Colin Bragg

My good friend Julie Caldwell has just released an album of songs titled “Further on Down the Road” (available on digital platforms and vinyl available soon at her website https://riveter-records.com/) that showcases her wonderful songwriting, singing, and arranging. It’s been a long time coming, encompassing years of her writing. I am always impressed with writers who just keep going and building up their hoard of riches. I can barely string two sentences together these days. Hey, I am now at five sentences!

Julie and drummer/producer extraordinaire Marlon Patton recorded together for a week in early 2021, working up the structures with acoustic guitar, piano, organ, synthesizer, drums, bass, and guide vocals. When Julie presented these tracks to me, I thought “This is it! I can finally create my guitar army!*” It was like a door opened to a playground, and I could run out there and swing and slide and jump and act a fool. 

Across the album one can hear my electric guitars, fretless bass, synthesizer, and even a guest vocal in a quasi-John Prine squawk. I’m proud of the work, and it was also an emotional experience, tracking at home in February 2021, just after my dad had passed, and with some of his equipment, including two older Fender guitars, a Telecaster and an Electric XII. Jimmy Page used these models to tremendous effect through the late Yardbirds and early Led Zeppelin years (both were used on “Stairway to Heaven”, for instance), and the project became a sort of collaboration between Julie, me, the material, and dad. He would have loved to hear this record.

In this post I’ll detail some of the thinking behind the guitar tracks, what Julie was looking for, and what I turned towards for inspiration. 

*From a Jimmy Page interview in 1977, which of course I’ve read: “My vocation is more in composition, really, than anything else. Building up harmonies, orchestrating the guitar like an army – I think that’s where it’s at, really, for me. I’m talking about actual orchestration in the same way you’d orchestrate a classical piece of music.”

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“Over My Head”: My idea for the track was to create a shimmery sound moving across the sound field like cicadas in the trees. I arrived at slowly panning the Electric XII, inspired by Alice Coltrane’s harp. I plucked it fingerstyle, more akin to Ralph Towner (dig one of my favorite tracks ever “Oceanus“) than Roger McGuinn. The effect wasn’t quite there, so producer Tommy Trautwein added a delay effect to spread the image and maybe cover up the fact that it’s difficult to play the XII in a Towner-esque manner! Julie hears John McLaughlin in the track, which makes me feel good.

“I Don’t Want Anyone But You”: Cure-esque timbres. Most likely the XII in the high melody, but maybe not? Who can tell with 80s-style effect treatments! I played my fretless bass on this track, and wanted to create an obvious fretless gesture with the low, rising glissando. Why else play a fretless on a pop track? I took my inspiration from Ron Carter’s bass line for Alice Coltrane’s piece “Huntington Ashram Monastery“.

The loops were actually just snippets of the original tracks, copied, pasted, and combined, sorta like a Waffle House plate.

“Unsettled”: This is a bona fide Telecaster Track™. The song basically dictated which guitar to use. I love the imagery in this song, and the initial vibe that Julie and Marlon put together.

Note for guitar nerds: the solo is on the neck pickup. I think it’s my favorite guitar pickup for nuance.

I’ll write out the Telecaster’s complete story someday, but at this time I was trying to figure out the peculiarities of this specific guitar. The frets were shot, the truss rod frozen, the pickups microphonic, and the neck worn away along the high E string side, making playing that string a little perilous. Luthier Danny Boyles resurrected the guitar for me the next year
(a 50th birthday gift to myself), and it’s hard to imagine tracking with it before he worked his magic – but I did it!

“Castle”: Julie wanted luscious soundscape guitar, and what better effect than the Daniel Lanois/Brian Eno “shimmer” sound, a revelation on U2’s Unforgettable Fire and Eno’s On Land albums, a preset on just about every reverb pedal, and heard in megachurches every Sunday? It’s a genius effect, and creates a bloom as the reflections are fed back into each other and are repeated an octave up, seemingly forever.

