Question: What picking style have you devoted yourself to the most, and why does it work for you?
Guest Picker - Mei Semones
Mei’s latest album, Kabutomushi.
A: The picking style I’ve practiced the most is alternate picking, but the picking style I usually end up using is economy picking. Alternate feels like a dependable way to achieve evenness when practicing scales and arpeggios, but when really playing, it doesn’t make sense to articulate every note in that way, and obviously it’s not always the fastest.
Obsession: My current music-related obsession is my guitar, my PRS McCarty 594 Hollowbody II. I think it will always be an obsession for me. It’s so comfortable and light, has a lovely, warm, dynamic tone, and helps me play faster and cleaner. This guitar feels like my best friend and soulmate.
Reader of the Month - Jin J X
Photo by Ryan Fannin
A: For decades, the Eric Johnson-style “hybrid picking” with a Jazz III for “pianistic” voicings. Great for electric, though not so much acoustic. I’ve been recently learning to use a flatpick, à la Brian Sutton, by driving the pick “into” the string at an angle—which makes me think of Pat Metheny and George Benson, without irony.
Obsession: I’m still focused on understanding the concepts of jazz, neo-classical, and beyond, though I’m also becoming obsessed with George Van Eps’ 7-string playing, flatpicking, hip-hop beats, the Hybrid Guitars Universal 6 guitar, and the secret life of the banjo.
Editorial Director - Ted Drozdowski
A: Decades ago, under the sway of Mississippi blues artists R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, and Jessie Mae Hemphill, I switched from plectrum to fingerstyle, developing my own non-traditional approach. It’s technically wrong, but watching R.L., in particular, freestyle, I learned there is no such thing as wrong if it works.
Obsession: Busting out of my songwriting patterns. With my band Coyote Motel, and earlier groups, I’ve always encouraged my talented bandmates to play what they want in context, but brought in complete, mapped-out songs. Now, I’m bringing in sketches and we’re jamming and hammering out the arrangements and melodies together. It takes more time, but feels rewarding and fun, and is opening new territory for me.
Managing Editor - Kate Koenig
A: I have always been drawn to fingerpicking on acoustic guitar, starting with classical music and prog-rock pieces (“Mood for a Day” by Steve Howe), and moving on to ’70s baroque-folk styles, basic Travis picking, and songs like “Back to the Old House” by the Smiths. I love the intricacy of those styles, and the challenge of learning to play different rhythms across different fingers at the same time. This is definitely influenced by my classical training on piano, which came before guitar.
Obsession: Writing and producing my fifth and sixth albums. My fifth album, Creature Comforts, was recorded over the past couple months, and features a bunch of songs I wrote in 2022 that I had previously sworn to never record or release. Turns out, upon revisiting, they’re not half bad! While that one’s being wrapped, I’m trying to get music written for my sixth, for which I already have four songs done. And yes, this is a flex. 💪😎
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While Annie Clark was named the 26th greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone in 2023, she couldn’t care less about impressing an athletic stamp on either her sound or her image.
St. Vincent - Flea (Official Audio)
But the sincere curiosity I sense in her question is charming. It hasn’t been mentioned in our conversation yet that she was partly raised Unitarian Universalist (the other part, Catholic), and it’s as if she’s innocently excited that there might exist a friendly connection between her and I, the sunny, “nonchalant” journalist who’s doing my best to hide a fair level of enthusiastic fandom and admiration for her.
“I was raised Catholic, actually,” I reply.
“I love the saints,” says Clark. “Gimme a Caravaggio any day. And Mary as a figure; I’ve always….” she trails off, wistfully. “I’ll always love Mary.” (This adds up, as under her long black coat, she’s wearing an oversized t-shirt with an icon of the Virgin Mary on it, where the religious figure also happens to be depicted as a Black woman.)
Of course, St. Vincent—who took her stage moniker from a Nick Cave lyric—isn’t meeting me at Electric Lady to muse on spirituality. We’re there to talk about her latest release, All Born Screaming—her eighth studio full-length. It also happens to be her first entirely self-produced record, and with this new 10-track collection, Clark feels a sense of celebration about her growth as an artist over the course of her career.
