Eric Johnson has been doing a lot of digging in the crates lately, mining old records for inspiration, for ideas on where he can take his electric guitar playing next.
Joining MusicRadar over Zoom to talk about taking the Texaphonic Tour to the UK in July, Johnson admits he has been a bit frustrated with his playing. He’s trying to get better at playing through changes, deepening his understanding of harmony.
“Lately, I’ve been thinking where you could go with guitar if you decided there wasn’t limitations at all, if you threw away the playbook and just kind of opened yourself up to ‘What if?’ I’ve been thinking about that lately,” he says. “And it’s interesting, because that lends itself to being a little bit more free, and being liquid, and I think there is always something you can infuse into what you do.”
Article continues belowJohnson believes we, as guitarists – as musicians – can get stuck by limiting ourselves to preconceived notions of what we should do, rather than what we ought to do, or more to the point what we want to do.
“In my case, I know I’m the one that’s limiting myself by what I decide I can do, or what I can’t do,” he says. “So if I throw that out and go, ‘Well, there’s nobody governing this situation except for me, so what if you threw that away, where could you go?”
Well, where would you go? That’s the question we all should ask ourselves. Where Johnson is going is back to the early canon of recorded music, to all the recordings that have shaped popular culture and – in his opinion – are still shaping it.
For Johnson, this is an education. It’s where Eric Johnson goes to get better at guitar.
“For me, mostly, it’s just listening to music more. I guess the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to listen to the wealth of music that’s come before us,” he says. “Like, if you listen to a lot of swing music from the ’40s, the first thing I noticed is that we’re not doing nothing new. There’s nothing new. I mean, yeah, we record things different, and we might put a fuzz tone on, but we’re not doing anything different. [Laughs]
“I mean, not only has it all been done, but there’s some players out there from many, many years ago that are, like, unbelievable! And then you add to the fact that these guys were unbelievable 24 hours a day, at any moment.”
It takes a special kind of musician to be able to do that. But then back in the day that is how the recording industry was. Players would come in, they would a cut record in a day, and then do another the next.
“They walked into a studio, first take or second take, and they did what we’re hearing on these records,” says Johnson. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I gotta go piece my record together for six months.’ And it’s humbling to think, ‘Wow! This stuff, the wealth that supplied the richness that we have today.’ It’s like sitting and looking at a river and going, ‘Hey, this river’s really great,’ and then you follow it to the ocean and go, ‘Oh my God, look where this came from.’ It’s this huge ocean that came before this and it’s humbling.”
Not that everything was better in the good old days. That’s not Johnson’s point. Nonetheless, the restrictions that were placed on musicians in those days – be that in the form of the equipment at their disposal, or, more to the point, the time they had – teased something extra out of them.
Digital recording allows us to dream bigger, and to do more with less, but there is an argument that it can devalue a take when you can have as many do-overs as you like. A little red-light fever can tease something out of a player that they didn’t know they had.
“Well, to your point, it certainly wouldn’t hurt anything that is being done,” says Johnson. “If you put more human emotion in, catching the moment of the interchange of people in there – just their spirit – if that was impregnated more into any kind of modern music, the only thing it is going to do is make it better.”
For the record, Johnson is a big fan of modern music. He sees no shortage of creativity in pop compositions, in how contemporary producers present often complex musical ideas in a way that connects with an audience. But it does lack something, a real live human on the drum stool.
“I mean, I was talking to someone recently [about this]. You listen to the old Motown stuff, that had such a vibe, and that was pop music, and people danced to it, and it was great,” he says. “You had these swing drummers. Like, if you took away those swing drummers and put a drum machine on it, it just wouldn’t be the same.”
Johnson wouldn’t change anything else; just that, the sound of a drum kit and a real live human, quantized as best their time-keeping as their timekeeping and sense of groove will allow.
It’d have a human element added to that newfound digital perfection – it would only help. It would be a win-win
“If I had to name one thing about modern pop music that’s just keeping it from being really a lot better is the tragicness of how drummers have been reduced to nothing. And it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ll just have the beat. We’re just gonna have this superfluous, generic thing.’ That’s sad, because you could take that music, you could keep all those chord voicings – and the vocals, and the songwriting of some modern pop song – and then just have some guy come and play a cool [beat], I think it would be way, way better! [Laughs]
“You don’t have to take anything away from modern pop music, because a lot of the chord changes and the melodies are very inventive, they’re very different to the pop music I grew up on, so why should it not have more? Why should it not have a swing drummer playing behind it!? He doesn’t have to play busy. He doesn’t have to be busy or obtrusive, but it’d have a human element added to that newfound digital perfection – it would only help. It would be a win-win.”
Eric Johnson’s Texaphonic UK Tour 2026 kicks off on 22 July in Wolverhampton. See Eric Johnson’s official site or The Gig Cartel for dates and tickets.
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