Jason Isbell: My Life In Five Riffs

I just spent a lot of time playing guitar and if there's a new technique or something I want to learn and want to pick up, I'll focus on that for a while, but I've never had to do that. programming that part of my

life

has always been what I did when I had nothing else to do, you know, I think that's the core of everything, it really is a big part of what people call talent, you know, for me I was enjoying the repetition of playing guitar so much that I developed quite quickly. You know, I think someone can be very talented, but if you don't like to sit and play just one instrument for long hours at a time.

You're never going to be very good at it, you know? And that was what I was luckiest to be born with. You know, I just enjoyed playing the guitar and I liked it so much even when I wasn't good at it. I would keep doing it and I would keep doing it until I got better I grew up in Alabama my grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher he played guitar mainly gospel bluegrass but my father's brother my uncle was interested in rock and roll music and also chatons Style of choice Merle Travis, which is something I really enjoyed a lot from the beginning.

I've never been really good at it, most of the things you'll see are styles I didn't follow all the way through. I think maybe my attention span ran out and I learned a little bit about each style and then moved on to something else, but this one was really important to me since I was probably 7 or 8 years old. I remember my uncle played. this and he was much better than me with his thumb, so I did a more hybrid style of picking, but I think you'll get the point and these are the bells of San Francisco.

Chet Atkins' version of Mary, You, You, so yeah, I didn't really do that style of music, but it certainly helped me with my songwriting when it came time to write more singer-songwriter type stuff and I was relying on an acoustic guitar to accompany me and having a little understanding of alternating thumb picking patterns really helped me a lot, so this song here, Cortes the Killer by Neil Young, was another one I learned from my uncle, my dad's little brother, who taught me a lot . A lot about guitar playing, this one really appealed to me previously for a couple of reasons, the main reason was that the melody of the song was reflected in the chords, so it wasn't like there was a lead guitar part and a lead guitar part.

Rhythmic guitar. I know, I think Neil Young did that a lot, especially on stuff he played acoustic, but Cortes was really cool to me because you could hear the melody as it was played along with the chords and also the chord changes in the melody carried over. from one chord to the next, so it created this kind of suspension that you know, I didn't know what that was at the time, I thought it sounded cool, but when I started creating melodies and chord changes on my own, this In a way, It kept coming back to me because of the tension and release that was created when I held that note while moving from one chord to the next.

I'll play a little bit for you, putting that note right there that always really appealed to me, that's how it stayed and then the progression went back and that denotes that it's a remnant of the end of the progression before I think it's a really beautiful song and The melody and chords work very well. together, you can play it very easily with just one acoustic guitar and you don't feel like anything is really missing. I think that's the sign of a really good song among the bluegrass songs, gospel songs, and Chet Atkins songs. In my house there was great love. of Lynyrd Skynyrd, Lynyrd Skynyrd before the plane crash, and especially the guitar playing of Steve Gaines, who I think was one of the most talented guitarists who ever lived, probably and he had little time to show it, but he definitely did and the first.

The song that I once learned to play on the electric guitar was simple, but the one I'm going to talk about today is that I know a little bit, and it's incredibly complicated from a lead guitar standpoint, especially for being considered southern rock, You know? In those days, a lot of southern rock was based on big

riffs

and kind of slow-moving guitar all the way to solos, but Skynyrd took a lot of pride in playing things that were very complicated, very difficult to achieve, and this song was definitely one of those. I spent many years listening to it before I tried to take the time to learn how to play it, but the intro blew me away when I was eight and still lets me do it.

Let's see if I can remember it. I'm a bluegrass picking fan and I thought I had it down a bit before I moved to Nashville and then I found out you know the guy staring at you in line at the grocery store. store is probably a better bluegrass selector than you, that's how things work, but I spent a little bit of time studying that stuff growing up because my grandfather played, as I had mentioned before, old gospel songs and he played in a very early A way. age he had me play rhythm guitar for him while he played what he called a lead instrument like a mandolin and a banjo or a fiddle or something, so I started getting interested in bluegrass music that way and one thing I don't do I don't really do it well, you know my right hand, and I think for a lot of musicians, I've heard Brian Sutton say that the nails are supposed to rest right where the pickguard is and nothing should be in contact.

At the top, I think a lot of those techniques were to get the fastest picking technique and the strongest picking technique you can get, but I don't really do it well. I have my own bastard version, but a song that I have always liked. I learned many, many years ago that it's Salt Creek Bill Monroe and the bluegrass guys' version of Salt Creek. Let me see if I can remember how to do it. I would be making a mistake if I did. I don't talk about slide guitar at least a little in this because it's been a big part of my guitar playing technique and just my musical style over the years.

One thing is that I really started playing slide guitar listening to people like Duane Allman and then. I went back and listened to Elmore James and learned a lot of blues-based licks, but then when I heard the way David Lindley played lap-steel, especially on the Jackson Browne albums, the early Jackson Browne albums of early of the '70s that David Lindley played on and was featured quite prominently, that's when I really started to understand that you could approach it melodically in a way that a lot of instruments couldn't because there's a lot of vocal quality on slide guitar and you don't have the You know, no, you don't have the frets in your way, you can make it really sound like someone was singing a melody that I thought was really beautiful and one solo that really moved me was the empty solo from the record of the same name and I think that They recorded live.

I think it was at Merriweather Post Pavilion where they did it, but you know, Lindley never seemed to play things exactly the same way twice and yet he was able to book in the solo. and make a real statement, you know, make like a little song within a song and that really appealed to me, yeah, I'm going to try to play this in the key of G instead of the original key of a because still in the lap you can go much higher than in this one. I remember hearing that and thinking it sounded like another song, it sounded like a complete melody and that really opened my eyes to a different way of playing slide guitar that wasn't just based on standard licks that I had heard in blues music.