Building guitars for a living and having
a reputation as one of the best luthiers
in the boutique category would probably be
a dream scenario for most admirers of the
guitar. How about having your shop 4,000
feet up Mt. Haleakala on the island of Maui?
As a woodworker and working musician,
Steve Grimes was fascinated by the prospect
of combining the two professions and began
building guitars in the early ’70s. Now with
almost 40 years of building high-end archtops,
flattops, mandolins, and ukes, Grimes
has amassed an impressive client list which
includes such luminaries as George Benson,
Walter Becker, Steve Miller, and Willie
Nelson, to name a few.
While Grimes does have a large selection
of standard model instruments, he specializes
in custom tailoring one-off guitars to suit the
tonal, aesthetic, and playability requirements
of his customers. When asked about one of
his more interesting custom requests, Grimes
recalled the “Family Tree” guitar he built for
a well-known collector. A double-soundhole,
flattop guitar, Grimes designed a fretboard
with a tree of life inlay, but instead of flowers
in the vine he made highly detailed engravings
of the faces of the customer’s family.
From the grandfather on down to a four-year-
old daughter, Grimes succeeded in capturing
the expressions so well that the young
girl recognized all the family members.
Grimes Guitars is a relatively small shop
with only one other luthier on staff. The
instruments are produced slowly and meticulously
by hand with just about 20 created
each year. Grimes builds a few guitars at a
time from start to finish, believing that he is
better able to control the response and tonal
characteristics as each instrument progresses.
When questioned about what present
trend in luthiery would have a major effect
20 years from now, Grimes says, “I think
that the current trend toward mechanization
and computerization will continue to
evolve, yielding guitars with high quality
and lower prices.” He continued, “But I
think we are still a long way off from having
a computer being able to discern good
wood from bad, voicing guitars depending
on the stiffness of wood, and catering to the
specific tonal and aesthetic needs of players
looking for something special. I expect I’ll
still be taking custom orders in 30 years.”
Jazz Laureate
The woods used for the Jazz Laureate—available in cutaway and non-cutaway—are selected from hundreds of samples of master grade wood for their exceptional tonal characteristics and visual beauty. The backs and sides are cut from the same billet of old cello wood, ensuring visual and tonal continuity, and Grimes personally chooses and tests this wood for lightness, stiffness, sustain, and purity of tone. Appointments include five-ply wood purflings with an optional dyed wood strip in the center of the five plies, and wood bindings consisting of curly koa, rosewood, silkwood, curly maple, or African blackwood. Inlays include a multi-layered diamond consisting of alternating strips of paua shell abalone from New Zealand and mother-of-pearl.
Pescatore
This custom guitar, called the Pescatore, features soundholes that resemble fishhooks in the ancient Hawaiian design. Needless to say, it was built for a customer that loves to fish. The Pescatore is a departure from Grimes’ more traditional archtops in a few ways. For one, the body is not symmetrical, and it features two points in the upper bout. The location of the two soundholes imparts a unique tone since there is more room on the bass side between the bridge and the widest part of the body, and a larger area from neck to tail for the bass tones to develop. The bridge is 100 percent ebony with no metal studs or adjusting wheels, allowing the bridge to be 75 percent of the weight of a traditional archtop bridge. A lighter bridge has less damping effect on the overall tone and volume. The action is adjusted by loosening the strings and simply sliding in a slightly lower or higher saddle.
The Beamer Steel String
This double soundhole guitar was originally designed for and made popular by acclaimed Hawaiian slack key artist Keola Beamer. By moving the soundhole away from the traditional spot at the end of the fretboard, a larger area of the top can be utilized to achieve a bigger sound overall. Grimes likens the difference between one traditional 3 7/8" and two 2 7/8" soundholes to the bass richness of a 15" woofer compared to a 10" woofer on a stereo system. Available in OM (15 1/8" wide) and Concert (16" wide) sizes, the Beamer is offered with an Engelmann or Sitka spruce top and the choice of koa, mahogany, Indian rosewood, maple, or walnut for the back and sides.
25th Anniversary Koa Edition
1999 was Grimes’ 25th year of producing archtop instruments. To commemorate the milestone, he designed an archtop guitar that originally was intended to be a limited edition guitar. The design proved to be so popular that he’s still taking orders for this model. Only the most special sets of wood Grimes has acquired over the years are used to construct the 25th Anniversary Model guitars, and they all feature wooden binding and purfling with maple, rosewood, African blackwood, ebony, bloodwood, or curly koa. Available in 16", 16.5", 17", and 18" sizes, the pictured guitar is finished in Light Parchment and is loaded with an optional DeArmond Rhythm Chief 1100 pickup.
