962 Fender Stratocaster
- Harmony Sovereign acoustic
- Gibson dreadnought owned by Rick Rubin (used on Mood Swings)
- Gibson ES-330 (Shangri-La studio backline, used on Mood Swings)
- 1939 Martin D-18
Amps
- Fender Super Reverb (studio)
- Fender Deluxe Reverb (studio)
- Orange MK Ultra Marcus King Signature 30-watt head (live)
- Orange slanted 8x10 cabs with Celestion speakers (live)
- 1968 Fender Bandmaster head/Bassman cab with two Celestion 15" speakers (live)
Effects
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- Tru-Fi Colordriver
- Tru-Fi Two Face
- Tru-Fi Ultra Tremolo
- Dunlop EP103 Echoplex Delay
- Dunlop Rotovibe
- MXR Phase 100
- MXR M300 Reverb
- MXR Micro Chorus
Strings & Picks
- Elixir Nanoweb (.011–.049)
- Dunlop Jazz III
When the sessions for Mood Swings commenced at the Shangri-La studio in Malibu, King found himself jamming with one of the funkiest drummers alive, Chris Dave, at Rubin’s behest. Alongside King and Dave, whose credits include Robert Glasper, D’Angelo, Maxwell and Meshell Ndegeocello, was keyboardist Cory Henry, a jazz, R&B, and gospel ace who earned acclaim in the fusion collective Snarky Puppy. Rubin’s idea, King comments, was simply for the trio “to create. And I think one of the initial ideas to approach this album was to kind of sample ourselves.” For about a week and a half, in six-, seven- and eight-hour days, the trio jammed and explored using a handful of simple, folkish songs King brought in.
For his part, Rubin was nowhere to be found, though he was still overseeing the sessions. “I’ll tell you,” King begins, “Rick is such a truthful, and whimsical, fan of music. He loves music so much, and he’s such a sweet human. But some of the stories you hear about him, about his eccentric approach to producing, are true.” Like the “Producer of Oz,” Rubin had GoPro cameras and microphones set up around the band, to monitor progress from afar. “He was like, omnipresent,” King says. “His presence was there, but not physically. It was really kind of a trip.”
“I was in that situation, like, breaking bad habits,” King adds, “and trying to abandon the idea that the structure and the form needed to be there before we started experimenting.”
“If you stay in your wheelhouse and you do something just like you’ve done before, you don’t lose any fans, but you don’t gain any.”
About a year later, after the sessions had moved to Rubin’s facility in Tuscany, songcraft came further into focus. King pulled 14-hour days, and Rubin, in the flesh, offered his famously sage insight. “I was really pleased to find out that this is the most intimately Rick’s been involved in a project in some time. And we spent every day together,” King says. “We would just sit on adjacent couches and listen back to what I’d done the day before.”
King first connected with Rubin after Rubin made a cold call to the guitarist after having been impressed by his Grand Ole Opry debut performance.
Photo by Tim Bugbee
One of the more fascinating angles of Mood Swings is how it represents progress, not only for King, but for his producer as well. Part of the Rubin lore has been his unmatched ability to deliver great artists from periods of profound and often painful change, by having them tap into their quintessential sounds, as if harnessing their most vital contributions to rock history. Think of Metallica’s return-to-thrash-form on Death Magnetic, or John Frusciante embracing sobriety to rejoin Red Hot Chili Peppers for Californication.
With Mood Swings, Rubin helped King regain his footing in life by unsettling him creatively, urging him toward audacious work that is nonetheless streaked with King’s signature brilliance. “Delilah” evokes the kind of wistful, classic R&B ballad that the Greenville, South Carolina’s Marcus King Band delivered with period precision. On “Bipolar Love,” its chorus a hooky, soulful marvel, King plays a luminous solo of unerring taste on Big Red, the trusty Gibson ES-345 that belonged to his grandfather, through a Fender Deluxe Reverb. Elsewhere, the album renders Marcus King a consummate neo-soul rhythm player and a shrewd, sonically curious soloist. Rubin and King employed the 6-string “the way that we approach any of the instrumentation that we love. We would deconstruct everything to the point that it was foundationally sound,” King says, so that “the song could stand up on its own with just the vocal.” (This was judicious, as King can sound like an heir apparent to Solomon Burke, with bits of Joplin grit.)
