*watch the video and hear the music here.
The hardest guitar part I’ve ever had to play…
…was the one I didn’t play. Here’s a story about how we all have to leggo our ego sometimes.
So the title track on my new album is called Love Again.
And the song is fantastic. It sounds really great, and I recently went to Nashville to record it and the end result is just killer, partly because I didn’t play a guitar on it. Here’s what happened in, in pre-production calls, my producer Cliff and I started talking about the song and what arrangements we had and what studio musicians we would bring in, and he suddenly asked me an interesting question.
He said, okay, so do you wanna play your own guitar parts? I thought, well, duh. I mean, I’m a guitar player. I wrote that song. Why? Why wouldn’t I play my own guitar parts? What are you getting at? And he says, no, it has nothing to do with you or, or your abilities. You’re a great guitar player. You are also not a studio musician.
I said, okay, tell me more. And he said, look, a lot of artists, some of the best known artists, some of the best guitar players, you know, they choose not to play their own parts in the studio, and instead hire seasoned Nashville studio musicians because they’re amazing. These people do this every single day, and they know how to get into a recording studio and boom, in one take.
They just make it work. They sound awesome. And they can sound just like you in some cases, even better. And I was surprised by how hard my ego took over. I suddenly was thinking, nuh uh, nobody could play that guitar part. Like, I mean, it’s nuanced. I No, no, no, no. I didn’t wanna do it. And after a while. I, I thought, well, you know, I’m spending a lot of money on this project.
I might as well do it right and I’m, I’m gonna trust him. So I decided not to play my own guitar parts on the record. Instead, we hired this musician named Dave Francis, and it was the right choice. It was the right choice, but it wasn’t an easy choice. And, and I remember the very first time I heard the track, I listened to it and I said.
Wait, that, no, that’s not, that’s not what I wrote. That, that, that doesn’t sound right. Yeah. That’s not what, and the more I listened to it, I, I was like , yeah, that’s, that’s not what I play. That, that’s better. And then, Ooh, ooh, that’s real. Really good. Oh man, Dave nailed that. And the more I listened to this guitar part, uh, the more I realized.
He. He was totally right. The moral of the story is sometimes we have to leggo our ego and get out of our way to create great outputs. The song is better because I didn’t play on it, and as hard as it was, it was the right call. Sometimes we all have to Lego our ego 📍 in order to rock.