Bird of Paradise
The Bird of Paradise model is a semi-solidbody electric guitar that features carved, curly maple top and back plates with a Honduras mahogany core. The body is 60 percent solid, providing excellent sustain without the unnecessary weight of a solidbody and the feedback problems inherent in many acoustic-electrics. Designed with excellent balance in mind and weighing approximately 7.5 pounds, it is comfortable to hold for longer periods of time. Sporting an oval soundhole, the pickups and electronics are per customer’s specifications. This particular Bird of Paradise is outfitted with a pair of Seymour Duncan Seth Lovers.
Pricing and Availability
The approximate waiting period for a Grimes guitar is currently 18 months or more, depending on the order. Pricing varies per model, from $9200 for the Bird of Paradise to $18,500 for the 25th Anniversary to $22,000 for the Pescatore. With a variety of add-ons and options, the sky is certainly the limit.
grimesguitars.com
LR Baggs Session DI Acoustic Guitar Preamp / DI
Inspired by the LR Baggs Handcrafted Video Sessions and our experience in some of Nashville’s great studios, the Session Acoustic DI brings our signature studio sound to your live rig. The Session DI enhances your acoustic pickup and imparts the rich sonic character that you’d expect from an experienced audio engineer using some of the world’s finest studio gear. We’ve captured this studio magic and put it into a compact, easy-to-use DI that will transform your live sound.
For the first time in the band’s history, the Dawes lineup for Oh Brother consisted of just Griffin and Taylor Goldsmith (left and right).
Goldsmith’s lyrics spoke to me the loudest, with lines like “Well, you can judge the whole world on the sparkle that you think it lacks / Yes, you can stare into the abyss, but it’s starin’ right back” (a casual Nietzsche paraphrase); and “Oh, the snowfall this time of year / It’s not what Birmingham is used to / I get the feeling that I brought it here / And now I’m taking it away.” The way his words painted a portrait of the sincere, sentimental man behind them, along with his cozy, unassuming guitar work and the band’s four-part harmonies, had me hooked.
Nothing Is Wrong and Stories Don’t End came next, and I happily gobbled up more folksy fodder in tracks like “If I Wanted,” “Most People,” and “From a Window Seat.” But 2015’s All Your Favorite Bands, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Folk Albumschart, didn’t land with me, and by the time 2016’s We’re All Gonna Die was released, it was clear that Goldsmith had shifted thematically in his writing. A friend drew a thoughtful Warren Zevon comparison to the single, “When the Tequila Runs Out”—a commentary on vapid, conceited, American-socialite party culture—but it still didn’t really do it for me. I fell off the Dawes train a bit, and became somewhat oblivious to their three full-lengths that followed.
Oh Brotheris Goldsmith’s latest addition to the Dawes songbook, and I’m grateful to say that it’s brought me back. After having done some catching up, I’d posit that it’s the second work in the third act, or fall season, of his songwriting—where 2022’s Misadventures of Doomscrollercracked open the door, Oh Brother swings it wide. And it doesn’t have much more than Dawes’ meat and potatoes, per se, in common with acts one or two. Some moodiness has stayed—as well as societal disgruntlement and the arrangement elements that first had me intoxicated. But then there’s the 7/4 section in the middle of “Front Row Seat”; the gently unwinding, quiet, intimate jazz-club feel of “Surprise!”; the experimentally percussive, soft-spoken “Enough Already”; and the unexpected, dare I say, Danny Elfman-esque harmonic twists and turns in the closing track, “Hilarity Ensues.”
The main engine behind Dawes, the Goldsmith brothers are both native “Angelinos,” having been born and raised in the L.A. area. Taylor is still proud to call the city his home.
Photo by Jon Chu
“I have this working hypothesis that who you are as a songwriter through the years is pretty close to who you are in a dinner conversation,” Goldsmith tells me in an interview, as I ask him about that thematic shift. “When I was 23, if I was invited to dinner with grownups [laughs], or just friends or whatever, and they say, ‘How you doin’, Taylor?’ I probably wouldn’t think twice to be like, ‘I’m not that good. There’s this girl, and … I don’t know where things are at—can I share this with you? Is that okay?’ I would just go in in a way that’s fairly indiscreet! And I’m grateful to that version of me, especially as a writer, because that’s what I wanted to hear, so that’s what I was making at the time.
