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Dear Brendan,
You blessed peach. This question hits me right in the tenders. Here is a diagram of how I can best describe my guitar playing:
Though I’ve often been surrounded by some of the very best musicians, I’ve never considered myself to be much of one. I was entirely street-schooled. I learned by figuring out how to play songs on the radio as a teenager. I’ve scored feature films, but I can’t even really read music. I barely know what chords I’m playing most of the time and my understanding of musical theory is rudimentary at best.
AND…
of course, sometimes not knowing very much about something can allow you to approach it uniquely. I do think that my guitar playing is unique, if perhaps a bit unorthodox. I’d say the same thing about my singing. I’d like to believe that what I lack in talent, I make up for with intuition and grit.
The early days…
I was obsessed with guitar as a teenager in the mid-late 90s. I learned roughly one million Pearl Jam, Nirvana & Foo Fighters songs. Green Day and Weezer. Duh.
Though Radiohead has been my one true love since they released The Bends in 1995, I think that my beginnings as a songwriter were heavily influenced by early 2000s acoustic troubadours like Dave Matthews, Ben Harper, and Damien Rice. In hindsight, I’m a bit embarrassed at how male (and mostly white) these influences are.
I loved how complicated Dave Matthews’ songs were on the guitar, and how accomplished I’d feel when I figured out how to play them. And how people (girls) would look at me when I performed them. I still chuckle at this tweet from 2013:
You can hear an intention to fuse complex guitar riffs with simple vocal melodies in my early songs like Unnatural Progression or Journal of a Narcoleptic:
The middle years…
By the time I was writing songs for Nice, Nice, Very Nice (2009), I’d realized that my intricate guitar noodling was at times getting in the way of the songs. I was never going to be a proper “guitar sensation”, and if I had any hope of making a mark, it would be because of my lyrics and melodies.
My tastes and influences had drifted away from those aforementioned troubadours toward lyric-heavy indie-folk acts like Bright Eyes, M. Ward and Neutral Milk Hotel. And besides - for a song to be truly iconic and have legs, it has to be simple enough for someone to cover it in the corner of a pub.
But something else evolved… as I began to simplify what my left (fret board) hand was doing, my right (strumming) hand began to develop in new ways. I experimented with more complicated picking rhythms - I’d strum down with the edge of my thumb and pluck up with my index finger. You can hear this on songs like Tina’s Glorious Comeback or Et Les Mots Croisés:
Another technique began to develop with my strumming hand in this era… The band had become fairly loud. There was a lot going on, and in order to make sure I could hear my guitar in the monitor wedge, I began strumming REALLY hard.
At some point along the way, I’d stopped using guitar picks. I preferred the sound of a guitar played with bare hands, and I tended to misplace my picks anyhow.
I found that by slamming my four fingers down across the strings and then flicking my thumb back up in quick succession, I could play a bare-handed acoustic guitar at the same volume as if I was using a pick. And, if I really relaxed my wrist, I could strum lightning quick, and the guitar itself would become a kind of drone instrument.
I broke a lot of strings and bled on my guitar during shows, but I didn’t really mind. I began putting crazy glue and nail hardener on my right hand’s fingernails before shows, which would get me through a tour without completely destroying my hand.
My kindred homie and bandmate Mike O’Brien coined this strumming move the “Mangan Chainsaw”. You can hear it on songs like Road Regrets and Mouthpiece:
The modern era…
Back in 2010, Bry Webb supported a short run of our shows. His band The Constantines are one of the very best Canadian bands of all time and I was a huge fan. He mentioned to me at Dawson City Music Festival that he’d planned to release some acoustic songs under the moniker Harbour Coats and I eagerly asked if he wanted to come on tour with us and try them out live. (He eventually released this music under his real name, and the album is called Provider. It’s one of my favourite albums of all time.)
Bry played solo and I was mesmerized with how he played guitar. He didn’t just strum along. He didn’t really finger pick, either. He used well chosen chord voicings to lightly support the song in every little moment. The guitar here was not really a rhythm instrument. It was a dancing partner for his vocal melodies in a delicate but crucial manner. Feist is an absolute master at this also. Check out Bry Webb’s Undertaker or Feist’s Forever Before:
Another influence that really had an affect on me at this time was David Bazan’s record Strange Negotiations. It was playing as I wandered into an HMV in Halifax and I thought it sounded cool so I bought the CD. I listened to it over and over in the van on tour. Not only are his lyrics devastatingly insightful and socially cutting, but the arrangements are beautifully simple and full. I love how he plays and mixes the acoustic guitar. Check out the title track here:
I think all of these more recent influences made my approach to the acoustic guitar more focused, delicate and intentional. In recent years, I’ve also had to re-approach how I sing for a handful of reasons, and it makes sense that my guitar might chill the F out alongside.
Another thing I must mention is my tendency to stick to the lower three strings and write songs with unique chord voicings up the fretboard. I talk a bit about this in my guitar tutorial for Cold In The Summer.
It all began with a song called Leaves, Trees, Forest:
I fell upon this chord progression on a rocky beach in Brighton, UK. I loved how the root note to the chord was the middle note in the voicing, and how each chord had an accenting bass note beneath it. It added a distinctive colour to the progression.
I subsequently wrote Oh Fortune using this newfound voicing structure, but this time with more strummy strum:
and, well.. I’ve used this fallen-upon style of chord voicing for the majority of the songs I’ve written since. I like that it is, to some extent, mine. Again - I’m not exactly great or technically schooled at playing instruments, but I feel like I’ve found ways to be myself in music, and that feels like a legitimate achievement.
HOW’S THAT FOR THE LONGEST ANSWER YOU DIDN’T KNOW YOU ASKED FOR?
Cheers, Brendan!
x
Dan
ps. I’ll leave you with some more examples of this chord structure at work:
I love that Venn diagram so much.
Your writing is so good to read, I’m sure you’ve got a book in you.