The spark for Striking Matches flared in 2007, on the first day Sarah Zimmermann and Justin Davis met in a guitar class at Belmont University. They've been playing as a duo and leading other musicians under the band's banner, with an album and a handful of EPs to their credit, ever since.
Recently, Premier Guitar's John Bohlinger met with Zimmermann and Davis in their East Nashville studio while they took a break from recording their new album. Zimmermann and Davis did some show-and-tell, pulling a lot of Gibson, Fender, and Takamine out of their collective hats, and playing some killer music, too.
[Brought to you by D'Addario XS Strings: https://www.daddario.com/XSRR]
Two Humbuckers, No Waiting
Sarah Zimmermann got into SG's when she was tracking the first Striking Matches album, Nothing but the Silence, with producer T Bone Burnett. Her No. 1 is this much-played 2014 Gibson SG. The guitar is stock except for the tuners and its truss rod cover.
Match Cover
And here's that truss-rod cover—obviously custom. The SG stays strung with D'Addario EXL110s (.010–.046).
Road Warrior
Her main acoustic is this Takamine TAN45C—a model the company no longer produces. This high-mileage 6-string features Takamine's proprietary Cool Tube preamp and Palathetic pickup, and stays strung with D'Addario EJ16s (.011—.052). She uses a Dunlop Moonshine slide and Tortex 1.14 mm picks for acoustic, and Dunlop Jazz iii plectrums for electric.
A Rare Mando
Zimmermann's Takamine mandolin appears to be a prototype that was never released. It resembles a Gibson F-style and sports a proprietary Takamine pickup.
Here's Junior
Zimmerman uses a Fender Blues Junior tricked out with a Patriot Swamp Thang speaker. Otherwise this 15-watt workhorse is all-stock.
On- And Off Board
In the heat of recording, it's often tough to keep a neat pedalboard. Zimmermann' pedals include a Boss TU-3 tuner, a Fulltone OCD, an Electro-Harmonix POG, and MXR Reverb, and her power station: Voodoo Lab's Pedal Power 2.
Davis' Dirty Dog
Justin Davis' No. 1 is his 2018 Gibson ES-335. The all-stock guitar stays strung with D'Addario EXL110s, and smudged with a patina of sweat and road dirt.
Old Friend
Davis purchased this '90s Fender Strat when he was a kid, just learning to play. It's been modded with a DiMarzio Rail in the bridge and stays strung with D'Addario EXL110s.
Up Nex
Yet another Takamine joins the Striking Matches roster. Davis' acoustic is an all stock P5NC, with X-bracing and the company's NEX body style, and it's strung with D'Addario EJ16s. For the record, he mostly plays with his fingers.
The Nest
Again, keeping pedals at home on the board during tracking is over-rated. So Davis' are loose and ready to goose his tone in a flash. They are a Boss TU-3 tuner, a TS-9 Tube Screamer with a Keely mod, a Boss DD-3 Digital Delay, and a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2. In addition to Zimmermann's pedals in this shot, interlopers include an Empress Effects ParaEQ, a Big Ear NYC More More More OD and boost, an EHX Holier Grail Reverb, and a JHS Ruby Red OD, designed by Butch Walker.
Teasing the Sub
For gigs, Davis uses a Fender Hot Rod Deville, but on this day in the studio he was using a newish silver-panel Fender Vibrolux Reverb.
Ox Me!
And he was running the Vibrolux Reverb through a Universal Audio OX Amp Top Box.
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We know Horsegirl as a band of musicians, but their friendships will always come before the music. From left to right: Nora Cheng, drummer Gigi Reece, and Penelope Lowenstein.
“It was kind of life-changing, honestly. It changed how I thought about womanhood,” Lowenstein says over the call, laughing a bit at the gravitas of the statement.
But the moment of levity illuminates the fact that big things are happening in their lives. When they released their debut album, 2022’s Versions of Modern Performance, the three members of Horsegirl were still teenagers in high school. Their new, sophomore record, Phonetics On and On, arrives right in the middle of numerous first experiences—their first time living away from home, first loves, first years of their 20s, in university. Horsegirl is going through changes. Lowenstein notes how, through moving to a new city, their friendship has grown, too, into something more familial. They rely on each other more.
“If the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band, without any doubt.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“Everyone's cooking together, you take each other to the doctor,” Lowenstein says. “You rely on each other for weird things. I think transitioning from being teenage friends to suddenly working together, touring together, writing together in this really intimate creative relationship, going through sort of an unusual experience together at a young age, and then also starting school together—I just feel like it brings this insane intimacy that we work really hard to maintain. And if the friendship was ever taking a toll because of the band, the friendship would come before the band without any doubt.”