“We spoke for quite a while about mental health and about viewing it as a writing partner, allowing it to help me speak my truth.”
Still, expect to find multiple Reddit threads offering both transcriptions and attempts to decode the masterfully dialed tones throughout Mood Swings. To start, King explained that his leads here “are a little more polished, just because I wanted them to be more like written solos, almost. They were improvised in the moment, but obviously I was stacking them or adding harmonies…. Then [the solo] kind of became a part, because you gotta play it the same way every time.”
King is a guitar obsessive, to be sure, but you’d never tag him a geek; he speaks about gear and technique with a meaningful, big-picture expertise that comes off as nonchalance. During the Mood Swings sessions, he didn’t have access to a massive arsenal of gear, but did smart work with some loyal axes, among them Big Red and his red Tele, his ’62 Strat, his Harmony Sovereign acoustic, and a Gibson J-45 or J-50 owned by Rubin. On “F*ck My Life Up Again,” he tracked the backwards solo on a Strat, “trying to go full Hendrix,” he says. Amp-wise there, he recalls a “Super Reverb in a big chambered hallway—get some natural ’verb, amp cranked,” along with what he believes was his Tru-Fi Colordriver for fuzz. (I’d like to rank this the second-finest Hendrixian backwards solo to go down on Rubin’s watch, following only Frusciante on “Give It Away.”) For “Hero,” a cowrite with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, he tracked a Strat slide solo on top of an acoustic lead. The slide work on the sanctified “Me or Tennessee” is a triumvirate of Strat, Super Reverb, and Tube Screamer, and finds King invoking the sacred-steel tradition, as turbocharged by Roosevelt Collier and Robert Randolph. For some of his favorite tones on the record, King decided to go straight “David Gilmour and hook the fuzz pedal up and play straight through the console and just high-pass it.”
The core performer trio on Mood Swings was made up of King, drummer Chris Dave, and keyboardist Cory Henry.
Mood Swings is still a kick-ass guitar record, even if it’s not a willfully “kick-ass guitar record” like King’s previous effort, Young Blood, produced by Auerbach with bloozy panache and released on Rubin’s American label. When that homage to the early ’70s was captured, King was still in a bad place. “I was really mentally detached during the recording process,” he admits, even as he takes pride in its ZZ Top swagger. And although certain songs foreshadowed the confessional bent of Mood Swings, King says he “didn’t feel as personally connected to some of the material.” In a way, he explains, his primary instrument became a crutch. “I felt like I leaned more heavily on the guitar, which had always been a safety blanket for me from when I was a kid, from young traumas to teenage traumas.”
“His presence was there, but not physically. It was really kind of a trip.”
Back in 2021, in the summer before Young Blood was announced, King returned to the road following the pandemic, opening dates for Nathaniel Rateliff. “On that first show back, I realized my actions and everything I was up to extracurricular-ly affected me performing,” King says. “I was having a hard time getting through the show.” The following morning, his health necessitated a doctor’s consult. “He said, ‘Just don’t quit everything at once, and just start putting things down,’” King shares. “And then that’s kind of when I started that process.” That same day, King met his wife, Briley, who sweetens “Delilah” and “Cadillac” with vocals. “I met her, and she had her shit together and I did not,” he says. “And I just wanted to have my shit together for her…. And I wanted to have my shit together for myself, for the first time in a long time.”
King’s focus these days, he says, is doing the heavy lifting of improving his physical and mental health. “It’s like anything else, man. It’s a skill and it’s not innate,” he argues. “I kind of [liken] it to reading music. I used to read music, but if you put something in front of me now, I couldn’t do it.”
