Take a look at how Kristian Matsson, one of Sweden’s most enigmatic songwriters, crafts layers of sonic magic with a handful of open tunings and a pile of pedals.
Kristian Matsson, aka The Tallest Man on Earth, met with Premier Guitar’s John Bohlinger after his soundcheck at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. As a solo performer, Matsson needs to cover a lot of sonic territory, laying down complex tone beds to accompany his voice. He offered up a step-by-step guide to the ingredients that go into being The Tallest Man on Earth.
Matsson plays a vintage ’50s Harmony Stratotone. The Stratotone remains all stock as far as he knows and in spite of the primitive bridge, the intonation is solid.
The acoustic equivalent of the Stratotone is Matsson’s vintage Kay acoustic from the 1950s. An L.R. Baggs M1 passive soundhole pickup sends the signal to front of house.
For a 12-string vibe, Matsson goes with this 2015 Gretsch Country Gentleman G6122-G212 with TV Jones pickups.
Matsson uses this 1965 Martin D-18 equipped with a an L.R. Baggs M1 pickup for more folk-based tunes. A feedback buster has been trimmed to accommodate the pickup.
This replica of a 1960s T-style was built for Matsson by luthier Kresimir Juricic. It was patterned after Mike Bloomfield’s classic axe and features Fender Custom ’62 pickups.
Matsson’s 2017 Fender Stratocaster has been upgraded with Lindy Fralin pickups.
Matsson’s Epiphone Serenader FT-85 is a late-’60s 12-string that has also been equipped with an L.R. Baggs M1 pickup.
One of the newer guitars in Matsson’s stash is this 2019 Gibson ES-335. It offers that classic humbucker sound combined with the warmth of a semi-hollow.
This 2015 Martin 00L-17 gives Matsson a bit more acoustic tonal variety. Like the others, this acoustic has been equipped with an L.R. Baggs M1.
A pair of Fender Blues Jr IVs serve as Matsson’s backline. Here’s a look at his settings.
Matsson has quite an expansive pedalboard that includes a Strymon blueSky Reverberator, an EarthQuaker Devices Avalanche Run, a Strymon El Capistan dTape Echo, a Strymon Flint, an Industrial Electric RM-1N, an Electro-Harmonix Nano POG, a Cornish Acoustic Preamp/DI, Electro-Harmonix Hum Debugger, a Strymon Deco, a Chase Bliss Tonal Recall, a JHS/Keeley Steak & Eggs, a Fulltone True Path ABY-HT, Korg tuner, and a Gamechanger Audio Plus.
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Less-corpulent, Big Muff-style tones that cut in many colors.
Unique, less-bossy take on the Big Muff sound that trades excess fat for articulation. Nice build at a nice price.
Some Big Muff heads may miss the bass and silky smooth edges.
$149
Evil Eye FX Warg
evileyefx.com
Membership in the Cult of Big Muff is an endless source of good times. Archaeologically minded circuit-tracers can explore many versions and mutations. Tone obsessives can argue the merits of fizzier or fatter tone signatures. The Ace Tone FM-3 is one of the less famous branches on the Big Muff evolutionary tree, but one that every true Big Muff devotee should know. It came out around 1971 and it was among the first in a line of often-imaginative Japanese takes on the circuit.
Evil Eye Warg Fuzz - MAIN by premierguitar
Listen to Evil Eye Warg Fuzz - MAIN by premierguitar #np on #SoundCloudEvil Eye’s Warg Fuzz marks another generation in this evolution. It uses the FM-3 as a design foundation and inspiration, and shares many of its tone characteristics. It’s most overtly a buzzier, less bass-hefty take on the V1 “Triangle” Big Muff, which serves as the FM-3 design’s launch pad. But the Warg also adds a midrange boost switch that makes the pedal better suited to mixes and environments where a little extra presence serves the musical setting.
