“I’ve always had a knack for emulating sounds or creating new ones”: Adrian Belew on the weird, wonderful and utterly unique tones behind his new solo album, Elevator

By his own description, Adrian Belew’s latest solo LP draws more from “quirky pop” than the proggy acrobatics of his former band, King Crimson. But these two creative roles – the Beatles-y hook writer and the experimentalist – always balance each other out in the long run, eternally linked by his uncanny gift for summoning strange noises. “[That’s] been my most important contribution,” Belew says. “I’ve always had a knack for emulating sounds or creating new ones.”

In the emulation category, Elevator has plenty of choice moments, like a frenetic sedan-horn guitar solo on the bluesy A Car I Can Talk To. 

“It harkens back to the very early days of my career, back to right before Frank Zappa discovered me,” Belew says, reflecting on the period before his life-changing big break in the late '70s. “I was beginning to realize how to make different sounds with the guitar using the volume and a couple of notes squished together in the right way. I’ve had that car sound in my menagerie for decades.” 

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And in the creation category, there are the eerie, droning tones that decorate the hypnotic acoustic reverie The Power of the Natural World. “There’s a very small guitar called a Loog that costs a couple of hundred bucks,” he says. “The idea is that you build it together with your child. It has three strings; I tuned it to three open D’s, and they’re rather floppy that way too, because I thought they would make a really interesting chorused sound on their own. 

“I was searching around for a way to make it sound like some kind of Eastern instrument, and I realized that, by using a piece of wood like a drum stick and rolling it up and down across the strings to change the note, I could achieve that effect. Then we triple-tracked it, and it just worked out beautifully. It’s a haunting sound, and if I heard it, I would say, ‘What instrument is that?’ Because it’s not an instrument – it’s a sound I made up.”

Belew had plenty of time for such tinkering on Elevator, writing most of the material at his home in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, amid the early Covid lockdown. 

a13 - YouTube

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“It was the first time when there wasn’t a deadline or something else coming around the corner,” he says. “I was able to completely craft exactly what I wanted without worrying about going on tour or having other commitments.” (As the live music realm has returned to normal, he’s resumed his typically all-over-the-map itinerary, playing and announcing shows with his regular band, the all-star Celebrating David Bowie tribute, and the Talking Heads Remain in Light celebration alongside guitarist Jerry Harrison.) 

While it’s far from a pandemic-themed album, Elevator is certainly a reaction, at least in spirit, to the onslaught of bad news everyone seemed to be experiencing at that time: “I wanted everything to be really clean and upbeat. I felt like when the clouds were lifted, so to speak, I’d want to have an uplifting kind of record to bring everyone back to normalcy, back to love.”

No song illustrates that longing for escape better than A13, a rollicking open-road rocker about “getting away from Covid” via “some fantasy train to nowhere.” The music, he notes, tips its hat to the Fab Four and, with its “big separation” between vocal harmonies, Simon & Garfunkel. But he was also hoping to evoke a vibe that’s even older: some kind of nostalgic romance that might have highlighted a 1950s film. 

Adrian Belew and Les Claypool revisiting King Crimson - YouTube

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“I had a very clear roadmap,” he says. “The running, fast piano figure is actually played on an [electronic] Japanese instrument called the [Yamaha] Tenori-On, which has a lot of different sounds in it. The song came from making that loop, and that led to me writing the chorus.

“I wanted some of those edgy, almost out-of-phase guitar sounds that were on early '60s records, so I used an Epiphone that has a five-way selector switch. I also used a Stratocaster that’s been modified with six switches on it, so it will do all 35 sounds you can possibly get out of a Stratocaster. Many of them are really edgy.”

Detailing these tones, Belew comes off positively childlike – enthusing about the nuances of every instrument, whether they already existed or he invented them himself. 

“I basically never really stop,” he says with a laugh. “It’s just always flowing out of me.”

• Elevator is out now.