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This 65-minute performance features 17 of the songs I’ve been performing live over the last couple of years. In concert, though, I use a single instrument. But here I get to play most of my favorite guitars. I’ve posted each of these songs individually over the last few weeks, but this is the first […] For the last day of Loopocalypse, here’s a cover of Spiritualized exquisite “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space.” I often close my show with this tune. Here’s an explanation of my live looping rig. In first heard this song in while asleep on one of those coffin beds on a […] Inspired by the most sublime thing you can drop into a cocktail. Or maybe that and the cocktail. The guitar is a random collection of Fender Strat parts with Duncan lipstick tube pickups. They sound a zillion times better than modern Danelectro pickups. (Plus I boycott Dano on principle because their parent company is […] This one is a tribute to Fela Kuti and afrobeat. I’m not trying to play in an authentic Nigerian style, obviously. But I lived for this stuff when I was in my early ’20s. Back then there was a thriving expat African musician community in Oakland, and I was privileged to be mentored by […] This is a companion piece to yesterday’s version of John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy theme. It’s the main title from Jerry Goldsmith’s score for In Like Flint, a kitschy Bond parody that predated Austin Powers by decades. I was too young to see the film as a kid, but a radio ad featuring this theme blew […] In 1980 I was mainly listening to avant-garde classical music and post-punk. Even so, the darkness of this Joy Division classic scared me. But last year I heard the song on the Muzak at a Palm Springs grocery store, so I guess everything is okay now. The guitar is a real weirdo: a […] I always feel a bit guilty playing this one, because it uses the one looping technique I’ve always tried to avoid: simply slathering one part on top of another till you have a damn racket, and then lurching to a halt. But hey. The guitar is a Lowden 15E, a cool yet bargain-priced 12-string. […] Best pop song ever about a school shooting (and yes, that includes “I Don’t Like Mondays.”) The guitar is my latest DIY experiment: A bunch of random Strat parts with magnificent Lollar Firebird pickups. I’ve built my Cult overdrive circuit into the guitar, and you hear it during the solo (though it doesn’t sound […] |
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