My Guitar, My Choice

I don't wanna play like you, dude, and I never will

Hi! Before I get into this, I want to thank everyone who just found me via the publication of my essay, “Thunderbitches and the Whores of Folk” this week in Oldster Magazine. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to do so (link above), because this piece is a sort of a companion to that one. In any case, if you like it please tap the little heart above on the left, and share my essays with anyone you like. Thanks so much, and feel free to leave comments, I love hearing from you and I will respond!

Sometimes you have to cross a border between the safety of what you know and the danger of what you need to learn, and you do it completely alone. I never took a single guitar lesson. I learned to play by writing songs, hunched over a book of guitar chords that included pictures of hands on the frets, so I could see what each chord was supposed to look like. One chord followed another, and conjured a mesmerizing river of sound that drew my voice into the current. There were songs out there, and I wanted them all. Whole days would go by while I cramped my hands around simple chords and secured them with lyrics and melody. I barely ate or slept. I strummed until my fingertips split and bled, my back seized up, and my notebook was full. In the first 6 months of playing guitar I wrote 10 songs. I also picked out a few easy Indigo Girls tunes and made myself play along with them, running fast to catch up to their rhythm. Both actions, the writing and the running, left me physically and emotionally exhausted. But after a lifetime of carrying other people’s songs around in my throat I was finally able to dispel them with some of my own, and suddenly the world was much bigger.

I never meant to become a guitar player. It wasn’t part of my vision as a performer. I had been trained as a singer since childhood, and except for a few years of beginner piano lessons, my voice was my primary instrument. In high school I sang in many shows and concerts, and afterward I got into a musical theater school in New York City. Moving to NYC felt like catapulting myself straight into a dream. But everything I did at school, all the endless dance, acting and voice classes, felt wrong. I was a terrible actor, because I was petrified of loosing myself in another character. I couldn’t risk abandoning my own love and pain, there were too many things I still needed to feel that were begging for attention and release. This tension and pressure bore down on my heart every single day. The Broadway songs I was assigned to study, and the shows I was cast in, felt worse than camouflage. They were a steely corset that prevented me from taking a single free breath. Yet there was no denying the power of stage performance, and its effect on both audience and performer. I already knew it could be a vehicle for healing, and even spiritual awakening, and that was where I needed to be.

Something had to give, but I didn’t want to drop out of school because I had worked so hard to get there. Making it to graduation was hardly guaranteed. Students who didn't measure up to the school’s strict standards were regularly and ruthlessly cut from the program. Some of them flamed out under the pressure, and some were kicked out for bad behavior. A few kids who had shown up for the first semester lasted just one week. I knew if I got all the way through it would be a significant achievement. A graduation certificate would tell the world that my talent and grit had been officially recognized, and I thought that would mean something no matter what I did afterwards. School was just hard work that I had to finish. Yet just before final exams, when we were supposed to be practicing all our assigned Broadway songs, I did something sneaky. I borrowed a friend’s guitar and started to write my own. 

I was thrilled by my beginner songs, even though I knew they weren’t very good. It didn’t matter at all. I could always write more of them, and get better. The whole point was to release the struggle that had built up in my heart and mind so I could breathe again. My guitar was merely a tool for songwriting, something I took into my arms when I needed to write, the way a carpenter picks up a hammer to build a house. Anyone can hit a nail, but the learning curve for the first year of guitar is brutal. By the time I moved to Seattle, a year after graduation, I could hold a steady rhythm with my simple chords while I pushed my voice out as far as it could go. Teaching myself to play guitar well enough to write and perform my own songs felt like I’d solved a complex quadratic equation, and I was so relieved to have done it. But as soon as I started performing in public, a new problem arose: men wanted me to play guitar the way they liked it.

With my band The Volcano Diary in 2011

They would come up to me after shows with unsolicited directives, and shout them into my face. Some of them thought I should learn to shred like Eddie Van Halen. Some thought I should become a girl Clapton, or the female Yngwie. I also had a boyfriend who worshiped Carlos Santana and couldn’t understand why the fuck I wouldn’t want to bust out a screaming, bluesy lead part in the middle of my quiet folk pop songs. Playing lead was the thing: It would be so fucking sexy, they’d say, nodding sagely with their eyes half-closed. As if I needed more sexual harassment from the music scene. Walking through a club after my set I was always carrying my guitar in one hand and my gig bag in the other, so I was completely vulnerable to furtive groping. Some nights I would come home from playing a show and find phone numbers stuffed into my ass pockets, and even down the front of my shirt. Once while making my way through a particularly packed crowd, a drunken asshole behind me shoved his fist right between my legs, bruising me for weeks. There was no one to complain to, and no sympathy available. It was simply the hassle that women in music were expected to endure.  

Despite the outside pressure to become a rock god, my relationship with guitar didn’t change. I loved acoustic sounds and their magical vibration against my body. Every time I strummed I could feel a thousand emotions in even the simplest chord progressions, and it was wild and beautiful. Most lead playing made my ears bleed. Shredding sounded like a teenager jerking off. A lot of rock leads sounded like women crying out in pain. I am not alone in this interpretation: back in the 60s, Clapton created a high-pitched setting on his SG that he actually called womantone (you can already guess that, at the time of its debut, many rock critics called it, “shrill”). I don’t mean to imply that these styles of playing contributed nothing to the canon of popular music. I just didn’t want them anywhere near my own songs.

With my band Diamondwolf in 2019

All the electric guitarists I love best are spellcasters, not flame-throwers. Edge, Chris Whitley, Daniel Lanois. Nick McCabe on some of the early Verve records. Peter and Rob in BRMC. I like some of what Annie Clark does. I’ve always thought Bonnie Raitt’s playing is sweet and creamy and entirely right for her songs. My friend Sheila Bommakanti’s project Cober is full of lush, shivery sounds that are unlike anything else out there. Eric Schermerhorn, who was a member of Sheryl Crow's “Tuesday Night Music Club” band (and has also played with Bowie, Iggy, Seal, and The The) did some gorgeous, atmospheric parts on one of my records. Atmosphere is everything in music. It colors the emotional landscape of a song, and helps you feel your way deep inside it. If it’s done well it will make the song transcendent. The men I’ve chosen to make music with know this as a kind of spiritual imperative, and play accordingly. I am grateful to each one, yet in truth it’s the least I expect.

I've been a guitarist for almost 30 years now. Mostly I play acoustic steel-string, sometimes I play a little slide, and sometimes I’ll bust out a nice Tele or 335 to mix it up. But I still play because I have to write songs. I play because I love the feeling of playing, the guitar’s back against my belly, body to body, a mutual expression of harmony and touch. I play because it helps me enter the music physically, ground myself in its rhythm, and make a home for my voice and my songs, so I can feel more at ease in the rest of my life. I play the way I want to, and that’s how everyone should do it.

You can learn more about my work as a Power Voice coach for women HERE.

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