Podcast 335: Nathan Salsburg | Fretboard Journal

You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate the bold project that guitarist Nathan Salsburg has just set up: an album of vocal and guitar compositions that was created around passages he wrote in his copy of a bilingual Hebrew-English book who found psalms.

“I happened to open a book of psalms,” he says of his original writing exercise. “[I’d] find an English text that I liked … then just start playing around with it. All the melodies are my own. ”The resulting compositions he wrote on his Bourgeois and Pleinview acoustics were a long way from the last time he had heard many of these passages … at the Jewish summer camp when he was a child.

Eventually, Salsburg recruited some of his collaborators – James Elkington, Spencer Tweedy, Joan Shelley, and Will Oldham, along with Israeli singer Noa Babayof – to give the final album its mark.

It’s a record like no other that Salzburg has released so far and we love it through and through.

command Psalms Here.

Two pieces of music referred to during the conversation:

Jonathan Harkham and David Brooks Darcho (Bandcamp-Link)

The caretaker (YouTube link)

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Don’t forget that we’re now running a whole family of podcasts on everything from violin making to home recording: Luthier on Luthier; The Truth About Vintage Amps; The Truth About Recording and Mixing; Acoustic Voices; and sweep the floor.

This episode is sponsored by Mono Cases, Folkway Music and Retrofret Vintage Guitars.

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