Already his efforts are paying off. “I was out in L.A. recently, doing some work, and I got to the hotel I was staying at … and it was the same room that I’d stayed at when I wrote ‘Bipolar Love,’” he recalls. “Just being back in that same room … ’cause they say a man never stands in the same river twice, it felt like I was back in that river, I’d returned. And I just was completely different and water had already flowed through. It felt really full-circle and validating, the whole process.”
YouTube It
Watch King perform “Goodbye Carolina” in his 2019 Grand Ole Opry debut—the performance that captured the interest of super-producer Rick Rubin.
As an electric hollowbody, the unusual Virginian appears at first to be an acoustic model, but has minimal acoustic projection.
This Virginian is one of the rarest, and oddest. Appearing at first glance to be an amplified (possibly hideously modified) flattop acoustic, it is actually a purpose-built electric. Introduced in 1965, it was one of Jim Burns’ final designs for his original company. This early 1965 example came over to me from the original owner’s family in the U.K., who taped the case shut, slapped on a label, and gave it to Parcelforce, hopefully with a nice “Cheerio!” Amazingly, it arrived in one piece and remains in excellent condition, except for an added string retainer on the headstock.
The Virginian evolved from an earlier Burns semi-acoustic, the GB65. That model used the same laminated mahogany body and flamed sycamore top, with eccentric twin f-holes and a trapeze tailpiece. Compared to the GB65, Burns substituted on the Virginian a decorative, round central soundhole—but the primary difference between the two designs is the patented Rezo-Tube bridge, developed as the vibrato system for the 1964 Hank Marvin solidbody. Each string terminates in an individual tube, hence the name, inside a cavity in the body isolated completely from the wood. Burns claimed that it “gives the string tone a new degree of resonance and sostenuto” (i.e., sustain).
The Virginian is built with Burns’ patented Rezo-Tube bridge, designed for the ’64 Hank Marvin solidbody, where each string terminates in an individual tube inside a cavity in the body.
Photos by George Aslaender
Burns was so pleased with the Rezo-Tube that the Virginian was designed around it, but here, the concept seems a bit counterintuitive. A large solid block under the bridge has a central opening; six strings in individual metal tubes hang down therein. The bridge is spring-suspended on a knife-edge pivot but not intended to move, having no vibrato arm. To top it off, decorative rosewood pieces are mounted either side, mimicking a flattop bridge. Despite a (mostly) hollow body, the Virginian has minimal acoustic sound, thanks to solid blocking around the Rezo-Tube. The natural-finished, bolt-on maple neck has a 24 3/4"-scale rosewood fretboard and the “scroll” headstock—also designed for Hank Marvin. As with most Burns designs, adjustment for the geared truss rod is hidden under the neck plate.
“The Virginian usually inspires a ‘huh?’ reaction—or at least a raised eyebrow—from any player that sees it.”
The Virginian featured Jim Burns’ newest 1965 Bar-O-Matic pickups. The wiring rig sports a major innovation Burns called the “density” knob. The knob blends in the lower coil of a stacked humbucker in the neck position, an original and early use of this concept. The simple-looking controls often baffle a first-time user; the forward knob is volume, with density in the middle and tone at the rear, which also works only on the neck pickup. There are effectively two tone controls for the neck pickup, none for the bridge, and a 3-way switch.
The guitar’s scroll headstock, seen here, was also designed for Marvin.
Photos by George Aslaender
Jim Burns seemed especially proud of this design, the initial ad touting, “Controlled Resonance technology … incorporates the Burns Rezo-Tube bridge/tailpiece developed for the Shadows.” The 1965 U.K. list price was £134, in the same range as many imported Fenders and Gibsons. Despite Burns’ gung ho, the Virginian seems a bit like a guitar in search of a mission. The name implies country Western, but the publicity highlighted “true jazz guitar tone! A real thick, full sound that explodes without ‘woolly’ trimmings with the unique density control.” It’s unlikely much serious jazz got played on Virginians, but one did appear with Lenny Breau in the 1960s. It also was played by a few 1965 U.K. chart acts: Unit 4 + 2, Pinkerton’s Assorted Colours, and even the Troggs.