All Born Screaming, which grew out of multiple hours-long solo jam sessions full of “bleeps and bloops,” is St. Vincent’s first entirely self-produced record.
“I’m very lucky to be in a position where more people care about what I do now than what I did on my first record,” she shares. “Like, thank god that I didn’t just have one that people liked, and then fell off the map. I got to grow as an artist and carve out whatever little lane I have in the world by getting to follow the muse and make music that lights me up, that I believe in.”
I would agree that All Born Screaming is a rather shiny jewel to be added to St. Vincent’s experimental, electroacoustic, art-rock crown. It’s ethereal and supernatural, which is to be expected from Clark, but this time, there’s something a little different in the air. The opening, “Hell Is Near,” conjures an illusion of billowing and enveloping fog, swallowing up the audience à la Stephen King. Her floating, sneakily adept vocal at times echoes that of her good friend Carrie Brownstein on Sleater-Kinney’s release from earlier this year, Little Rope, creaking and reaching with pangs of metaphysical desperation.
“Thank god that I didn’t just have one [album] that people liked, and then fell off the map. I got to grow as an artist and carve out whatever little lane I have in the world.”
The album’s first two singles, “Broken Man” and “Flea,” are framed by methodically chugging bass lines that nudge ominously at the edges of your shadowy mental recesses. (On “Flea,” Dave Grohl guested on drums.) “It was pouring, like a movie / Every stranger looked like they knew me,” she sings on “The Power’s Out,” calling David Bowie’s “Five Years,” the 6/8 opening track on Ziggy Stardust, to mind. Towards the close of the record, “Sweetest Fruit” and “So Many Planets” proudly, shamelessly, groove.
And guitar? It enters with an eerie George Harrison-esque jangle on the second verse of “Hell Is Near,” and, throughout the rest of the record, guides with punchy, distorted leads, accents, and welcome interjections. Clark, who was named the 26th greatest guitarist of all time by Rolling Stone in 2023, has rarely imprinted much of an athletic stamp on her music, in terms of shredding—which she’s shown she can do, but, almost as an aside to her more popular artistic definition. Instead, she moves the instrument in and out of her compositions in streaks of indigo, threading it like dendritic capillaries through a Junoesque, avant-psychedelic, gas-giant planet of sound.
Clark was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and moved to Dallas, Texas, with her family when she was 7. There, she developed a tight-knit group of friends with whom she’s still close with today.
Photo by Alex Da Corte
St. Vincent has an unshakeable confidence about her, in both her physical presence and creative exploits. She explains how, in her solo production pioneering for the making of All Born Screaming, she built out her home studio, got a Neve console, set up her modular synths and analog drum machines, and “finally figured out how to MIDI clock everything in time, which was its own hellscape.
“But then, [it was] playing with electricity,” Clark continues, “because electricity through analog circuitry.... I think it has a soul. Ultimately, you’re harnessing chaos. You’re like a god of lightning or something, you know?” she laughs.
“I would just jam for hours, making kind of post-industrial music, and then I would go back through and listen and go, ‘Ooh, well, this is a three-hour jam of bleeps and bloops. But, these four seconds are something so cool that I want to build a whole song around them,” she shares, then vocalizes some of the melodies in “Big Time Nothing,” “Broken Man,” and “Sweetest Fruit.”
Elaborating on her production approaches, she says, “Psychically, I’m obsessed with people like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry or J Dilla, where all of the effects are tactile. What I find exciting is making big decisions and then printing things, or the sound of something. ’Cause then it’s like you’re building a house on rock rather than sand,” she shares, referring to recording effects with the raw audio signal, as opposed to applying them after the signal is tracked, or in post-production. After further reflection, she concludes, “I think producing the album myself was like managing various egos, but all of the egos were in my own brain.”