Close Cousins
If you look at schematics for a V1 Big Muff and an Ace Tone FM-3 (minus its largely superfluous “boost” circuit) side by side, you’ll see a near-mirror image. But the small differences are significant. On the Ace Tone and Evil Eye Warg, the volume pot is positioned before the output gain stage rather than after, as it is on a Big Muff. A few filter and feedback capacitor values are smaller than those on the Big Muff, and there are a few extra resistors and an extra capacitor. Those changes aside, the two circuits would be hard to differentiate at a glance. But as we’ll hear, the audible differences are often profound.
Though Evil Eye was careful to replicate the Ace Tone circuit as closely as possible, the company added a second path for reshaping the output in the form of the “scooped and flat” toggle. Big Muffs are generally pretty scooped in the midrange, which is one of the breed’s distinguishing qualities, no matter the version. But that doesn’t keep newer manufacturers, like EarthQuaker and Stomp Under Foot, to name a few, from building Big Muff clones that add a midrange boost. Here, a variable boost knob is replaced by the flat-switch setting, which still offers ample tone reshaping utility.
“In a band mix, there’s more contrast with a burly bass.”
Build quality on the Philadelphia-made Warg is very nice. The circuit board is tidy, arranged along four rows of components that make the circuit relatively easy to trace. Input and output jacks as well as the footswitch are mounted to the chassis rather than the circuit board. The footswitch is a soft-relay unit. The pedal also looks bitchin’ (though the namesake wolf beast on the enclosure looks a little slender for a mythical, massive Warg). Given the careful, high-quality execution, the $149 street price is an especially good value.
Less Woof in This Wolf
Situating the Warg alongside any Big Muff makes the sonic family resemblance very clear. For comparison, I used a Sovtek Big Muff as well as really nice Ram’s Head and Triangle Big Muff clones. And while the Triangle is very clearly the closest cousin, in an audible sense, in the mid-scooped setting, the Warg shares a powerful, thick, high-gain profile and feel with all three Big Muff types. Where it’s most pronouncedly different is in its relatively light bottom end. For Big Muff hounds that savor the unique, bassy Big Muff ballast, the difference will probably sound pretty stark. But there’s lots of upside to the Warg’s less fat and sprawling profile. In a band mix, there’s more contrast with a burly bass. It will inhabit a much more individual space in a mix, too, which can open up mixing and arrangement options once you’ve laid down your tracks. And for this Big Muff fan, the less-bass-forward profile meant I could coax thick, grindy tones that were a touch more evocative of mid-to-late-’60s fuzz tonalities and felt less shackled to fat stoner-rock templates or late-Gilmour butter-sustain cliches without sacrificing a Big Muff’s sense of wide-spectrum chord aggression.
In the flat frequency mode, I found that the closest sonic likeness to the Warg was an EarthQuaker Hoof with an enhanced mids setting. The EQD probably offered more range on the traditional, bassy side of the Big Muff spectrum. But almost none of the pedals I tested against the Warg could match the Evil Eye’s high-mid clarity in chording situations and melodic leads.
The Verdict
Ascertaining how the very apparent, but sometimes subtle, differences between Big Muff types and the Evil Eye Warg fit your tone ideals and musical needs will probably take a shootout of your own. But if, like me, you’re a Big Muff user that sometimes wearies of that pedal’s smooth, fat, bluster, Evil Eye’s alternative is attractive and intriguing. It’s a great study in how different the basic Big Muff architecture can sound. And at just less than $150, you don’t have to feel too scared about taking a chance on this very interesting fuzz
Paul Reed Smith shaping a guitar neck in his original Annapolis, Maryland garret shop.
You might not be aware of all the precision that goes into building a fine 6-string’s neck, but you can certainly feel it.