The Virginian became Baldwin’s Model 550, listed at the rather non-bargain price of $495 (plus a $55 case). They reasoned that if you’re going to put in a vibrato, you should give folks an arm to shake—so later Virginians do have a whammy bar, along with other small changes. Baldwin had a Nashville operation tied in with Sho-Bud, so a few country stars, including a young Johnny Paycheck, got one. Baldwin Virginians were sold from 1966–’69, but first-generation 1965 Burns examples are rare—even in England. The Virginian usually inspires a “huh?” reaction—or at least a raised eyebrow—from any player that sees it. There’s something endearingly goofy about its hybrid appearance, but this is a solid player, handling well with a bright, clear sound for a full-size hollowbody. Jim Burns re-engineered the concept in the ’70s into the Steer model (a favorite of Billy Bragg), but the original Virginian remains unique, and has never been reissued.
Anne McCue’s electric instruments of choice include a pair made by Hanson Guitars in Chicago.
“I try to approach the guitar differently, more like a piano, which has a broad palette and colors and textures, and I really focus on melody and harmony,” McCue says. “I don’t try to come up with riffs and licks that are classically guitar. I love that, but when I was learning guitar, I was learning more complicated chords than I-IV-V. As a child I was a huge Beatles fan, and their arrangements were really quite sophisticated.”
The Loneliest Saturday Night - Anne McCue & The Cubists
“The Loneliest Saturday Night” is the first single from Anne McCue and the Cubists new album, Wholly Roller Coaster.
Early on, McCue shared a nylon-string with her siblings and, later, taught herself on an SG copy one of her brothers brought home. She delved into the Reader’s Digest Treasury of Best Loved Songs, from her parents’ bookshelf. “It had the most beautiful songs, from the jazz era all the way up to Burt Bacharach. I learned all the jazz chords, and the major sevenths and minor sevenths—more complicated chords than most people start with.”
For McCue, who grew up in a small town outside of Sydney, Australia, her modernist take on the era of incense and peppermints is the latest stop in the musical Gulf Stream that she’s navigated. Buoyed by other canonical influences, from Ennio Morricone and Alfred Hitchcock soundtracks to the sophisticated guitar-pop of XTC, she has chased her muse from Melbourne blues jams to Ho Chi Minh City, where she played solo jazz and blues guitar at a hotel for a year. A return to Australia in turn led her to Los Angeles, following a lead from a friend about a band on the verge of breaking out that was looking for a female guitarist who could sing harmony. That group’s record deal and a subsequent solo contact both fizzled. But she moved to Nashville in 2007 on the advice of her manager, and found a home in the creative music hotbed of East Nashville.
“When I was learning guitar, I was learning more complicated chords than I-IV-V.”
Allowing the influence of the Western movies, like the classic High Noon, and her early country music heroes—most notably Johnny Cash—that she loved as a kid to pervade her songwriting, McCue dived into the currents of Americana and developed an international reputation over the course of seven albums, including the powerful Roll. That recording ranges over a variety of roots terrain, from the fingerpicked, elegiac “Ballad of an Outlaw Woman” to a boldly reharmonized, ripping cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun” to the album’s most harrowing song, “Hangman,” about a lynching, driven by the raw, ghostly tones of her lap steel. The BBC’s influential DJ Bob Harris chose Roll as his top album of 2004. Over the years she’s toured the U.S. and abroad, hosted the smartly eclectic radio show Songs on the Wire on Nashville’s indie radio station WNXA, produced other artists, and played on sessions, mostly for friends—including modern psychedelicist Robyn Hitchcock.