We’ve been chatting for about half an hour, and St. Vincent mentions that she brought some snacks, if I want any. (I politely decline, as I’d rather not hear chewing on the recording of the interview when I listen back.) When I presume that she must have a strong sense of self-actualization at this point in her career, she gently counters, “But, I think, you don’t get the confidence without walking through some fire of self-doubt. As I grow more proficient, have more expertise, or get better at my instrument in various ways, music as a whole is more mysterious, mystical, and otherworldly than ever,” she adds. “So, understanding that feels more like it’s receding in a beautiful way, or opening in a beautiful way, while … ‘Okay, great, I know how to compress this better.’”
“What album of yours, excluding All Born Screaming, do you feel the most proud of?”
“Because I’m putting a set list together [for the All Born Screaming tour], I went back and listened to Strange Mercy. There are moments on that, tracks like ‘Surgeon,’ that I’m like, ‘Fuck yeah! That rips! I had no idea!’” she exclaims. “And that’s not always the case. You go back to certain songs, and you’re like, ‘Uh, I’m not sure I executed the vision here, or if this was … a good vision to have.’ But yeah, because I was so broken and bereft at that particular period of life.... I think you can hear it.”
St. Vincent's Gear
This shot was taken a year before the release of St. Vincent’s 2015 self-titled album, where she wore a hairstyle similar to this one on the cover. It was also four years before her signature Ernie Ball Music Man guitar debuted.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography
Guitars
- Ernie Ball St. Vincent signature models
Amps
- Marshall 1974X
- Roland JC-40
Strings & Picks
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinky (.010–.046)
- Ernie Ball Nylon Light
Effects
- Rig controlled by RJM Mastermind and Gizmo loop switchers
- Hologram Chroma Console
- Empress Echosystem
- Universal Audio Golden Reverberator
- Electro-Harmonix Small Clone
- Malekko Diabilik
- EarthQuaker Rainbow Machine
- Boss VB-2 Vibrato
- JHS Colour Box
- Fulltone Distortion Pro
- Ibanez Modulation Delay II
- Boss SY-200
- ZVEX Fat Fuzz Factory
- Chase Bliss Mood
- Chase Bliss Habit
“You told The Guardianrecently, ‘Artists and songwriters are in some way writing about the same thing over and over again: sex, death, love.’ Do you have any other thoughts on that?” I ask.
“Oh, did I say that? Sure!” she chimes, laughing. “Maybe I did!”
“My favorite art has always been stuff that channels the stream-of-consciousness mode of thinking. Do you know Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky?”
“No, I haven’t … read it?”
“Oh, it’s a film.”
“Seen it!” she amends, smiling. “But, understanding that sort of time-scape dreamscape multiverse…. I feel you.”
“I think Yes’s Close to the Edge is something like that; it’s one of my top 10 favorite albums.”
“I love Yes. Close to the Edge is one of my favorite records as well,” she says, and sings the melody to “II. Total Mass Retain” from the 18-minute-long title track. “And Chris Squire’s bass tone is perfect. It’s perfection on that record.”
“Absolutely! But I admit, I’m really just into early-’70s Yes.”
“Oh, 100 percent. ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ just reminds me of … being at the Texas state fair and my friend giving a hand job on a Ferris wheel to a carnie.”
On tour for 2018’s MASSEDUCTION, Clark plays a model of her EBMM signature with a leopard-print pickguard.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/tinnitus photography
While Clark shares that at certain points in her life, she has delved into practices like transcendental meditation, she says that today, the non-musical habits that best cultivate her creativity come down to activities as simple as working out, “so I don’t feel crazy,” and doing chores. “Oh, that’s so depressing,” she laughs.
And, while she doesn’t subscribe to any kind of organized religion, St. Vincent is entranced with a kind of spirituality behind making music. “I find music to be incredibly mystical, and that songs become prophecies,” she reflects. “Artists have, in the best-case scenario, an antenna up that makes them a kind of psychic mirror to the society that they live in, right? Almost like a weathervane.
“There have been times that I have written something that in a way prepared me for, or, predicted something that I was about to go through, in very specific, very witchy ways,” she continues. “I’m not a person of like, faith faith, but I have known certain things in ways that are not rationally explicable.”
