Happy Snaps

"My friend Mike had offered up his studio,” guitarist Kaki King, who recently won US Guitar Player magazine's annual readers' poll for Best Acoustic Guitarist, recalls the genesis of her latest and purely instrumental album, Glow. It began at the Malibu, California home studio of Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger. “It was just an invitation that I didn't take seriously until I suddenly went, 'Oh my God yeah, that would be great.' And he was such a sweet guy in allowing me to hang out at his house and sort of, you know, hide, and write music,” she says.

“It was just playing guitar, just solo guitar, and making sure that the songs I had written were complete songs by themselves with the guitar, and that can be kind of a painstaking process, just because it's a lot of repetition and getting the songs under your fingers and then getting the kinks worked out and adding dynamics and adding little things and putting together the song as it's supposed to be. So I kind of got the hard work out of the way before I went into the studio.”

Glow, while it remained an instrumental album, didn't remain a solo guitar album once she found herself on the other side of the continent at Woodstock in New York State in a studio called The Isokon, owned and operated by one D James Goodwin. “He'd produced a record by a band called Thieving Irons [Behold! This Dreamer] and a friend of mine [frequent collaborator, multi-instrumentalist Dan Brantigan] had played on that record and played that particular album a lot while we toured around together. I visited [Goodwin's] studio and when it connected that that was the guy that made this incredible album that I loved listening to, I went, 'Oh my God, I wonder if he would produce my guitar record?' I emailed him and he got on the phone and said, 'Let's do this.'”

As the pair began working on the record, Goodwin would make suggestions like, rather than playing this or that song on guitar, why not try it on piano? So Glow evolved organically into something quite different, the simple guitar songs gaining string arrangements played by the renowned quartet ETHEL, a bagpipe here or an Akai EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument) there. Certain other instruments that King opted to play also prompted the composition of certain songs. The opening track, Great Round Burn, the Celtic romp that is King Pizel and Fences were composed on her much-loved 12-string Veillette Gryphon Hugh 12, which can sound like a mandolin.

“That little guitar is pretty amazing,” King continues. “It's an incredible sound that plays really dynamic and really fast, and it's almost as if, if you hold it and treat it right and keep playing, these songs really do tend to write themselves, I think. Pizel is my sister's husband's name and I played that song [King Pizel] at their wedding. I think the guitar lends itself to that sound – you say Celtic and I think New Age and 'oh God'. That's awful, but there are certain things that really work and it just does, you know? It's a beautiful sound, that guitar, and kind of very intense and dramatic and powerful but fun at the same time.”

To some extent the diverse compositions that make up Glow were prompted by King finding herself going through a period of questioning her self-worth and the quality of the work she'd done up to that point. “But because of that you keep trying to do better,” she qualifies. “You keep trying to make things sound better and try to ply your best. Those sorts of things are an integral part of my process. They're probably completely unsustainable,” she chuckles. “You know, I'm not always going to have some tight, crazy deadline that I have the ability to just work like a dog to meet, and I'm probably not going to hate myself or doubt myself forever! Right now it's really working – that's all I can say.”

Part of King's current feeling of wellbeing is down to her having tied the knot with her partner Jessica, taking time out over the Christmas/New Year period, when she was here to play the Peats Ridge Festival, to honeymoon, scuba-diving on the Great Barrier Reef. Despite the self-doubt that might have preceded her writing material for Glow, King is never short of ideas. “At all times, as a guitarist, you have these collections of riffs and ideas… You know, little things that you want to try or things that are 20 seconds, 30 seconds long. But I really put the pressure on to get this record done and once we had the 12 tracks that we liked, we were ready, we were done – the record was complete. It wasn't the right environment for mucking around and experimenting.”

Her teaming up with ETHEL for the recording turned out a serendipitous choice, as King is to perform a piece of Bach with them and has also been commissioned to compose a piece for contemporary classical composer David Lang for a musical series he's curating at the legendary Carnegie Hall next year. “It's crazy, and ETHEL and I will be touring together, and there are a couple of things on the table that I need to write. It's something that I dabbled in when I was at college and something that I'm really, really looking forward to getting into. I've had some crazy collaborations in my career and that's the one that I never thought would come to fruition – and it has!

“Most string players are very literal and they're very by the charts and it takes a lot for them to venture away from that. ETHEL plays like a band – the notes on the page are just a suggestion. It's really, really cool to play with people who are so talented and so gifted and so good at being literal musicians and who are completely willing to go off the chart.”

Of course, on the album tour that brings King back to Australia for what must be her sixth or seventh visit in barely five years, she'll be performing solo. “There are a couple of subtle things that I've added to the instrumentation, but for the most part these songs were written as solo guitar songs, written without the surrounding accompaniment – that was luck, and a gift – so they're still very complete as they are. And I think the more I play them – I've been playing them solid since October – and sort of more gets revealed every time I play them. I've always said this and I do mean it, especially when you make a record, it's a snapshot of the songs at that particular moment, especially a solo guitar record, because it's always changing. Your fingers are just gonna slip and there's gonna be a happy accident and suddenly there's a new part of the song; there's always something a little bit faster, a little bit slower, the tuning changes or something. Though I hope things don't change too much by the time I get to Australia!”