Anne McCue's Gear
McCue’s acoustic is an old Guild dreadnought, captured with her here onstage at Nashville’s 5 Spot. It’s used as her primary instrument on “Witch Song?" and for sweetening elsewhere.
Photo by Jill Kettles
Guitars
- 1979 Gibson Les Paul
- Hanson Cigno
- Hanson Gatto
- Hanson Ravenswood 12
- Guild acoustic dreadnought
Amps
- Fender Blues Junior
- Custom Jamison (15/30 watts switchable)
Recording Gear
- Pro Tools
- Royer 121 mic
- Mojave Audio MA-50, MA-100, MA-200, and MA-300 mics
- Focusrite interface
Effects
- Line 6 DL4
- Electro-Harmonix ML9
- Fulltone Distortion Pro
- JHS Morning Glory
- Danelectro Rocky Road
- Strymon Flint
- Dunlop Cry Baby
- Boss OC-5 Octave
- EBow
Strings, Slide, & Picks
- D’Addario (.010 and .011 sets)
- The Rock Slide
McCue met Hitchcock, a native Londoner who moved to Nashville in 2015, when she produced an EP for Emma Swift, his wife, and Hitchcock invited McCue to be his guitar foil on 2017’s Robyn Hitchcock. Hitchcock, who came to fame as the leader of the Soft Boys, can be glibly described as a sane version of his idol Syd Barrett, the original Pink Floyd frontman and the guiding hand behind the Floyd’s marvelously playful and boldly psychedelic debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
“He didn’t want lead guitar on the album,” McCue explains. “He wanted two guitars working together, so it was more about riffs that would fit with what he was playing. I went around to his house and we played, to try out things, before we went into the studio.” The result is a guitar conversation as literate and bristlingly playful as Hitchcock’s always-clever lyrics.
“I wanted to make a record that made people feel like they were stoned without actually having to work hard.”
That planted the psilocybin seeds of a new musical direction, but they really sprouted during the pandemic, when Pink Floyd became an important and soul-buoying part of McCue’s musical diet. “The pandemic gave me a chance to get off the treadmill of everyday existence,” she relates. “One day, I listened to the first seven Pink Floyd albums [including early live recordings] and never even got to Dark Side of the Moon. It was an epiphany. I listened to Pink Floyd and XTC for days and days and days. It took me out of a long gray tunnel into an open space, and I hear that space in the music.”
When she began playing guitar, McCue didn’t initially encounter the good ol’ I-IV-V. “I learned all the jazz chords, and the major sevenths and minor sevenths—more complicated chords than most people start with,” she says.
Photo by Jill Kettles
Which is only right, because, as Sun Ra declared, “Space is the place.” It breathes life into Wholly Roller Coaster, which McCue crafted with her band, the Cubists—although McCue played guitars, bass, keys, percussion, bouzouki, and electric sitar (which opens the album, with the gently hallucinogenic “Fly or Fall”) herself, at her home studio, Flying Machine. Even when contemplating the quirky nature of humanity in “Leaping on the Moon,” which has a soaring EBow finale, her lyrics possess grace and empathy—the latter another element that taps the spirit of Pink Floyd’s less acerbic work. And her often-playful rhyming swims in the same channel as Barrett and Hitchcock. By the time the album ends with “The Years,” which offers a backwards guitar solo in the middle of its observations on the passage of a lifetime, a repast richer than “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast” has been served.
“There’s a comforting, expansive, and inspiring space to get into,” McCue says. “I wanted to make a record that made people feel like they were stoned without actually having to work hard … so you could get lost in the sound.” And want to stay lost, for a good, long while.
YouTube It
Anne McCue & the Cubists recently filmed McCue’s “Witch Song” for NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest.
I think it’s fair to say that the Fender Marauder, like Gibson’s Moderne, was ahead of its time, and neither guitar made it beyond the prototype stage—at least not as originally designed.
