Interview: Emily Wolfe: New Album, New Signature Guitar...still an "Outlier"
Malcolm X Abram
Emily Wolfe is ready to resume rocking stages and navigating whatever the “new normal” will be for touring musicians in 2021. The singer-songwriter/guitarist with one full-length self-titled album in her catalog is ready to leave her Austin residence once again after having been one of the many who lost their 2020 touring plans to the pandemic. But Wolfe’s seasoned trio with bassist Evan Nicholson and drummer Clellan Hyatt had already spent much of 2019 touring the songs from her self-titled debut album. The album, produced by Alabama Shakes keyboardist Ben Tanner, features Wolfe’s strong, malleable voice and catchy pop melodies mixed with her tough, fuzz guitar tone, taut riffs and screaming but focused solos.
When she realized 2020 touring was “kind of a wash,” Wolfe went all in to pre-production for her second record, Outlier, officially available on Friday, June 25 on Crows Feet Records. Besides completing and releasing the new album, in the spring of 2021 Wolfe teamed up with Epiphone to design her signature Emily Wolfe Sheraton Stealth guitar. Epiphone approached Wolfe after her trio’s set blew executives away at a Gibson event. The collaboration produced a sleek, black Gibson ES-335-inspired semi-hollowbody with diamond F-holes and a headstock branded with Wolfe’s tree of life logo. Wolfe’s name is strategically placed on the back of the headstock, lending it the “stealth” status.
For Outlier, Wolfe enlisted Michael Shuman, co-founder of the band Mini Mansions and longtime bassist for Queens of the Stone Age. Initially, the pair worked remotely. “He’s in L.A. and I’m in Texas, we just sent files back and forth and got demos together that way,” Wolfe said.
But when they were finally ready and able to hit the studio they already had booked, they hit a small snafu. “It just randomly closed. The owner was like, ‘Oh, I sold the building, sorry!,’” Wolfe said, still sounding a bit surprised.
The sale of the studio necessitated that Wolfe and Shuman mother some invention and they settled on recording the entire album in Shuman’s garage studio in Los Angeles.
“It’s really cool because all the drum tones are super tight and there’s not a lot of room sound at all. So it’s really in your face and close up. It definitely affected the sound of the record, not being able to do it in a big studio. I love the way it sounds and I’m really excited about it,” she said.
Outlier features brand new songs written by Wolfe and Shuman and an expansion of the layered, heavy guitar trio sound of her debut, with more current pop-rock influenced melodies and instrumentation including synths, drum machines and some big, soaring choruses evidenced in the album’s lead single, “Something Better,” a plea for change. The second single, the sparse, declarative “No Man,” reveals a different side of the album with low tremolo guitar, and burbling sequenced synths boom over a big beat of stomping kick drum and hand claps. Wolfe declares her independence and mastery of her creative tools: “I don’t need no man to tell me how to work my machine,” she snarls.
“No Man” live at the Gibson Showroom in Austin, TX. (courtesy of Epiphone)
“Something Better”
“The goal was to make a record that would stand the test of time and put modern elements into my love of classic rock and pop. I think we achieved that, but I guess we’ll let everybody else decide,” Wolfe said.
Important to hitting the primary goal was changing her mindset about creating in the studio. As with many artists who spend most of their time playing their tunes on the road, Wolfe would write, arrange and record with an ear towards how to readily recreate the song on the stage. But Shuman suggested she treat writing and recording and performing as separate processes.
“He said, ‘The best approach is to just make the best record you can and then figure out the live stuff later’, so I’ve been doing that,” Wolfe said.
“It’s cool. I think I like it better because it’s less of a limitation. You can just be free with where the songs are going and figure it out later on down the line,” she said.
Without worrying about recreating the record live, Wolfe also chose to use the studio to expand her guitar tone palette. Instead of her usual mode of carefully pre-planning the tones and sounds for each song, Wolfe instead wanted to improvise.
“On this record I wanted to leave some room for studio experimentation. So I decided what the tones and the sound would be, in the moment, in the studio. We just got the sounds totally fleshed out and ready to go remotely,” Wolfe said.
Plenty of that tone experimentation happened through her pedal board.
“I brought a bunch of pedals. We used the Erupter a ton and the Dirt Transmitter. The Tentacle is on, like, every song.”
If you didn’t notice by that list of pedals and her solos, fuzz and overdrive are the beating heart of Wolfe’s solo tone.
“I love fuzz. I’m just a big fan of fuzz. I think the Tentacle is probably my favorite pedal of all time. It’s so cool before any kind of drive; it just really brings out the top end and that amazing octave. I just love it,” she said.
“My core tone is an [Fulltone] OCD, but without the Tentacle it just doesn’t sound right to me. I think when I [first] put the Tentacle before it for the first time, I was like, `Oh my god, I think that’s the sound.` So that is just such an exciting combination for me,” Wolfe said.
Having a signature tone has been an important quest for Wolfe, a big fan of guitarists such as Steve Ray Vaughn and B.B. King who have tones that listeners recognize after a few choice notes. Wolfe’s desire to sculpt her own signature tone sent her down the rabbit hole of gear after talking with a former producer who suggested the best way to find your sound was to really dive in and get to know your gear.
“I went and tried every single pedal I could and all the strings I could and all the picks I could. I just started to really love it and love all the creativity that can come out of a piece of gear. I think it’s really fun and it’s become this obsession-hobby thing,” Wolfe said.
That obsession-hobby thing also includes soldering her own cables and a fascination with loopers and switchers. And in the spring of 2021, Wolfe and Epiphone teamed up for her signature Emily Wolfe Sheraton Stealth guitar with her preferred specs giving her another way to get that signature tone.
Emily Wolfe, courtesy of Gibson.
But, she says, pedals are still her first love. “That’s where my excitement really comes from,” she said.
Wolfe’s excitement and obsession took another step when, for her most recent birthday, her bandmate Evan Nicholson bought her a D.I.Y. pedal kit for her to build.
“It’s just a Tube Screamer. But it was really fun. I like it,” she said. “But I think I’m going to leave it to the experts. It sounds fine. But it's ... a lot of work. It was cool that I got to solder a box and sound came out of it and it worked. But I think I’m just so stuck on the pedals I’ve been using that it’s hard for me to get away from them.” Besides the Tentacle and the Dirt Transmitter Wolfe recently added the Tone Job.
“I love it. I use it to EQ the gain a little bit. So, I’ve got three EQD pedals on my board and I’m never changing them!,” she laughed.
With Outlier ready to rule the world, Wolfe and the band will perform a few shows in Texas to celebrate the record’s release and then wait until October when she plans to really hit the road and spread the music.
“Fingers crossed. Let’s hope it happens,” Wolfe said of fall touring, and admitted she’s missing performing.
“I’m going nuts. But there’s hope and that’s all I can ask for.”
Malcolm X Abram is a recovering reporter and music writer and a proud 40 year guitar noodler. He lives, works and plays in the bucolic dreamland of Akron, Ohio in an old house with two dogs who don’t really like each other and way too many spiders.
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