This is a live performance with no overdubs. Yes, you can hear the switches of the foot pedals during this recording because I kept the board too close to the amp/mic, but imagine yourself in the room with me where you’d see and hear all of these shifts.
I assembled this guitar about 12 years ago – it’s a Frankentele with a stock Fender neck and a very heavy ash body blank that I left unfinished. I wired in two Lollar pickups, standard three-position, all of which make their appearance here to vary the tones and textures and separate the voices.
On Tuesday, I read Lyn Hejinian’s A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking, her second book and the first to be published by her Tuumba Press. Moments of connection happen all the time, such as in this paragraph, that seemed to connect my return to the guitar, to my reading of Sally Mann this week, and to living:
“Diversions, or, the guitar. It is in rereading one’s journals, especially the old ones, that one discovers the repetition of certain concerns, the recurrence of certain issues, certain chronic themes that are one’s own. You ask that whatever comes out of the five books on the shelf be new. It is now that I realize that that is impossible. Certain themes are incurable.”