I do not consider my first “real” guitar the one where I only made the body. In my mind, an electric guitar maker makes necks with a body attached—not the other way around. (In the acoustic world, the body is a physics converter from hand motion to sound, but that’s a different article for a different month.) To me, the neck is deeply important because it’s the first thing you feel on a guitar to know if you even want to plug it in. As we say at PRS, the neck should feel like “home,” or like an old shirt that’s broken in and is so comfortable you can barely tell it’s on.
A couple articles ago, I talked about things on a guitar you can’t see, but are of the utmost importance to the quality of the instrument. I’d now like to go deeper into some of those unseen details in guitar neck making that make a difference. This list is a small percentage of what’s really going on, so please take each one as an example of the craft.
Gluing in the frets. In my old repair shop, there were several instruments that kept returning after gigs because the frets had again become unlevel. If I took a very flat file and started to level the frets, the volume of the squeaking of the frets as I filed was really loud. I realized that these guitars had never had their frets glued in. It seemed clear that the fretshad to be glued into the slots, so when someone sweats into the instrument at a gig, the frets do not change height. I learned, after interviewing Ted McCarty, that the Gibson factory in Kalamazoo in the ’50s glued the frets in with fish glue. I tried it once. It stunk, and I never used it again. But gluing frets in has been important to me since day one. The glue makes a mold around the teeth of the fretwire to hold the frets in place. Another reason to glue the frets in is that on some ’60s Martins, for example, the frets would lift up on the treble side and the high-E string would get caught underneath the fret. So, glue the frets in or you’re going to have a long-term problem. By the way, using a water-based glue is like adding all the water back to the fretboard that you spent months drying out. I like super glue because it doesn’t have any water in it.
“Terry Kath, the great guitar player from Chicago, once told me, ‘Most guitars won’t play in tune down near the nut, and I search and search for guitars that will.’”
Fret positions. When I was young, there was an article in Guitar Player that described how to calculate fret positions by using the 12th root of two. The number is 1.0594631. And the reason I remember the number is because calculators didn’t have memory at the time, and I had to keep entering the number over and over again. One day, someone came into my shop and said, “I can’t play in tune with the keyboard player when I am playing lines near the nut.” I said, “That’s hard for me to believe, but I’ll check it.” Sure enough, the first few frets were out of tune with the open nut even though I had calculated the 1st frets’ positions perfectly. Turns out the nut needed to be moved so that it would play in tune down there (in the same way you have to adjust the intonation at the bridge end). Terry Kath, the great guitar player from Chicago, once told me, “Most guitars won’t play in tune down near the nut, and I search and search for guitars that will.” Getting the frets, the nut, and the bridge in the right positions is incredibly important. You’d be surprised that this is not always a given.
Neck shape. I was once at Dave’s Guitar Shop in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in his upstairs guitar museum, and got to compare early ’50s Tele, old Les Paul, and early Strat neck shapes. What was so surprising was how close the neck shapes were, including the thumb round-over (where the side dots are). I was later able to scan a lot of these necks and compare them with a computer, and, damn, they were really close. What was different was the radius of the fretboards. Some of them were more curved than others, and the old Gibsons’ radii were not what the internet says they should be. So, it’s pretty hard to understand from the specs alone how a neck is going to feel in your hands. In my mind, there’s a common shape that your hand feels comfortable with, and then all the extensions that make 7-string guitars, 12-strings, acoustic instruments, and modern Ibanez/flat-radius type instruments are other artforms altogether.
At PRS, we often think of guitars in terms of looks, feel, and sound. If it looks good, you’ll probably pick it up. If it feels good in your hands and rings for a long time when you strum it acoustically, you’ll probably plug it in. If it sounds good plugged in, there’s a good chance you’re hooked.
Warren Haynes has unveiled the Million Voices Whisper 2025 Tour in support of his new solo album.
The 9-date run will launch February 7th in Knoxville, and the Warren Haynes Band will travel throughout the Midwest and Northeast, stopping in such cities as Huntsville, Toledo, Des Moines, and Burlington before wrapping February 22nd in Buffalo. See below for all dates and details.
