Eric Johnson has been doing a lot of digging in the crates lately, mining old records for inspiration, for ideas on where he can take his electric guitar playing next.
Joining MusicRadar over Zoom to talk about taking the Texaphonic Tour to the UK in July, Johnson admits he has been a bit frustrated with his playing. He’s trying to get better at playing through changes, deepening his understanding of harmony.
“Lately, I’ve been thinking where you could go with guitar if you decided there wasn’t limitations at all, if you threw away the playbook and just kind of opened yourself up to ‘What if?’ I’ve been thinking about that lately,” he says. “And it’s interesting, because that lends itself to being a little bit more free, and being liquid, and I think there is always something you can infuse into what you do.”
Eric Johnson has been doing a lot of digging in the crates lately, mining old records for inspiration, for ideas on where he can take his electric guitar playing next.
Joining MusicRadar over Zoom to talk about taking the Texaphonic Tour to the UK in July, Johnson admits he has been a bit frustrated with his playing. He’s trying to get better at playing through changes, deepening his understanding of harmony.
“Lately, I’ve been thinking where you could go with guitar if you decided there wasn’t limitations at all, if you threw away the playbook and just kind of opened yourself up to ‘What if?’ I’ve been thinking about that lately,” he says. “And it’s interesting, because that lends itself to being a little bit more free, and being liquid, and I think there is always something you can infuse into what you do.”
“For me, mostly, it’s just listening to music more. I guess the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to listen to the wealth of music that’s come before us,” he says. “Like, if you listen to a lot of swing music from the ’40s, the first thing I noticed is that we’re not doing nothing new. There’s nothing new. I mean, yeah, we record things different, and we might put a fuzz tone on, but we’re not doing anything different. [Laughs]
“I mean, not only has it all been done, but there’s some players out there from many, many years ago that are, like, unbelievable! And then you add to the fact that these guys were unbelievable 24 hours a day, at any moment.”
“They walked into a studio, first take or second take, and they did what we’re hearing on these records,” says Johnson. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I gotta go piece my record together for six months.’ And it’s humbling to think, ‘Wow! This stuff, the wealth that supplied the richness that we have today.’ It’s like sitting and looking at a river and going, ‘Hey, this river’s really great,’ and then you follow it to the ocean and go, ‘Oh my God, look where this came from.’ It’s this huge ocean that came before this and it’s humbling.”
Not that everything was better in the good old days. That’s not Johnson’s point. Nonetheless, the restrictions that were placed on musicians in those days – be that in the form of the equipment at their disposal, or, more to the point, the time they had – teased something extra out of them.