Darwin Deez

well, this was me any given monday in asheville in 2012 while making songs for imaginative people. i lived in my friend lela’s house by myself for a year and a half while teaching myself how to shred. after hearing a lot of thin lizzy while on tour in the UK, i suddenly gave a shit about guitar solos. and when i got to asheville, i got bitten hard by this bug and i suddenly felt “i MUST be able to SHRED.” the desire was burning and clear. now, if you recall, i made my debut album on a 4-string guitar. that was because it was different but also because it was easier for my left hand. see, i quit guitar at age 13 and started making drum ‘n bass instead. i saved up my allowance and bought a $700 akai s2000 sampler for this. i didn’t resume listening to rock music until i was 18 or so, which was around the year 2000, a amazing time for indie rock. i was blown away by the first animal collective album. their lo-fi DIY experimental emotional tuneful-with-harsh-noise sound inspired a noise-pop record that i made before my self-titled debut in 2010. but my point is, by the time i picked up my white guitar again to re-explore making rock music, a journey which i’m still on, i had completely lost all my chops (which i never really had anyway, which is why i quit, because i was so frustrated by how much i sucked on guitar, plus i was blown away by the chemical brothers and prodigy when i was 13). so that’s my story and here’s my own personal big moment on the mountain top of hard-earned chops. at the end of this year-long learning process, which also included re-learning regular six-string guitar and writing an album mostly on that, i rewarded myself with this sweet black strat, which is now my favorite guitary, although the white one is still very special. whitey is locked in 4-string mode/tuning though.

honoring my past, sitting with my old sampler, manhattan 2010