“I think producing the album myself was like managing various egos, but all of the egos were in my own brain.”
Musicians have a common language of creativity, in that for most, inspiration tends to emerge unpredictably, out of the ether, or perhaps as the result of neurons firing haphazardly. But they do seem to each have an individual way of keeping track of their ideas, whether that involves writing them down or committing them to memory; usually, it’s a balance between the two. “I’ve had the title ‘All Born Screaming’ since I was 22,” says Clark. “I knew that I was going to use it at some point, but I don’t think I was worthy of explaining the complexity or talking about it until this record.
“I don’t know how records get finished,” she elaborates. “But I trust the process enough to know that, if you just put in the hours and stick with it, eventually the big picture will reveal itself to you. I describe the process as making perfect little puzzle pieces—making sure every edge is perfect and ornately drawn, and I don’t know what the big picture is until I’ve finished every single puzzle piece. And that’s when I go, ‘Oh, this is what this is [laughs]. Nobody told me!’”
While Clark’s guitar playing got off to a typical start—the first couple parts she learned were the opening chords to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the iconic riff from Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung”—her evolution as a player has made her increasingly savvy at envelope-pushing. Even on her 2007 debut album Marry Me, a singer-songwriter project at its core, the songs “Now, Now” and “Your Lips Are Red” lean toward the progressive territory she’s mined deeper and deeper since. It would be fair to call her soloing and style of arranging daring and subversive; she bends sound and songform as she sees fit.
“Artists have, in the best-case scenario, an antenna up that makes them a kind of psychic mirror to the society that they live in.”
By 2011’s Strange Mercy, whose collection includes the distinctively electroacoustic-yet-guitar-enforced tunes “Cruel” and “Surgeon”—which, as previously asserted, “rips!”—Clark’s guitar is cloaked in fuzz and couched in ambience and synthesizers. And, in the 13 years since, it’s pretty much stayed loyal to that description. The oddest thing, however, is this duality: That shrouding somewhat precipitates her guitar’s erasure from the foreground of the listener’s earscape, while yet maintaining its stitching throughout the songs themselves. I’ve listened to plenty of her discography, all the while forgetting it right as it’s there. Perhaps, the synths are the furniture, and the guitar is but a centered lamp, unifying the room’s elements within the same bath of light? But, personally, I have not been able to answer the question “How?”
Regardless, St. Vincent couldn’t care less about her image or sound as a “guitarist.” If she has ever made any kind of effort to “prove” herself on the instrument, I haven’t come across a record of it. An educated ear will recognize her august aptitude in her avant-garde playing style, and she has left it at that. In my eyes, this makes her an actual hero in an industry saturated with overcompetition and machismo.
“Sound has incredible meaning,” she summarizes, and the end of our conversation. “It led me to songs, and when you trust that you just will follow the things that will light you up inside, then you’ll be okay.”
YouTube It
On Later… with Jools Holland, St. Vincent rocks her Ernie Ball Music Man signature guitar in “glam tuning,” where all strings are tuned to the same pitch, enabling her to create a synthesizer-like effect with the help of a slide.
Johnny Cash on the front porch of the Cash Cabin in Hendersonville, Tennessee.
For fans who know Cash only through his much-loved American Recordings series, this is a very different artist—healthy, vital, his signature baritone booming, his acoustic playing lively, percussive, and focused. This is the muscular Johnny Cash heard on his career-defining recordings, from his early Sun Records sides like “Cry! Cry! Cry!” and “Folsom Prison Blues” to “Ring of Fire” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” to later, less familiar hits like “The Baron” and “That Old Wheel.” In short, classic Cash—the performer who became an international icon and remains one 21 years after his death.
In addition to theSongwriter album, it’s also worth noting that there is a new documentary, June, that puts June Carter Cash’s life and under-sung cultural legacy in perspective. Johnny wasn’t the only giant in this family. Just the biggest one.
“I think it’s important to support my father’s legacy in the world in which we live,” says John Carter Cash, who, in addition to his own work as an artist, is the primary caretaker of his family’s estimable body of work.
