Neil Young’s greatest guitar solo, according to St Vincent: “One note?”
St Vincent’s signature guitar is the key to her hypnotic sound, carving her own path within the wild world of experimental rock that has proven her to be one of the most exciting modern musicians.
At the age of five, St Vincent, otherwise known as Annie Clark, was gifted a red plastic guitar for Christmas by her mother. She would play her first real guitar at the age of 12 when she began taking lessons, wishing to mirror some of the instrument’s most virtuosic greats.
As a professional musician, she played with the choral rock band the Polyphonic Spree, ventured into noise rock with the band the Skull Fuckers and joined Sufjan Stevens’ touring band in 2006. All of these stints would inform her eccentricity as a guitarist, and soon, St Vincent was born.
Her seventh, most recent album, 2024’s All Born Screaming, honed a darker, more eclectic sound, born from what Clark was seeking in music, but couldn’t find, so she resolved to perfect it herself. “That’s what I want from music right now, personally,” she told The New York Times. “I would like a pummeling. I want something to feel dangerous.”
On the album, she likens the guitar solo on ‘Flea’ to one reminiscent of Butthole Surfers, as she tells Total Guitar, imagining her younger self listening to the Texan rock band as a teenager growing up in Dallas. She describes the solo on ‘So Many Planets’, in contrast, as a “love letter to second-wave ska and 2 Tone Records”, referencing The Specials, in particular.
“I was going for a sound where it’s like… wrong? Like, ‘Is this person virtuosic, or do they totally suck?’ That’s kind of where I live,” she expands to Total Guitar. One of Clark’s primary influences found his core sound in simplicity. Neil Young and his famous “one note” solos are reflected in Clark’s overall approach to expanding her virtuosity on the guitar.
“Like, one of the great guitar solos, Neil Young’s ‘Down By The River’ is, what, one note? So it’s just in the hands of the beholder, I think,” she says, before clarifying, “That’s not an expression!”
Young’s 1969 single, released on his album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere with Crazy Horse, is a nine-minute morbid tale of a man who has killed his lover after losing all self-control, unable to cope with the emotional heights of their relationship. As Young has clarified, his narrator’s murderous tendencies are more symbolic of inner turmoil.
“It’s about blowing your thing with a chick,” he explains, as quoted in Nigel Williamson’s Journey Through the Past: The Stories Behind the Classic Songs of Neil Young. “It’s a plea, a desperate cry.” ‘Down By The River’ begins with electric guitars, before longer instrumental portions feature Young’s famous guitar solo. In them, we hear Young play short, staccato notes with distortion, communicating melodies and aggression in equal parts. Young recognises the power in refinement, letting that singular note speak for the danger that is woven into the song.
However “wrong” Clark’s sound may be, the guitars on All Born Screaming reflect a desire to disrupt expectations, as Young did, and produce an unprecedented scope filled with emotional resonance.