Fan Club presale tickets will be available starting Wednesday, November 20th at 10am local time with local presales beginning Thursday, November 21st at 10am local time and the general on sale commencing Friday, November 22nd at 10am local time. $1 from every ticket sold for the winter tour will be donated to assist with hurricane relief.
A limited number of specially curated fan packages will also be available for the Million Voices Whisper 2025 Tour. Packages include one Ultimate Guitar Player Package per show, featuring a Les Paul Standard 60s Plain Top guitar in Sparkling Burgundy to be played and signed by Warren, meet & greet with a photo with Warren, soundcheck access, premium reserved seats, and more, and the Guitar Player Package, which includes an autographed Gibson Les Paul Standard Pickguard, a set of custom Warren Haynes guitar picks in collector box, a Dunlop guitar slide, and set of GHS strings (items as used by Warren), plus soundcheck, priority access, and more.
Visit www.warrenhaynes.net for all ticketing and VIP information and to purchase.
Performing alongside Haynes (vocals, guitar) will be the current, all-star lineup of the Warren Haynes Band: longtime drummer Terence Higgins (of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band), Gov’t Mule bassist Kevin Scott, Matt Slocum on keys, and Greg Osby on sax.
Just released November 1stvia Fantasy Records, Million Voices Whisper – Warren’s first solo album in almost a decade and fourth solo collection in his esteemed career catalog – debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Blues Albums Chart and also entered the Americana/Folk Albums chart at #3, Current Rock Albums chart at #5, and Top Current Albums Sales chart at #29. Already hailed as his best album yet, the 11-song collection of soulful blues-rock, produced by Haynes and recorded at Power Station New England, includes the singles “This Life As We Know It” and “Day of Reckoning” featuring Lukas Nelson and Jamey Johnson as well as guest appearances from Warren’s Allman Brothers Band bandmate and longtime friend Derek Trucks on multiple tracks including “Real Real Love,” a song whose lyrics were initially started by Gregg Allman that Haynes finished to honor his friend. Million Voices Whisper is available digitally and on CD, 2-LP vinyl set, and a deluxe CD version with four bonus songs.
This Sunday, November 24th, Haynes, a native of Asheville, and Dave Matthews Band will host “SOULSHINE,” a benefit concert to aid relief and recovery efforts in Western North Carolina and Florida in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, at Madison Square Garden. The sold-0ut, all-star event – featuring performances from DMB, Warren Haynes Band, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, and Goose along with very special guests Trey Anastasio, Mavis Staples, Robert Randolph, Joe Russo, Trombone Shorty, Susan Tedeschi,and Derek Trucks – will now be available worldwide via a free live stream hosted on YouTube. Produced by Volta Media and sponsored by Cisco Systems, the concert will be streamed live on Sunday from 7:00-11:00 pm ET on the official event website SOULSHINEMSG.COM. Net proceeds will go to the SOULSHINE Concert Fund at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, which will benefit Habitat for Humanity’s 2024 Hurricane Recovery fund and will also support a variety of non-profits on the ground in North Carolina and Florida. Visit SOULSHINEMSG.COM to learn more or make a donation.
Following “SOULSHINE,” Haynes will wrap the year with Gov’t Mule’s annual New Year’s Run – December 28th at College Street Music Hall in New Haven, Connecticut, and December 30th and 31st at The Beacon Theatre in New York City – and then launch 2025 with his annual concert-cation experience Island Exodus 15 in Jamaica from January 19-23 before heading out on the road for the Million Voices Whisper 2025 Tour.
For more information, please visit warrenhaynes.net.