I recently visited the Cash Cabin—a log cabin recording studio on the Cash family property in Hendersonville, Tennessee, that was originally built as a sanctuary where Johnny wrote songs and poetry—with PG’s video team of Chris Kies and Perry Bean—to talk about Songwriter with John Carter Cash, the son of Johnny and June Carter Cash. [Go to premierguitar.com for the full video.] In this shrine of American music, Johnny Cash recorded most of the American Recordings series, and many others, from Loretta Lynn to Jamey Johnson, have tracked here. It’s also where John Carter Cash and co-producer David “Fergie” Ferguson took apart the original Songwriter sessions and put them back together, stronger, with musical contributions by Marty Stuart, Dan Auerbach, Vince Gill, a blue ribbon rhythm team of the late bassist Dave Roe and drummer Pete Abbott, backing vocalists Ana Christina Cash and Harry Stinson, percussionist Sam Bacco, guitarists Russ Pahl, Kerry Marx, and Wesley Orbison, keyboardist Mike Rojas, and John Carter himself. Johnny’s vocals and acoustic rhythm guitar, and guest vocals by Waylon Jennings on two songs, are all that was saved from the 1993 sessions, cut at LSI studios in Nashville.
In addition to getting the lowdown on Songwriter from John Carter Cash, he showed us some of the iconic guitars—including original Johnny Cash lead guitarist Luther Perkins’ 1953 Fender Esquire and a Martin that was favored by the Man himself—that dwell at the busy private studio. [Go to the video at premierguitar.com for an eyeful.]
Only 44 of these Rosanne Cash signature model OM-28s were made by Martin. John Carter Cash says it’s his favorite guitar to play, and he and house engineer Trey Call attest that it’s probably the most frequently chosen instrument by guests recording in the studio.
Photos by Perry Bean
Only Johnny Cash’s original vocal and guitar tracks, and Waylon Jennings’ performances, were kept from the 1993 sessions. Marty Stuart, Vince Gill, Dave Roe, Dan Auerbach, and others contributed new tracks.
Speaking about Songwriter, John explains, “In some ways, these recordings fell through the cracks. I was in some of the sessions and can hear my guitar on some of the original recordings.” Dave Roe was also on those initial sessions, but he’d just started to play upright bass and didn’t have the finesse he lends to the revamped album.
The idea with Songwriter, John Carter relates, wasn’t to do anything more with the music than make it stronger. His dad was initially unhappy with the overall playing on the LCI recordings. “We didn’t add elements to make it about the ‘now’ or more ‘Americana’ or whatever,” he says.
The amp room at the Cash Cabin studio has some small but potent combo treasures.
Photos by Perry Bean
Nonetheless, Songwriter does take the Cash legacy to some new places, including the realm of psychedelia. Although the song “Drive On,” about a trucker who survived the Vietnam war with internal and exterior scars, was written for the 1993 sessions, it debuted in 1994 as part of the American Recordings album. The Songwriter treatment is radically different, from the panned amp, beating with tremolo, that opens the song to the concluding lysergic odyssey of 6-string provided by John Carter and Roy Orbison’s son, Wesley. It might well appeal to Johnny, who was a musical maverick—insisting that then-controversial figures like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, as well as a just-emerging Joni Mitchell and Linda Ronstadt, appear on the ABC network’s The Johnny Cash Show, which aired from 1969 through 1971.
This is June Carter Cash’s piano—an antique Steinway upright that still earns its keep as one of the studio’s active instruments. Nothing in the Cabin is a museum piece.
Photos by Perry Bean
John Carter, who is a singer-songwriter and producer, and is currently at work on his own fourth solo album, notes that the sonically spacious Songwriter opener “Hello Out There” resonates with him most, emotionally, as its lyrics balance the possible end of humanity with a message of hope. But every song on the album brims with empathy and kindness in strong measure. “Like a Soldier,” which blends Johnny’s patented guitar thrum with an introspective story about his battles with addiction, and “She Sang Sweet Baby James,” about a struggling single mother singing the James Taylor song to comfort her infant, are two more examples. And the guitars are always prominent, whether they’re Russ Pahl’s steel providing ambient textures or Marty Stuart’s hard-charging country licks, which breathe fire into the album.
