Tore Down House by Scott Henderson. Listen to the original here.
I heard this song for the first time about four years ago. It popped up randomly on Spotify, and I loved it instantly. Amazing guitar tone, those weird accents in the intro that make you unsure what time signature it’s in (it’s 6/8!), an incredible vocal performance by Thelma Houston, and a couple of guitar solos that inhabit the blues style, but are full of brilliant fusion-y licks and phrases. I immediately wanted to learn how to play it.
And that’s where the fun began. It was a serious challenge for me to undertake. A lot of the playing was beyond me, from a technical point of view, at that point and I made several attempts over the next couple of years to attack it properly, but always got either distracted or disheartened.
Enter Lockdown Number Three, and more specifically, the KQ 100 Day Challenge. My friend and colleague Kieran Quinn started a Facebook group in early January with the aim of getting participants to commit to practicing a new skill (or developing an existing skill) for half an hour a day, for 100 days. I signed up with the aim of working on some acoustic guitar pieces (which I wrote about here), but found myself generally playing more guitar overall on top of the 30 minutes a day. So when I was asked (at around Day 50 in the 100 Day Challenge) to appear as a guest on In The Lamplight, a podcast hosted by Kieran, Luke Devaney and Rory Maitland, I decided to get the finger out and finish working on Tore Down House, so that it could be included as one of the featured pieces of music in the show. (You can find my episode, and all the other great episodes, HERE)
I asked my friends Stephen Kohlmann and Sinead Conway to lend their considerable talents on drums and vocals, and sent the whole lot over to Luke Devaney at Blue Room Studios who did a masterful job on the mix, And here it is!
(If you’re a guitar player, I’ve also made a video which contains just the close-up guitar shot so you can get a good look at my hands. That video can be found in this blog post.)
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