“Every time I play with a session musician, they’re like, ‘What are you doing? What chords are you playing? That chord doesn’t even exist!’” Why Gen Z guitar star Beabadoobee’s chords have confused her fellow guitarists – but won over Rick Rubin

Beatrice Laus, who performs under the moniker Beabadoobee, has firmly established herself as an indie rock and bedroom pop Gen Z guitar hero. Given her start as a violinist, and with influences ranging from Pinoy music to '90s pop and rock, her approach to guitar playing is far from traditional – something that has raised some eyebrows and, at times, even outright confused guitarists from a more traditional background.

“The way I play guitar, every time I play with a session musician, they’re like, ‘What the fuck are you doing? What chords are you playing?’ They’re always like, ‘It sounds pretty, but that chord does not even exist!’ I don’t really follow any rules,” she explains in an interview with Mix Online.

Her unconventional way around the guitar led her to bond with famed producer Rick Rubin, who put his mark on her third and latest album, This Is How Tomorrow Moves.

“Yeah, I don’t know if ‘professional’ would be the word I would use for anything I’ve ever been involved in,” he agrees. “I come from a punk rock background and have made some of the most, let’s say, naïve-sounding recordings that you can find.”

Combining their two off-kilter approaches sometimes meant ditching the playbook altogether, including Rubin's insistence that Laus and her bandmate, Jacob Bugden, record all the songs in a stripped-down manner.

“Solo guitar, just her or Jacob playing, and her singing,” says Rubin. “I wanted to hear the strengths and weaknesses of the songs, because sometimes you can use a production trick that’s really exciting and get fooled into thinking that the song is better than it is when really the production is what’s carrying it. The best is when the song carries itself and then the production makes it the coolest record.”

“I think what I really go off with, and what Rick really goes off with, is what you feel and the vibe and what you hear,” adds Laus.

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Laus had previously spoken about how her digital crate digging and early diet of My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, and Elliot Smith led her to throw guitar conventions out the window from the get-go.

This is exemplified by her penchant for alternate tunings, which may account for the confusion experienced by her fellow guitar players – and Rubin’s insistence that she strip the songs back, to expose the tunings’ unique overtones.

“We’ve been trying to limit the amount of guitar changes on stage – because I have too much,” she said in a 2022 Guitar World interview. “But with some songs, you really can’t duplicate the sound because of how open the strings are.

“There’s such a specific sound with tunings, so you need another guitar for that specific tuning. It will change the whole song, essentially, if I play in standard when it’s supposed to be in some weird emo tuning I found on YouTube… We have a very big guitar rig. It’s a hard job for the guitar tech.”

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Beabadoobee has long been associated with Fender offset guitars, and these days, opts for a short-scale Fairlane Zephyr in Paisley Pink, equipped with Monty’s Guitars ’54 P-90 pickups.

This Is How Tomorrow Moves marked a landmark moment for Beabadoobee, reaching number 1 on the UK Official Album Chart. She just wrapped up a US tour that concluded at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on September 28.