A stained-glass portrait of Mother Maybelle Carter with her autoharp. Mother Maybelle invented a style of guitar playing, where melody was executed on the bass strings and rhythm on the high strings, that influenced Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, and a host of other famed pickers.
Photos by Perry Bean
For Stuart, who toured with Johnny Cash for six years and played on many of the Man in Black’s recordings, the experience of working on the retooled Songwriter, as well as his time with the senior Cash, was “mystical—everything about him was mystical. Even after I left his band, anytime the chief called, I was available. To the day he passed away, he was the boss. So when John Carter called and said he needed guitar on some of his dad’s tracks, I went over there. It’s so natural to hear that voice in the headphones. What I always loved about playing against him is that his voice is like an oak tree. You can put anything you want next to it, and it still stands out.”
From father to son: On his 10th birthday, Johnny Cash drew John Carter Cash this chord diagram for “I Walk the Line.”
Photos by Perry Bean
The exterior of the Cash Cabin—one of the sacred places of American music and still a busy working studio.
Photos by Perry Bean
This 1953 Fender Esquire belonged to Luther Perkins, who was a member of Cash’s first recording bands and played on all of the Man in Black’s foundational recordings for Sun Records—likely with this guitar.
Photos by Perry Bean
Stuart’s instruments of choice for Songwriter were a ’50s Telecaster owned by Clarence White that bears the first B-bender, a 1939 Martin D-45 that Cash used on his ’60s/early ’70s TV show and gifted to Stuart, and a silver-panel Fender Deluxe, in addition to John Carter’s ’59 Les Paul, another of Johnny’s old Martins, and a baritone that resides at the Cabin. And Stuart’s focus was getting back to the template of Cash’s original Tennesse Two and Tennessee Three bands, and the guitar style created by Luther Perkins, Stuart’s first guitar hero. “They had their own language, and it’s a foundational sound inside of me,” he says. “With Johnny’s voice and the thumb of his right hand on the guitar as a guide, that architecture was all there. I heard the album the other day for the first time, and I thought, ‘Man, John Carter and David Ferguson worked their hearts out to honor the real sound.’”
John Carter Cash bought this 1959 Gibson Les Paul at Gruhn’s in Nashville. It has a neck that is atypically slim for its vintage and appears as part of the psychedelic guitar interplay on the Songwriter song “Drive On.”
Photos by Perry Bean
John Carter Cash remembers this Martin 40 H from his childhood as the guitar Johnny kept around the house to play on a whim or when he was chasing a song idea. The year is unknown, but as a guitar that Johnny Cash played, it is priceless.
Photos by Perry Bean
Here’s the headstock of the Stromberg that Mother Maybelle Carter used on the road while touring with Johnny Cash and her daughters. Her main guitar, dating back to the first recordings of country music, which she made as part of the Carter Family, was a Gibson L-5, but she judged this instrument hardier for travel.
Photos by Perry Bean
Fishing was a favorite pastime of the Cash family. This is June Carter Cash’s fishing reel and tackle box—one of the many personal and historic items in the cabin.
Photos by Perry Bean
When Johnny Cash completed his novel about the apostle Paul, titled Man in White, he commemorated the occasion by scratching his initials and the day into the arm of the studio’s rocking chair—his favorite place to sit.
“In so many ways,” John Carter allows, “my father is always with me. People everywhere still love my father’s music. For instance, a 15-year-old kid wrote saying that without the strength through hardship my father expressed in his songs, he would not be alive. So, I think it’s important to support my father’s legacy in the world in which we live.
“My father made a distinction between the business of Johnny Cash and himself,” John Carter notes. “It’s almost like I’ve studied Johnny Cash my whole life, and so I can tie the two together somehow and still go through the healing process of losing a father while embracing him and his work on a level that spreads his music’s joy and brilliance to the world. I believe that his goal for his music and his life was to share with other people out there who connect on a level of the heart.” And that echoes, boldly, throughoutSongwriter.