“What we have in common is that we don’t shred for the sake of it. In my case, it’s because I can’t!” Brian May on his unlikely guitar kinsmanship with Steve Cropper and Billy Gibbons
Recruited for the recent Cropper tune Too Much Stress, May says the three masters fit together better than you might think
Not content to rest on his (formidable) legacy, Booker T & the MG's and Stax Records guitar legend Steve Cropper is still releasing new music, his most recent offering being this year's Friendlytown.
One byproduct of that aforementioned legacy, though, is that Cropper had little difficulty recruiting some famous friends for the album – Billy Gibbons and Brian May being the two most prominent.
Along with Cropper, both Gibbons and May sat down with Guitarist to discuss the making of Friendlytown, and their respective approaches to its material.
Though Cropper's immaculate, soul-flavored rhythm work, Gibbons' Texas-flavored blues riffology, and May's stadium-filling electric guitar heroics have little in common on the surface, according to May, the trio are more alike in their playing than you might think.
“What we have in common is that we don’t shred for the sake of it. In my case, it’s because I can’t!” May told Guitarist recently. “Guitar playing, for all of us, is the voice; it’s how you feel. If your guitar can express that feeling, you’ve done your job. We have that in common.
“Nobody is showing off or zooming up and down the fretboard,” May continued. “Everyone is playing what feels right, and there’s passion in it. There’s an incredible sense of integrity that Steve helped to create.”
Though he's the author of some of the world's best-known and beloved riffs and solos, May showed great deference to both Cropper and Gibbons during his appearance on the Friendlytown track Too Much Stress (Gibbons appears on almost every one of the album's tracks), to the point where May actually tried not to solo with the latter.
Get The Pick Newsletter
All the latest guitar news, interviews, lessons, reviews, deals and more, direct to your inbox!
“Billy had already played half a solo. Jon [Tiven, the album's producer] said to me, ‘Can you play the other half?’” May told Guitarist in the same interview.
“I said, ‘Jon, look, can’t you give him a whole solo and me a whole solo?’ Jon said, ‘No, this is the way it’s going to be.’ I said, ‘Oh God, all right.’ But I listened and thought, ‘Actually, this probably does make sense.’”
To read a full breakdown of Friendlytown with May, Gibbons, and, of course, Cropper, pick up the new issue of Guitarist at Magazines Direct.
Thank you for reading 5 articles this month**
Join now for unlimited access
US pricing $3.99 per month or $39.00 per year
UK pricing £2.99 per month or £29.00 per year
Europe pricing €3.49 per month or €34.00 per year
*Read 5 free articles per month without a subscription
Jackson is an Associate Editor at GuitarWorld.com. He’s been writing and editing stories about new gear, technique and guitar-driven music both old and new since 2014, and has also written extensively on the same topics for Guitar Player. Elsewhere, his album reviews and essays have appeared in Louder and Unrecorded. Though open to music of all kinds, his greatest love has always been indie, and everything that falls under its massive umbrella. To that end, you can find him on Twitter crowing about whatever great new guitar band you need to drop everything to hear right now.
“The idea of lead guitar is that there’s focus put on it, and during this period I just didn’t want any focus to be on me”: How Devin Townsend relied on his production process to deliver his new album from the depths of depression and grief
“Wolfgang knows more Intervals songs at any given moment than I do – on guitar and drums”: Intervals' Aaron Marshall on making the impossible possible, and jamming with Wolfgang Van Halen