“But then as I got older, it became, ‘Oh, maybe that’s not an appropriate way to answer the question of how I’m doing.’ Or, ‘Maybe I’ve spent enough years thinking about me! What does it feel like to turn the lens around?’” he continues, naming Elvis Costello and Paul Simon as inspirations along the way through that self-evolution. “Also, trying to be mindful of—I had strengths then that I don’t have now, but I have strengths now that I didn’t have then. And now it’s time to celebrate those. Even in just a physical way, like hearing Frank Zappa talking about how his agility as a guitar player was waning as he got older. It’s like, that just means that you showcase different aspects of your skills.
“I am a changing person. It would be weird if I was still writing the same way I was when I was 23. There would probably be some weird implications there as to who I’d be becoming as a human [laughs].”
Taylor Goldsmith considers Oh Brother, the ninth full-length in Dawes’ catalog, to be the beginning of a new phase of Dawes, containing some of his most unfiltered, unedited songwriting.
Since its inception, the engine behind Dawes has been the brothers Goldsmith, with Taylor on guitar and vocals and Griffin on drums and sometimes vocal harmonies. But they’ve always had consistent backup. For the first several years, that was Wylie Gelber on bass and Tay Strathairn on keyboards. On We’re All Gonna Die, Lee Pardini replaced Strathairn and has been with the band since. Oh Brother, however, marks the departure of Gelber and Pardini.
“We were like, ‘Wow, this is an intense time; this is a vulnerable time,’” remarks Goldsmith, who says that their parting was supportive and loving, but still rocked him and Griffin. “You get a glimpse of your vulnerability in a way that you haven’t felt in a long time when things are just up and running. For a second there, we’re like, ‘We’re getting a little rattled—how do we survive this?’”
They decided to pair up with producer Mike Viola, a close family friend, who has also worked with Mandy Moore—Taylor’s spouse—along with Panic! At the Disco, Andrew Bird, and Jenny Lewis. “[We knew that] he understands all of the parameters of that raw state. And, you know, I always show Mike my songs, so he was aware of what we had cookin’,” says Goldsmith.
Griffin stayed behind the kit, but Taylor took over on bass and keys, the latter of which he has more experience with than he’s displayed on past releases. “We’ve made records where it’s very tempting to appeal to your strengths, where it’s like, ‘Oh, I know how to do this, I’m just gonna nail it,’” he says. “Then there’s records that we make where we really push ourselves into territories where we aren’t comfortable. That contributed to [Misadventures of Doomscroller] feeling like a living, breathing thing—very reactive, very urgent, very aware. We were paying very close attention. And I would say the same goes for this.”
That new terrain, says Goldsmith, “forced us to react to each other and react to the music in new ways, and all of a sudden, we’re exploring new corners of what we do. I’m really excited in that sense, because it’s like this is the first album of a new phase.”
“That forced us to react to each other and react to the music in new ways, and all of a sudden, we’re exploring new corners of what we do.”
In proper folk (or even folk-rock) tradition, the music of Dawes isn’t exactly riddled with guitar solos, but that’s not to say that Goldsmith doesn’t show off his chops when the timing is right. Just listen to the languid, fluent lick on “Surprise!”, the shamelessly prog-inspired riff in the bridge of “Front Row Seat,” and the tactful, articulate line that threads through “Enough Already.” Goldsmith has a strong, individual sense of phrasing, where his improvised melodies can be just as biting as his catalog’s occasional lyrical jabs at presumably toxic ex-girlfriends, and just as melancholy as his self-reflective metaphors, all the while without drawing too much attention to himself over the song.
Of course, most of our conversation revolves around songwriting, as that’s the craft that’s the truest and closest to his identity. “There’s an openness, a goofiness—I even struggle to say it now, but—an earnestness that goes along with who I am, not only as a writer but as a person,” Goldsmith elaborates. “And I think it’s important that those two things reflect one another. ’Cause when you meet someone and they don’t, I get a little bit weirded out, like, ‘What have I been listening to? Are you lying to me?’” he says with a smile.