WARREN HAYNES TOUR DATES
Gov’t Mule – New Year’s Run
December 28 – New Haven, CT @ College Street Music Hall
December 30 – New York, NY @ Beacon Theatre
December 31 – New York, NY @ Beacon Theatre
Island Exodus 15
Featuring Gov’t Mule, Warren Haynes, Drive-By Truckers, Karina Rykman & Big Sugar
January 19-23, 2025 – Runaway Bay, Jamaica @ Jewel Paradise Cove Resort
Million Voices Whisper Tour 2025
February 7 – Knoxville, TN @ Bijou Theatre
February 8 – Huntsville, AL @ Mars Music Hall
February 11 – Toledo, OH @ Stranahan Theater
February 13 – Northfield, OH @ MGM Northfield Park – Center Stage
February 14 – Carmel, IN @ The Palladium
February 15 – West Des Moines, IA @ Val Air Ballroom
February 20 – Burlington, VT @ The Flynn
February 21 – Concord, NH @ Chubb Theatre
February 22 – Buffalo, NY @ Town Ballroom
April 5 – Columbia, SC @ Township Auditorium (rescheduled from 9/28)
Gov’t Mule – Festival Appearances
March 6-8 – Live Oak, FL @ Suwannee Amp Jam #1 (on sale 11/21)
July 23-27 – Floyd County, VA @ FloydFest 25~Aurora
Warren Haynes Band – European Festival Appearance
July 6 – Sperken, Austria @ Castle Clam
Amythyst Kiah began learning guitar at the age of 13, then later attended a creative arts high school, where she found her people among all the “misfits and weirdos.”
The Americana singer-songwriter, known for supporting her vocals with intricate fingerpicking, found herself simplifying her process for her latest full-length, which, in turn, has led to more personal and artistic growth.
Folk singer-songwriter Amythyst Kiah is a formidable fingerstylist. When asked about her creative process, she explains how she’s come up playing a lot of solo shows—something that’s inspired her to bring out the orchestral range of the guitar for her own vocal accompaniment. Over the years, she’s taken her high school classical training and college old-time-string-band experience to evolve her fingerpicking skills, developing three-finger technique and other multi-dimensional patterns influenced by players like Mike Dawes. And for her latest full-length, Still + Bright, she’s only continued to grow in her musicianship, but by stepping back to square one: rhythm.
Amythyst Kiah - "God's Under the Mountain"
“I’ve stayed away from writing songs where I’m just strumming for a really long time,” she prefaces, “because I was worried that it was going to be too boring to not do fingerstyle. But then I realized, there’s so many [strummed] songs that are super powerful, and you can still make it interesting rhythmically.
“I started to listen to more rhythm guitar players, like Cory Wong, and reconfigured how I was viewing rhythm guitar,” she continues. “It was a matter of finding a way to do it that was exciting and interesting to me. Now, it’s really expanded the songs that I can write.”
All of the demos for Still + Brightbegan with strumming, says Kiah. When working on ideas, she would “play rhythmically as much as I could,” then open GarageBand, choose a tempo she felt comfortable playing to, and add programmed drums—often going with a modern R&B pattern. But when she brought her songs to the studio, she discovered that she was struggling to replicate the guitar parts she’d recorded at home.For Kiah, who’s always had a very strong sense of self and vision for her sound, that was a bit discomforting.In the making of Still + Bright, Kiah’s fifth full-length album, the songwriter strengthened her skills as both a rhythm guitarist and a vocalist.
“I had a moment of, ‘I can either spend way too long trying to replay this part that I’ve been playing from muscle memory at this point,’” she shares, or hand it off to her session player, Nashville guitarist (and, coincidentally, Premier Guitarcolumnist) Ellen Angelico, and focus on her lyrics and vocal delivery instead. “I used to be very much like, ‘I have to be playing guitar on everything.’ But there’s a team of people here that can help, and make things go along more smoothly. My ego shouldn’t be getting in the way.”
She did, ultimately, play guitar—acoustic or electric, or both—on five out of 12 tracks, and banjo on two. Angelico performed on each track, alternating between mandolin, dobro, pedal steel, and acoustic, electric, and baritone guitar. (You’ll also hear Billy Strings, with his unmistakable, rapid-fire bluegrass licks, on “I Will Not Go Down.”)
