Part 1

Name: Brad Allen Williams

Nationality: American
Occupation: Guitarist, producer, songwriter, composer
Current release: Brad Allen Williams's œconomy is slated for release February 10th 2023.

Tool of Creation: Guitar
Type of Tool: Fretted musical instrument
Country of origin: Most likely Spain / Italy.
Became available in: The modern guitar gradually developed between roughly 1200 and 1600.

If you enjoyed this interview with  Brad Allen Williams about the guitar and would like to explore his music in more depth, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter. For an even deeper look into Brad's composing process, read our earlier interview with him. 

For another perspective on the guitar, read our interviews with Oliver Darling, and Marisa Anderson.



What was your first encounter with the guitar? What was it about it that drew you in?

My earliest memory (not just guitar-related!) is seeing footage of Chuck Berry on television when I was about 3 years old. It’s extremely-vivid … vivid enough that I can scrutinize the image in my mind and say without question that he was playing a red Gibson ES-355.

I can’t explain what drew me in, but I instantly knew that I wanted to do that, too.

Just like any other instrument, the guitar has a rich history. What are some of the key points from this history for you personally?

Well I received it all out-of-sequence (as I suspect would be true for most of us).

But for the electric guitar it has to start and end with Charlie Christian. “Solo Flight” was—and I’ve characterized it this way often—the true Big Bang of the electric guitar. Everything we now know spiraled out from there. Nothing was untouched by it.



Name any player at any other point on the continuum and we can trace their lineage directly back. Most obviously, a young player like Cecil Alexander is part of a thread that goes through Russell Malone and Peter Bernstein, George Benson, Grant Green, Wes Montgomery, etc.



But we could just as easily trace Prince, H.E.R., Vernon Reid or Edward Van Halen to Hendrix, then to Ike Turner and Chuck Berry, via T-Bone Walker, straight to the same source … or Brad Paisley to Danny Gatton to Jimmy Bryant to the same place, by way of Junior Barnard. Even like … Lindsey Jordan via Thurston Moore. We could go by the Derek Bailey path or the Keith Richards path (through T-Bone Walker), but we’d still end up right back at Charlie Christian.

Some (not all) of those other names were also important for me, but I was thinking just yesterday of a random moment that was, in hindsight, pretty influential.

When I was very young I somehow came into possession of an old guitar magazine that had an interview with Kim Deal and Kelley Deal—it was from when Last Splash came out.



Apparently Kelley was fairly new to guitar playing when they formed the Breeders, and they were discussing all of the ways that informed the work. I remember them describing cutting a bit of the recorded tape into a million pieces and shuffling them, splicing them back together in random orientations to generate something interesting.



That clued me in to this whole other layer of guitar playing—where it’s not just about instrumental virtuosity, but there’s also this kind of creative virtuosity that’s possible.

What, to you, are some of the most interesting guitar recordings and -performances by other artists in terms of your personal development?

That’s such a big question!

Are You Experienced was the first CD I ever owned (I think I was 12). It had everything!



It was funky, but also futuristic. It was impressionistic, but also virtuosic. It had hooks, but also long moments of stretching. It was tuneful, but also experimental. It was grounded, but also restless. It was proof that you can be all of those things at once, and somehow still be a sui generis sort of identity.

Also, the first time I heard Derek Bailey it completely flipped me upside down—I was in high school and didn’t have any idea what the fuck was going on. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee! We didn’t have shit like this there.



It felt subversive, almost dangerous—if you played this way in public where I grew up, you’d probably become a victim of simple assault. And it was on a record! I had to know more.

Then I saw some videos of him with Tony Oxley, and it kind of clicked—I was hooked.



On a different tip, Reggie Young—literally anything he played on. He was kind of the James Jamerson of session guitar players to me; an endless fount of innovative, intricate parts that go almost unnoticed because of just how well they served those records.

In the light of picking your instrument, how would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation vs perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

I’d dispose of the word “perfection” immediately.

“Timelessness” belongs with “innovation” and “originality” to me, because timeless work is generally innovative and original at its inception. The revelation of some new insight—some new understanding of the world and how we exist within it—is what makes it timeless.

This extends even to the instruments themselves. For one example: the Fender Stratocaster stimulated the imagination of an entire generation by reframing what a musical instrument could look like; what kinds of sounds could be made and classed as “music.” That’s a pretty big deal!

But my own interest in vintage instruments is weighted heavily toward alternate futures. If a series of historic coin flips had landed differently, what might have changed?

What if the Farfisa Compact had become more popular than the Hammond B3? What if the guitar amp hadn’t fallen off the car on the way to record “Rocket 88?” What if Charlie Christian had lived to be 100? How would music be different?

When talking about electronic devices, we often think about their “features”. But the guitar is a complex device, too. What are some of its stand-out features from your point of view? How would you describe its sonic potential?

The most interesting feature of the guitar is the lack of convergence on a single classical archetype.

If you ask someone to imagine a violin (or saxophone, trumpet or flute) they’ll most likely imagine things that are substantially-similar. Would-be innovators have tinkered at the margins from time to time, but there does seem to be a sort of platonic ideal.

The guitar is centuries old, but this hasn’t happened. There are sort of miniature versions—the Telecaster is rather synonymous with some playing styles—but no single design ever seems to take over at the expense of all others. Maybe something eventually will, but for now there are all of these parallel paths to validity.

Instrument design is an ongoing process. Are you interested in recent developments for the guitar in this respect?

In theory, yes! In practice, most things purporting to be “innovations” for guitar are answering questions nobody asked.

Getting back to the concept of alternate futures: history has given us a wealth of marginal guitar innovations—about a century’s worth! If we’re looking for different-for-its-own-sake, we don’t need to contrive that anew. It’s already there (and I mine that largesse constantly).

If improved function is the objective, we’ve already kind of been on that journey. While the above-mentioned platonic ideal hasn’t ever materialized, the electric guitar did undergo a sort of technological maturation in the late 20th century.

Players begun to realize that some of the earlier design concepts were sufficiently expressive, and usually simpler in terms of maintenance and  operation. They “got out of the way” of the music a bit more.

For example: I have one guitar with a Floyd Rose vibrato, and it’s fantastic in its own way. It’s unique, it’s expressive, and it never goes out of tune.

But it takes about half an hour to get it in tune the first time, and if you break a string in the middle of the set, you’re fucked. It’s easy to see why some people were like “You know what? Leo Fender’s original concept was really just fine,” and others asked “do we really even need a vibrato bridge at all?”

On the flip side, whenever I watch David Torn play my outlook on the concept of “mature technology” changes.

[Read our David Torn interview]

Tell me about the process of learning to play the instrument and your own explorations with it.

It’s a developing story—one that’s full of stubbornness, occasional triumph, continual failure, hubris, hope, unbridled joy and missed opportunity.

It’s foremost been an exercise in humility. It’s a continual process of thinking I know everything; of impetuously discounting the wisdom of mentors and elders (only to come crawling back to the realization that they were right all along).

Most of my development has taken place on bandstands and recording studios rather than in practice rooms, and this is both good and bad. That path has been an asset for the development of big-picture musicianship, but I’ll be a much better guitar player after more time in the shed.