There are Telecasters lurking in the choruses, playing little R&B lines. I’ve played with horn players for so long now that when this opportunity arose, I naturally wanted to recreate a horn line with multiple harmonized guitars on a few tracks.

“I’d Love You So”: The Telecaster again! During the first verse, one can hear the microphonic pickup, and my touch making extra-musical noises as I change position on the neck or the body. It sounds like random knocks at times, which gives the track an extra dimension. As the track builds, I start to bring in higher slide lines in harmony, deep in the background space. For some reason I think of them as singing, cartoon alley cats.

“Restless Heart”: Some soft rhythm guitar on a Stratocaster, and a big, reverberant slide guitar during the choruses. I may have used an old Magnatone lap steel for that part. I love the stereophonic, strummed acoustic guitars throughout, recorded much later in the process by Julie and Tommy. Tommy’s acoustic solo is also excellent, and the treatment is immersive. Wonderful! I’d like to hear this on the radio.

“Do You Love Me Right Now”: My ode to Mark Knopfler (and his tones in “Ride Across the River“, amongst a zillion other songs), within an ode. All fingerpicked, with a low rhythm guitar and another high, vocal call-and-response guitar. All played on a Gibson SG with the old school P90 pickups, which are big, loud, and clucky. A reverberant chorus of guitars make their entrance towards the end as the vocal guitar loses its emotional grip.

“Further On Down the Road”: Julie hears Led Zeppelin in this arrangement. The high synth part, played on my Moog knockoff, was definitely inspired by John Paul Jones’s organ playing. The electric guitar was a Stratocaster going through a 1960s Fuzz Face. With that pedal, one can dial the guitar’s volume back for a clean yet somewhat furry sound during a verse, and then roll it all the way up for that crazy, clipping sound that hearkens back to Hendrix in full flight – for instance, hear his Fuzz Face amplifying a local radio signal before some fuzzy wailing in a live performance of Foxy Lady. I could live in that sound!

“Too Late Now”: The minimalist soundscape for this tune made me think about how Dave Rawlings fills in behind Gillian Welch (check out “Ruby” live on Tiny Desk Concerts) throughout a song, weaving in and out, playing over the bar line, and just generally being snaky. I love that! Another player who does this is Bill Frisell (see a fun version of “Goldfinger” with bassist Thomas Morgan), and when I attempt Rawlings on electric, it does come out Frisell-esque. I think I did this in one pass on the SG. I also played the fretless here, mostly anchoring the chords with some little octave fills here and there.

My singing was inspired by Julie’s pronunciation of “can’t” for the tune (“caint”), which reminded me of John Prine and his duet album In Spite of Ourselves. It was a fun challenge, because I naturally sound like I’m from some vague place in the midwest. I told myself that Prine wasn’t a vocal perfectionist, so I shouldn’t be either. Julie’s harmonies on the record are incredible, and I was more than happy to sing the lines she gave me.

“When It’s Over”: For me, the lyrics of this dynamic track spoke to me in early 2021, particularly after the loss of dad at the end of January. Again, the tracks that Julie and Marlon created told me what to use. To my surprise Marlon also plays the double bass! At the end of the second chorus he hits a low parallel fifth that rung a bell for me – I heard Jack Bruce in that chord, like in Cream’s “We’re Going Wrong“, and this dictated the tone I wanted to achieve. Once again I used the SG for some Cream-era Clapton chords and a big rock solo à la Jimmy Page. I made several frenetic passes at the solo with various guitars and devices, and once I decided on something more melodic, it came together in an instant. The earlier attempts would be fun to hear all strung together, if I can ever find them in my graveyard of digital artifacts. 

(For some fun, check out Togi Hideki’s cover of “Stairway to Heaven” performed with traditional Japanese instruments, a Gibson Les Paul, and tall hats.)

For me, this was the song that really thinned the veil, and in my head I conversed with dad about all of the possibilities. Well, it wasn’t quite a two-way conversation, but more like a series of decisions about the material, based on our mutual appreciation of our favorite players and sounds, and driven by how the track’s lyrics and arrangement hit me emotionally.