ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON FEB. 11, 2009
By Steve Newton
There’s nothing like the sweet sound of a slide caressing strings, especially if the tube of metal or glass is on the finger of a supremely gifted player. Specialists from Elmore James to Derek Trucks have brilliantly tapped into the wonders of the bottleneck, yet major guitar manufacturers have mostly overlooked the needs of the slide enthusiast. All that will change once Fender unveils the Sonny Landreth Signature Model Stratocaster, which is scheduled for production this year.
The picker who Guitar Player magazine dubbed “Supreme Slide Master” in a recent cover story intends to take prototypes of the guitar he’s helped design on the road soon and “run ’em through the paces”. So when the finished product hits stores, does he expect hordes of Sonny Landreth sound-alikes to come out of the woodwork?
“Well, I don’t know about that,” drawls the 58-year-old from his home in Lafayette, Louisiana. “But Fender’s never put out a slide guitar per se, and I always tell people who are learning how to play slide that the first thing is to have a dedicated guitar just for that. That’s what helped me way back when.”
Landreth discovered his love of slide as a teen and over the years developed a Chet Atkins–inspired fingerstyle technique that allows him to seamlessly fuse the bluesy spirit of the Delta with the Cajun stylings of his home state. As a youngster honing his craft, Landreth used metal slides before switching to the glass ones synonymous with his liquid, otherworldly tone.
“I had a friend with a motorcycle shop,” he recalls with a chuckle, “so I went over and got a pair of handlebars, got a hacksaw out, and started making a lifetime supply of slides. Then a coupla years later I started using glass, and just kinda fell in love with that.”
Any guitar freaks unfamiliar with Landreth should immediately invest in his new CD, From the Reach, which boasts fretwork by Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Eric Johnson, and Robben Ford, all of whom Landreth wrote songs specifically for. It opens with “Blue Tarp Blues”, in which he and Knopfler trade poignantly rockin’ licks in a tribute to survivors of Hurricane Katrina.
“That imagery of the aerial shots of the blue tarpaulins covering the roofs from all the damage is just a really powerful image,” he explains. “So it’s a theme of grace in the face of adversity, inspired by our friends there who rebuilt their homes and their lives.”
Although Landreth managed to round up an impressive array of six-string hotshots for From the Reach, the self-described “guitar geek” is keen to collaborate with plenty more.
“Aw, man, I got more heroes than I can check off,” relates Landreth, who plays the Yale Hotel next Thursday (February 19). “I could do this for the rest of my life, because I really do like the contrast. I like how they’ll give me ideas and push me into directions of songwriting that I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. That’s really the magic for me. That give-and-take makes for the mojo.”
To hear the full audio of my 2009 interview with Sonny Landreth–and my interviews with him from 1995, 2013, and 2016 as well–subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 700 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with stellar musicians since 1982.