The finished album exudes a spirit of triumph. It rings as one extended anthem, beginning with “Play God and Destroy the World,” a reflection on a childhood rejection of religious hypocrisy, and ending on “People’s Prayer,” an avowal of humanistic compassion. “S P A C E,” one of the more pensive songs in the collection, features Kiah playing clawhammer banjo. “God’s Under the Mountain” builds and undulates with a communion of syncopated vocal melody, fiddle, pedal steel, dobro, and background vocals by producer Butch Walker and Avi Kaplan. Then, the waltzing “Dead Stars” unwinds with simpler, judicious instrumentation supporting a mournful theme, before swelling with Morricone-like eloquence as it closes. “This is the first album where I really had a concept about everything, from the logo to the color palette, and everything else,” says Kiah, “and I had an incredible team who was able to really bring to life what I was envisioning.”
Amythyst Kiah’s Gear
Some of Kiah’s building blocks for her fingerpicking abilities came from classical training in high school and old-time studies at East Tennessee State University.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography
Effects
- L.R. Baggs Para Acoustic DI
- TC Electronic Polytune
Strings, Picks & Accessories
- Acoustic: D’Addario light
- Electric: Ernie Ball medium
- Dunlop .73 mm picks
- Paige capo
Throughout the record, Kiah’s propulsive singing voice is the glowing flame to the hearth, acting as a centerpiece to the already luminous, Americana-fueled full-band arrangements. Like rhythm guitar, voice was another essential element that she cultivated while creating Still + Bright.
“I kind of diminished that power of having a voice,” she admits, explaining how she’s always been preoccupied with measuring up on guitar, and has long held multi-instrumentalists such as Prince in high esteem. But something shifted when a sentiment expressed by her manager, Dolph Ramseur, years ago, finally sunk in. “He said, ‘Amythyst, you know, you could just stand in a room and sing a cappella, and people would sit there and listen, and they wouldn’t get up and leave, and they would not be bored.’ And then it really dawned on me—it’s a powerful thing, people that can just sing; there’s a power and strength there, too. It’s just understanding where the power lies, and then embracing it, as opposed to feeling inadequate.
“It’s just understanding where the power lies, and then embracing it, as opposed to feeling inadequate.”
“I have this ongoing obsession in the back of my mind that I’m never doing enough,” she continues. “So, anytime I remove something from the equation, I worry. That stems from social anxiety, and being overly concerned with, like, ‘Am I making the right decision?’ But it doesn’t matter how long I agonize or rethink or redo something; at the end of the day, the decision I make is still going to be spontaneous. Because there’s only ever ‘now.’” She adds, laughing, “I’m a big Alan Watts fan.”
Now, she’s started doing vocal warmups before shows, “and through that, I’ve expanded my range and I’ve also been able to gain even more control over my voice. It also means that I can write more challenging songs. Those two things—expanding [rhythm] guitar and expanding voice—have let me open a whole new side to my sound.”
Spiritual themes appear frequently on Still + Bright, in both Kiah’s song titles and lyrics. The opening lines of “Empire of Love” include, “My religion is none at all / I build my own cathedrals and let ’em fall.” On “Let’s See Ourselves Out,” she sings, “So many matrices we create to escape / Sometimes I wonder if we’re just a mistake.” And, on more than one song, there’s mention of how “we’re all made from stars from above,” alluding to the scientific evidence that the elements of the human body were created by stars that went supernova.
Kiah was raised in a predominantly white, Christian suburb in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as part of a Black family who didn’t attend church. She identified as an “alternative” kid, vacillating between agnosticism and atheism, shopping at Hot Topic, and drawing inspiration from The Matrix’s theme of breaking free from societal constraints. (She remarks on her younger self’s “cognitive dissonance” of buying “‘alternative clothes’ at the mall.”) As a self-proclaimed introvert, she dealt with social anxiety, and spent a lot of her time at home alone on the computer. But when she began learning guitar at 13, and later started attending a creative arts high school, she finally felt like she fit in: “’cause everybody there was misfits and weirdos.”