Taylor Goldsmith's Gear
Pictured here performing live in 2014, Taylor Goldsmith has been the primary songwriter for all of Dawes' records, beginning with 2009’s North Hills.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
Guitars
- Fender Telecaster
- Gibson ES-345
- Radocaster (made by Wylie Gelber)
Amps
- ’64 Fender Deluxe
- Matchless Laurel Canyon
Effects
- 29 Pedals EUNA
- Jackson Audio Bloom
- Ibanez Tube Screamer with Keeley mod
- Vintage Boss Chorus
- Vintage Boss VB-2 Vibrato
- Strymon Flint
- Strymon El Capistan
Strings
- Ernie Ball .010s
In Goldsmith’s songwriting process, he explains that he’s learned to lean away from the inclination towards perfectionism. Paraphrasing something he heard Father John Misty share about Leonard Cohen, he says, “People think you’re cultivating these songs, or, ‘I wouldn’t deign to write something that’s beneath me,’ but the reality is, ‘I’m a rat, and I’ll take whatever I can possibly get, and then I’ll just try to get the best of it.’
“Ever since Misadventures of Doomscroller,” he adds, “I’ve enjoyed this quality of, rather than try to be a minimalist, I want to be a maximalist. I want to see how much a song can handle.” For the songs on Oh Brother, that meant that he decided to continue adding “more observations within the universe” of “Surprise!”, ultimately writing six verses. A similar approach to “King of the Never-Wills,” a ballad about a character suffering from alcoholism, resulted in four verses.
“The economy of songwriting that we’re all taught would buck that,” says Goldsmith. “It would insist that I only keep the very best and shed something that isn’t as good. But I’m not going to think economically. I’m not going to think, ‘Is this self-indulgent?’
Goldsmith’s songwriting has shifted thematically over the years, from more personal, introspective expression to more social commentary and, at times, even satire, in songs like We’re All Gonna Die’s “When the Tequila Runs Out.”
Photo by Mike White
“I don’t abide that term being applied to music. Because if there’s a concern about self-indulgence, then you’d have to dismiss all of jazz. All of it. You’d have to dismiss so many of my most favorite songs. Because in a weird way, I feel like that’s the whole point—self-indulgence. And then obviously relating to someone else, to another human being.” (He elaborates that, if Bob Dylan had trimmed back any of the verses on “Desolation Row,” it would have deprived him of the unique experience it creates for him when he listens to it.)
One of the joys of speaking with Goldsmith is just listening to his thought processes. When I ask him a question, he seems compelled to share every backstory to every detail that’s going through his head, in an effort to both do his insights justice and to generously provide me with the most complete answer. That makes him a bit verbose, but not in a bad way, because he never rambles. There is an endpoint to his thoughts. When he’s done, however, it takes me a second to realize that it’s then my turn to speak.
To his point on artistic self-indulgence, I offer that there’s no need for artists to feel “icky” about self-promotion—that to promote your art is to celebrate it, and to create a shared experience with your audience.
“I hear what you’re saying loud and clear; I couldn’t agree more,” Goldsmith replies. “But I also try to be mindful of this when I’m writing, like if I’m going to drag you through the mud of, ‘She left today, she’s not coming back, I’m a piece of shit, what’s wrong with me, the end’.... That might be relatable, that might evoke a response, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily helpful … other than dragging someone else through the shit with me.
“In a weird way, I feel like that’s the whole point—self-indulgence. And then obviously relating to someone else, to another human being.”
“So, if I’m going to share, I want there to be something to offer, something that feels like: ‘Here’s a path that’s helped me through this, or here’s an observation that has changed how I see this particular experience.’ It’s so hard to delineate between the two, but I feel like there is a difference.”
Naming the opening track “Mister Los Angeles,” “King of the Never-Wills,” and even the title track to his 2015 chart-topper, “All Your Favorite Bands,” he remarks, “I wouldn’t call these songs ‘cool.’ Like, when I hear what cool music is, I wouldn’t put those songs next to them [laughs]. But maybe this record was my strongest dose of just letting me be me, and recognizing what that essence is rather than trying to force out certain aspects of who I am, and force in certain aspects of what I’m not. I think a big part of writing these songs was just self-acceptance,” he concludes, laughing, “and just a whole lot of fishing.”
YouTube It
Led by Goldsmith, Dawes infuses more rock power into their folk sound live at the Los Angeles Ace Hotel in 2023.