The Marauder’s ’60s production model came with three pickups in a Jaguar-style body, many rocker switches, German carve headstock, and some even with slanted frets. It was later offered as part of the Modern Player series as well as through the custom shop. But the original design and concept of the Marauder was quite different.
In order to see what Leo Fender cooked up in the mid ’60s, we will have to take a short journey back in time, firing up the flux capacitor in our DeLorean with 1.21 gigawatts of energy. Our destination is the Fender factory in California, somewhere between 1963 and 1964—the early beginnings of the space age. The United States worked on the Apollo program at the same time the former Soviet Union worked on the Luna program on the other end of the world. Europe was busy developing and building the Concorde, and Leo Fender, sitting on the porch of his home in Orange County, was ready for his next stroke of genius.
Today, “less is more” is a common approach, not only in the guitar industry. But back then, it was “more is more” and “the more, the merrier.” Leo Fender offered the Esquire with one bridge pickup, and the two-pickup Esquire/Telecaster followed soon after. The next step was the Stratocaster with three pickups, which was mostly influenced by Bill Carson, one of Leo’s favorite guitarist guinea pigs in the ’50s. The next logical step was a guitar with four pickups, and that was exactly the idea behind the Marauder project. There are other guitars with four pickups, like the Japanese-made Teisco/Kawai EG-4T (nicknamed the “Hertiecaster”), or the Italian-made Welson Kinton, Galanti Grand Prix V4, and Eko 500/4V. But Leo Fender went the extra mile with his Marauder concept and installed the pickups underneath the pickguard for a very sleek aesthetic.
“The next logical step was a guitar with four pickups.”
Let’s have a look under the hood: The patent for the Marauder was filed March 6, 1964, and granted December 6, 1966—US patent #3290424—so we can say that developing and prototyping probably started somewhere in 1963. In addition to the four pickups under the pickguard, the original Marauder had a 3-way switch for each of the pickups, plus a Telecaster-style master volume/master tone configuration. On the patent, you can clearly see that the guitar was planned as an offset-type like the Jazzmaster or Jaguar using the same hardware.
There was, however, a one-off prototype built around a Stratocaster that has a dedicated 3-way lever pickup selector switch from the Telecaster and Stratocaster (the 5-way switch was not yet invented then) for each pickup, which looks really weird.
The Pickups
The pickups in the Marauder were designed by a man named Quilla “Porky” Freeman, a Western-swing musician and tinkerer based in Missouri. These large, slightly offset experimental pickups featured a dozen pole pieces and deep armatures, which helped give it a percussive tone. To compensate for the distance from the strings, the pickups were overwound. The patent document clearly states that all four pickups had the same winding direction (phase), but different magnetic polarity. The first (bridge) and the third pickup had south polarity, while the second and fourth (neck) pickup had north polarity, which was a clever move. This was the start of what is known as a “stealth pickup” today, often used as the hidden neck pickup on an Esquire. For such a construction, it’s important that the pickguard material is non-magnetic.
The Switching Matrix
Each of the pickups is connected to its own 3-way on-off-on switch, allowing the corresponding pickup to be on, off, or on with reversed phase, resulting in a total of 48 different sounds between the four. If the idea of these 3-way pickup selector switches sounds familiar, that’s because this is the basic design of Brian May’s “Red Special” guitar that he built with his father Harold in 1963. While that’s the same time frame, it’s close to impossible that Leo Fender knew what Brian May was doing in the U.K., so two geniuses simply had the same idea at the same time.
Here we go with the wiring: The four toggle switches are double-pole on-off-on types, volume and tone are 250k audio, and the tone cap is a 0.05 uF type. To keep the diagram clean, I substituted all ground connections with the international symbol for ground.
Illustration courtesy of Singlecoil
That’s it! Next month, we will talk about a very cool and clever way to integrate a variable dummy-coil into a guitar, so stay tuned.
Until then… keep on modding!