Spirituality is a common theme in Kiah’s music. Her current beliefs draw mainly on principles of Zen Buddhism and Taoism.
Photo by Kevin & King
Though still adamantly individualistic, her spiritual views evolved when she took courses in both Western humanities and Eastern religion in college: “I realized that people have created narratives about how to live our lives for thousands of years. So, this idea that only one group of people got it right and everyone else is wrong; that threw all of that out the window.” Today, she says that Zen Buddhism probably best captures her personal belief system, but, “I hesitate to call myself a Zen Buddhist because I feel like I still have more to learn,” she says. She also rereads the Tao Te Ching by Laozi “pretty regularly,” lauding the principles of Taoism as another strong influence on her philosophies.
At the beginning of our 1 p.m. Zoom call, Kiah shares that she typically spends her mornings alone and in silence, meditating, writing, and reading, and lightheartedly apologizes for enthusiastically “going on”—saying she’s had a lot of time to think before speaking to another person. When I ask her about what modern artists she’s listening to lately, she has more to say about what she’s been reading. One of the books in her current rotation is The Lost Art of Silence by Sarah Anderson.
Growing up, Kiah identified as an “alternative” kid, and was something of an “anime mall goth” who often shopped at Hot Topic.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography
“It goes along really well with meditation and learning to live in the present,” Kiah says. “It’s been interesting to explore those different perspectives on silence, and make more of an effort to find time in my life to be quiet. I find that I’m getting more and more comfortable with myself and my thoughts, and I feel less like I always have to block out anxious thoughts. Or, if I have anxiety about something, I can come up with an idea of, ‘Okay, well, how can I alleviate this? Can I do anything about it?’, and solve the problem as opposed to starting the spiral.
“Impostor syndrome was the big driver for my social anxiety, and now, I feel like I’m on the other side of being an impostor,” she reflects. “I’m doing what I’ve been wanting to do for the past 12 years, making a living doing this. There’s stressful things that happen, but you have to decide, what are you willing to be stressed out about? To try to seek a perfect, happy life where nothing ever upsets you—that’s called emotional repression and it’s really unhealthy. It’s just about accepting the fact that, hey, some days, some weeks are gonna be shit, and to find ways to take care of yourself that are as least self-destructive as humanly possible.”
“It doesn’t matter how long I agonize or rethink or redo something; at the end of the day, the decision I make is still going to be spontaneous. Because there’s only ever ‘now.’”
And while she’s outgrown a lot of her social anxiety, she says it’s been a challenge adapting to the stress that comes with the unpredictability of touring. “When I would be at home, I would establish this really tight routine, and then I got completely knocked on my feet when I would leave,” she explains. “I had to get to this point where I would just be focusing more on the present and less on trying to micromanage how my day’s going to be, because it’s not gonna always go the way that I want things to go.
“That’s been also helpful in my creative process, because then I’m not as anxious and worried about all these other things that I don’t have control over, and I’m able to just … enjoy the process of living.”
Ellen Angelico's Gear
Guitars
- Dismal Ax Barnstormer
- Cervantes Telecaster
- GFI Expo S-10
- 1980s Kentucky KM-250S mandolin
Amp
- 3rd Power Dream 50 Plexi
Effects
- Peterson StroboStomp HD tuner
- Line 6 HX Stomp
- 1981 DRV
- MXR Timmy Overdrive Mini
- Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Boy
- Strymon Flint
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario NYXL
- Wegen picks
YouTube It
On WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, recorded in Knoxville, Tennessee, Kiah performs an evocative, stripped-down version of “Empire of Love” from Still + Bright.