Paul Gilbert: loves Georgie Fame and his dancing girls!

Jeb: Unlike Vai, your instrumentals feel like songs and not just alien musicians conquering the electric guitar. Unlike Satch, your instrumentals are not so smooth they feel worked on a long, long period of time. How do you differentiate yourself from the other Shred Masters?

Paul: I'm actually not that familiar with most modern “shred” music. I have enormous respect for both Steve and Joe, as well as Eric Johnson, Yngwie [Malmsteen], Tony MacAlpine, Joe Bonamassa; Is he instrumental? Either way, all those guys play so well. But as a listener, I find myself listening to very different music. For this album, I was listening to Melody Gardot, Justin Currie, old Georgie Fame records. You've got to do a YouTube search for Georgie Fame doing a song called “Seventh Son.” It's in 7/8 and there are a bunch of dancing girls dancing to it. I've never seen anyone dance in 7/8 before; the whole song is pretty cool. I took the basic groove and played it Charlie Watts-style on my drum kit. This was the inspiration for the song, “Propeller.” What else? I listened to a lot of Silvius Weiss lute music, a lot of Bulgarian female choir music and old Johnny Cash folk ballads. My biggest guitar influence was probably B.B. King. I pulled up an old live video of his every morning and bent strings along with him to try to improve my vibrato. Oh yeah, and there's the Bach piece. I got some great licks from that violin Partita. Bach is always good.

Jeb: Did you view the electric guitar as a vocal instrument when you create a song like "Mantra the Lawn?" It almost sounds like it is singing.

Paul: Thanks for listening so closely! I actually wrote lyrics for that song, just so I could sing them in my head while I was playing the guitar part. The funny thing is that the lyrics don't have to make any sense because it just ends up on guitar anyway. So I get nonsensical phrases like, “Mantra the Lawn.”

I love playing like this, but it's really new to me. As a teenager, I was always more into the fiery guitar players like Eddie Van Halen and Frank Marino, rather than melody guys like Neal Schon or whoever was playing the solos in Boston. But now, I'm really starting to like playing melody. It might not seem as athletic as the shred stuff, but it's often stronger musically. full interview