Singer-songwriter Margaret Glaspy, the cover subject of the September/October 2024 issue of AG, demonstrates a handful of the guitar parts from her latest EP—and her first solo acoustic effort—The Sun Doesn’t Think.
The examples in the lesson are excerpted from a longer conversation between Glaspy and Acoustic Guitar, which you can read in its entirety here.
The guitar parts on the EP are interesting in that many are deceptively straightforward. The right-hand patterns might seem familiar, but a song like “Would You Be My Man?” [Example 1], for instance, has some unpredictable rhythms in the bottom register. Are those sorts of manipulations deliberate on your part, or just how you feel and hear things?
I think it’s a little bit of both. One is that because I’m often playing and writing by myself, things will come out that I think feel normal and are just kind of within my own wheelhouse. And then in playing them with someone else, I notice things I didn’t realize I had done—things that came about by letting the lyrics lead and accommodating them. So, some of the parts are a little wonky in their own way because that’s how I heard them, and other times they start out more normal, and then in editing them, things get changed.
Your songs tend to have efficient harmonic movement. In writing parts like the intro to “24/7” [Example 2] or “Bathtub” [Example 3], are you consciously thinking about smooth voice leading and maintaining common tones between chords?
There’s an effort to make things feel like they’re always very close to one another. I feel a little bit allergic to having large jumps—I want it to creep. I wouldn’t ever seek chordal information up the neck if I’m already playing down at the bottom.
I remember being fascinated with Bach chorales, studying voice leading and basic contrapuntal movement, and getting that in my blood to see how I could employ that on the guitar. I think about it a lot, not when I’m writing the songs, but after they are written when I finesse things a bit. It’s not totally by happenstance, in terms of the actual voice leading. I like that work, for sure; I like to get in there and fiddle with the bits.
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