geez, i'm really working my hands out this summer. that's ok, i obviously need it.

i'm three different types of guitarist. i did take some classical lessons, and there's a lot of stuff in my discography that is either performed on a nylon guitar with fingers or creatively utilizes chord shapes that are common in classical music but are not often found in blues-based music (pro-tip: that's actually how john lennon got his idiosyncratic guitar sound: he used classical chords in blues music. fucking honkies, right? well, it was ukelele chords. same thing. and, it's sort of what sonic youth did, too, in a round about way, by using weird tunings.). and, my lead playing is very blues-based.

but, my songwriting is very punk rock. almost everything i've ever listened to is some kind of punk rock, and almost everything i've ever written on a guitar is some kind of punk rock.

i used to spend hours thrashing along to bad religion and offspring records. people have this dumb idea of punk rock as being easy to play on guitar, because they associate showmanship with musicianship. it always has been a smokescreen. johnny ramone was moving his right hand every bit as quickly as van halen was, it's just that he was playing very fast chords instead of very fast notes. if you break it down to the physics of it, it's really no less difficult to do. we just have this very silly perception of the whole thing.

i haven't played chords that fast in quite a while, and the song absolutely requires them. i'm going to drive my neighbours nuts practicing it....

that's actually something you're going to notice in the next batch of material. the work i did with the singer in 01 and 02 was much more song oriented, which brought my punk guitar roots out. there's a lot of really unusual syncopation going on.

it actually used to drive him nuts, because it would throw him off on the timing. i can do all kinds of weird things and get back to the one, because i'm a musician, and musicians can do that. he didn't have any musical background, so what he really needed was some kind of a click track to stay in time (we never used them, though, i'd just cut his vocals up afterwards).