Horsegirl recorded their sophomore LP, Phonetics On and On, at Wilco’s The Loft studio in their hometown, Chicago.
These changes also include subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in their sophisticated and artful guitar-pop. Versions of Modern Performance created a notion of the band as ’90s college-rock torchbearers, with reverb-and-distortion-drenched numbers that recalled Yo La Tengo and the Breeders. Phonetics On and On doesn’t extinguish the flame, but it’s markedly more contemporary, sacrificing none of the catchiness but opting for more space, hypnotic guitar lines, and meditative, repeated phrases. Cheng and Lowenstein credit Welsh art-pop wiz Cate Le Bon’s presence as producer in the studio as essential to the sonic direction.
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little.”–Nora Cheng
“We had never really let a fourth person into our writing process,” Cheng says. “I feel like Cate really changed the way we think about how you can compose a song, and built off ideas we were already thinking about, and just created this very comfortable space for experimentation and pushed us. There are so many weird instruments and things that aren't even instruments at [Wilco’s Chicago studio] The Loft. I feel like, definitely on our first record, we were super hesitant to go into territory that wasn't just distorted guitar, bass, and drums.”
Nora Cheng's Gear
Nora Cheng says that letting a fourth person—Welsh artist Cate Le Bon—into the trio’s songwriting changed how they thought about composition.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Devices Plumes
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- TC Electronic Polytune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex .73 mm
Phonetics On and On introduces warm synths (“Julie”), raw-sounding violin (“In Twos”), and gamelan tiles—common in traditional Indonesian music—to Horsegirl’s repertoire, and expands on their already deep quiver of guitar sounds as Cheng and Lowenstein branch into frenetic squonks, warped jangles, and jagged, bare-bones riffs. The result is a collection of songs simultaneously densely textured and spacious.
“I listen to these songs and I feel like it captures the raw, creative energy of being in the studio and being like, ‘Fuck! We just exploded the song. What is about to happen?’” Lowenstein says. “That feeling is something we didn’t have on the first record because we knew exactly what we wanted to capture and it was the songs we had written in my parents’ basement.”
Cheng was first introduced to classical guitar as a kid by her dad, who tried to teach her, and then she was subsequently drawn back to rock by bands like Cage The Elephant and Arcade Fire. Lowenstein started playing at age 6, which covers most of her life memories and comprises a large part of her identity. “It made me feel really powerful as a young girl to know that I was a very proficient guitarist,” she says. The shreddy playing of Television, Pink Floyd’s spacey guitar solos, and Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan were all integral to her as Horsegirl began.
Penelope Lowenstein's Gear
Penelope Lowenstein likes looking back at the versions of herself that made older records.
Photo by Braden Long
Effects
- EarthQuaker Westwood
- EarthQuaker Bellows
- TC Electronic PolyTune
Picks
- Dunlop Tortex 1.0 mm
Recently, the two of them have found themselves influenced by guitarists both related and unrelated to the type of tunes they’re trading in on their new album. Lowenstein got into Brazilian guitar during the pandemic and has recently been “in a Jim O’Rourke, John Fahey zone.”
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument,” Lowenstein says. “And hearing what the bass in those guitar parts is doing—as in, the E string—is kind of mind blowing.”
“On the record, I think we were really interested in Young Marble Giants—super minimal, the percussiveness of the guitar, and how you can do so much with so little,” Cheng adds. “And also Lizzy Mercier [Descloux], mostly on the Rosa Yemen records. That guitar playing I feel was very inspiring for the anti-solo,[a technique] which appears on [Phonetics On and On].”This flurry of focused discovery gives the impression that Cheng and Lowenstein’s sensibilities are shifting day-to-day, buoyed by the incredible expansion of creative possibilities that setting one’s life to revolve around music can afford. And, of course, the energy and exponential growth of youth. Horsegirl has already clocked major stylistic shifts in their brief lifespan, and it’s exciting to have such a clear glimpse of evolution in artists who are, likely and hopefully, just beginning a long journey together.
“There’s something about listening to that music where you realize, about the guitar, that you can just compose an entire orchestra on one instrument.”–Penelope Lowenstein
“In your 20s, life moves so fast,” Lowenstein says. “So much changes from the time of recording something to releasing something that even that process is so strange. You recognize yourself, and you also kind of sympathize with yourself. It's a really rewarding way of life, I think, for musicians, and it's cool that we have our teenage years captured like that, too—on and on until we're old women.”
YouTube It
Last summer, Horsegirl gathered at a Chicago studio space to record a sun-soaked set of new and old tunes.
