Chords for St Vincent | Today in Music | Amazon Music

_ _ _ _ _ _ Thank you _ _ _ _ _ [Ebm] for _ spending a few minutes with us.
Sure.
But I do want to know about _ the new album of the songs, Mass Education, right?
Was it the plan all along to do this?
Well, as far as the kind of [Eb] faux press conference that we [Gb] did to introduce mass [C] seduction, _ originally
the idea was like, okay, I'm going to save some time.
I'm going to imagine what people might ask.
And then I'm going to just do it in front of a green screen so that [Bb] people will be able
to just insert their own graphics.
And it'll be like, oh, look, she was in Dubai doing this interview.
_ But then as we started actually doing it, I wrote it with my good friend, Carrie Brownstein.
It just ended up [F] being like complete satire.
So it was funny to see how many people, journalists, were kind of terrified after that.
And I was like, no, I'm just having a joke.
It's a little joke. _ _ _
But the inspiration for _ Mass Education, _ _ this is kind of solipsistic, but it was _ mass seduction
that was the inspiration. _
One of my good friends, Thomas Bartlett, is a beautiful piano player.
And _ he really introduced me to _ [Bb] my people in New York.
He was one of the first people I met.
And I got to just get to know downtown characters and _ great artists [D] and writers and freaks and weirdos.
And I finally kind of found my place. _ _
_ _ But we'd never played music together. _
[G] And so I just asked him if we could _ play these songs.
I wasn't sure if it would be [Ab] properly released.
I just knew that as a kind of culmination of having written all the songs on mass seduction
that I wanted to _ calcify them just for myself and getting to just live in them for a second
with him and perform them live with him and a piano.
Well, Mass Seduction was one of my favorite albums of the last couple of years.
It's amazing.
But as a fan of things that are just stripped down [Eb] to either a piano or an acoustic guitar
and a voice, it was really exciting when I heard you were doing it. _
_ And I'm really excited to hear what you do with the title track, [Db] Mass Seduction, because
[E] I'm having such a hard time with my tiny musical brain imagining how you kind of broke it down.
Yeah.
Because that song sounds like Prince and Bowie had a baby.
Oh, thanks.
Love them.
And so how did you kind of, _ how did you do that one?
How did we do any of it?
Yeah.
Truthfully, we _ didn't talk about what we were going to do.
Oh, yeah.
[E] _ We just, I [Em] said, hey, can we block out a couple days in the studio?
It was me and Thomas, who's at the grand piano.
I [E] was like on a couch in the fetal position. _ _
_ And our friend and mix engineer was in the booth.
And we would just, Thomas would listen to the song really quickly, kind of like go,
I got it, not practice anything.
[Eb] Just make sure you have the changes.
And then we would go in and record two, maybe three passes of the song and pick the best one.
And [Ebm]
that's kind of it.
[Eb] That's how it happened.
I mean, that's, yeah, it was the quickest recording process I've ever done.
It's just like, okay, what feels like magic in this moment?
Like when did the ghost walk through the room, as [Bm] they say?
Yep.
[Gb] And then, okay, we're going to use that one.
That was it.
It was [D] right.
Everything was right. Yeah.
_ [Bb] Well, thanks for letting me ask those inspiration [D] behind the album [Dm] questions.
Totally fine.
Well, the inspiration [G] behind the album was my [F] other album.
The album, yes.
[Gb] So if we [E] were talking about that.
Yeah, that's easy enough to answer.
[Eb] Yeah.
So I want to talk a little bit about guitar because you're such an amazing guitar player.
And _ me and a friend on the team, we kind of were geeking out,
watching some of your _ greatest little moments.
Oh, and I just sat with another fellow kind of guitar wizard who doesn't play with a pick,
Mr.
Lindsey Buckingham.
Oh, he's so great.
He's amazing.
So I kind of dove into his kind of [E] solo career to meet with him.
But yeah, _ I guess the question is,
how do you kind of develop that [Eb] style where it's different and it's unique,
yet you can pretty much do [D] everything?
How did you [Abm] develop?
Thanks.
Well, _ _ my uncle, Tuck Andrus, is a brilliant fingerstyle jazz guitar player.
So I would grow up, I was on tour with him a lot, and I would watch him play.
And he's all fingerstyle.
I mean, he can play with a pick, but _ he is just this, that, all this crazy kind of right-hand technique.
_ And so [Eb] I think that part of it was watching him.
And then I also think that [D] there's just something genetic [N] in our [G] musculature or something
where we'll even do some of the same things, and I think it's not [Abm] from having watched him,
but just we will both, when we play extreme vibrato, we'll shake our heads like this,
as if that's controlling that.
_ [E] _ [A] But then I also, you know, I just love music.
So I played bass in metal bands growing up.
I [G] played noise bands, where it was like,
if your hand isn't bloody by the time you walk off the stage, you did not play well enough.
You know, I had a _ sort of Freddie Green jazz phase.
It just kind of went all over the place with _ the style and [A] learning different kinds of music.
And then the other thing is sometimes just not_
[Fm] The guitar is _ [G] mysterious to me in a lot of different ways,
but one of which is that sometimes I just reach for things,
and I don't know what they're going to sound like.
You know, you just kind of decide to jump off the roof and hope that you land on solid ground.
And if you don't, that's kind of interesting [E] too.
Does you think that you have to have the technical proficiency
and the background to [Ebm] be able to [Eb] take those leaps?
I don't know.
As far as guitar playing goes,
I mean, some of my favorite guitar players are so technically proficient.
You know, the Hendrixes [C] and the Mark [Em] Rebos. _ _ _ _ _ _
But some of my _ [E] favorite guitar players are also _ _ terrible guitar players, you know, whatever.
Maybe a super guitar nerd would go like, ooh, he or she can't play, but that's not the point.
[F] The point is like, what are they saying and how does it make you feel?
[E] You know, some of my favorite guitar solos [Bb] are one note.
Like, argue with _ _ this solo and rip it up and start again,
or argue with Neil Young's solo and just ride that note.
Yeah, down by the water.
_ _ [E] Like, okay.
That works.
[D] That absolutely works.
So like [Dm] anything, it's not about how many notes you play or what you're able to do.
It's about what you're able to express.
_ [Gb] Well, thank you for taking [Bb] a few minutes out of your busy schedule to talk a little music with us.
My pleasure.
This was fun.
Cool.
[Ab] _ _ [E] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
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