Brokeback Mountain Suite About 10 years ago, Gustavo Santaolalla performed the Brokeback Mountain Suite for the Latin program, Encuentro en el Estudio. To date, it’s his best performance of the Brokeback Mountain score (and I’ve watched them all). The guitar tone is gorgeous. You’ll notice […]

Hurt Hurt was originally written and performed by Nine Inch Nails (Trent Reznor). It was actually a pivotal NIN song long before the seminal Johnny Cash cover. [The dissonant note in my intro is an ode to the NIN original.] In a similar but reverse […]

Wicked Game For my money, the two greatest unrequited love songs are: U2’s With or Without You, and Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game. The former can prompt one to hold a lighter in the air and bellow “…and you give yourself a-way-a”. The latter makes (me) […]

Wonderful Tonight Wonderful Tonight is far and away Eric Clapton’s most famous song — and one of the most romantic songs ever written. I’ve had this arrangement in my back pocket for 20 years. I had been developing and playing it at wedding ceremonies for […]

Motion Sickness As a guitar teacher, I’m fortunate to be in front of some really cool, music obsessed young people on a daily basis. My student Hannah tips me off to new music all the time, and routinely discovers artists years before they go mainstream. […]

Morning Morning is the central theme from August: Osage County — a highly underrated soundtrack by Gustavo Santaolalla. Much like Brokeback Mountain, the film’s score has Santaolalla exploring uniquely American themes. You might also like to play… Gustavo Santaolalla: Brokeback Mountain 1 | fingerstyle guitar […]

The Last of the Mohicans While the film and soundtrack are timeless — the music production was fairly chaotic for The Last of the Mohicans. Director Michael Mann had initially requested that Trevor Jones (composer) provide an electronic score for the film. That surprises me […]

The Ludlows Legends of the Fall (1994) is a sweeping epic that chronicles the lives of the Ludlow family in early 20th century Montana. Colonel William Ludlow, a disillusioned former U.S. Army officer, has retreated to the wilderness with his three sons: Alfred, the responsible […]

Cover Me Up Cover Me Up was the song that first introduced me to incredible singer/songwriter Jason Isbell. Forget the writing – the raw honesty of the song, and power of Isbell’s voice is what captured me. It’s just brutal in every good sense of […]

cardigan I’ve always liked Taylor Swift. In fact, she’s responsible for most of my physical lesson business. In the mid 2000’s, mostly boys (and very few girls) played guitar. That suddenly changed around 2007 when Taylor Swift became the biggest star in the world. Ever […]

The Water Lets You In Bloodline (2015-2017) is a Netflix original thriller series that follows the Rayburns, a family who own and run a beachside hotel in the Florida Keys. When the black sheep of the family, Danny Rayburn, returns home for his parents’ 45th wedding […]

Finding the Master “At first the music almost repelled me, it was so intense, and this man (Robert Johnson) made no attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or play. It was hard-core, more than anything I had ever heard. After a few […]