Willy Porter
Milwaukee’s resident acoustic genius on doing his own thing with Guild …
 Porter: New album out; Guild model in the works.
Photo by Deone Jahnke |
When last we checked in with casually mind-blowing Wisconsinite acoustic guitar ninja Willy Porter, he had just stepped offstage after opening the March 2006, Tempe Music Festival, right there in Guild’s Arizona backyard, and captivating the audience with his soulful songwriting, dazzling chops, premium-level banter and nimble footwork. He told us then that he was in the process of setting up his own label, Weasel Records, to release an album he recorded in his own studio, the Engine Room.
True to his word, he has since accomplished all of that, and the resulting album, Available Light, is now available for your dining and dancing pleasure. A soulfully heartfelt and atmospheric group effort, the disc (Porter’s sixth), is full of subtly nuanced textures coaxed from his guitars, most notably his beloved Guild Valencia.
Here, Porter literally checks in—he popped by our Scottsdale offices in person on Sept. 19 to talk about his album and latest exploits, as well as something called the Guild Contemporary Series, a very top-secret, hush-hush sort of project around here on which he has worked closely with guitar maker par excellence and resident Guild mastermind Donnie Wade. Well, top-secret and hush-hush until now, anyway …
GN: Welcome, Willy Porter. Are you getting enough oxygen?
WP: (laughs) Uh, yeah. Yes.
GN: What brings you here to Guild headquarters?
WP: A grand sense of dementia has brought me here (laughs). No, I’m happy to be here meeting with some folks at Guild and Fender and talking about instruments and amps and the music that I make with them.
GN: You’re a Guild Valencia man, are you not?
WP: I am. It’s my main axe. It’s the one I tour with all the time.
GN: What’s all this about a "Guild Contemporary Series?"
WP: Well, I’ve been working with the guys for about five years now, and talking about a guitar that would be something that I would play all the time and that would be affordable for folks, you know, rather than having to go to, say, the Custom Shop and have something made. And now I think we’re right on the cusp of coming up with something that will be in production soon, so I’m really excited about that.
 Porter onstage at the Tempe Music Fest, March 31, 2006.
Photo by Jerome Brunet
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GN: They would do well to heed your advice …
WP: Well, you’re very kind, but I don’t know about that (grins). But it’s really an honor to be asked to be involved in this process. I’ve been working with Donnie Wade, who’s obviously a genius in terms of guitar building and luthiery. And he knows a lot about materials science as well—picking the right woods for the tones and the way that I play.
The guitar we’re working on will be a guitar that’s really designed to handle a lot of open tunings; it’ll be an instrument that’s very stable, but also has a very broad voice so that when you play it plugged in, you’ll have the full audio range if you’re a solo player. It’s great to have lots of bass and a lot of clarity in the high end, but it’s hard to build a guitar that does both. So I think that’s the challenge that Donnie’s rising to, and that the folks at Guild in Tacoma, Wash., are rising to.
GN: How’s Weasel Records going?
WP: Weasel Records in great. It’s my label, and the first album I’ve released is Available Light, which came out a week ago today. So it’s a very exciting time for me.
GN: Recorded at your own studio, the Engine Room …
WP: Yes, a studio of mine in Milwaukee. Just a great venture. I have a great four-piece band—a wonderful piano player, drummer and fretless bass player—and the four of us were sort of just, you know, kids with the key to the city. And we didn’t feel any pressure to deliver a record that had to meet record company standards, in that they often want things to sound like singles; they want things that are going to be able to sort of cross over in different genres at radio and such. And I didn’t have any of the pressure to do that, so we really focused on making this a great piece of art, as an album.
People say the album is dead, but I don’t think so. I think that folks are hungry to listen to a full statement instead of for disposable two-and-half-minute or three-minute songs. So I might be missing the boat in not embracing that culture of ring tones, but I feel like the music that I want to make doesn’t really serve that beast. And I feel happy that the label is distributed by Ryko, so that’s good news. It’s a great team, so it couldn’t be better.
 The Willy Porter Band.
Photo by Deone Jahnke
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GN: Do you write differently for your group, as opposed to solo compositions?
WP: That’s a great question. There’s sort of a variance between the two. Some songs are really written as solo pieces—for instance, the song “Tribe,” which was on an album called Falling Forward, was written completely for solo guitar and vocal, whereas tunes like “Available Light” on this (new) album—I always had the idea that it would be fleshed out with a broader band. So in that way, I’m playing more simply; more spartan chords. But for a lot of stuff, if it’s a real big, open-tuned thing where the guitar is tuned way down and it’s very percussive, it’s sometimes so much information that it’s hard to put other musicians into that context.
So I’m learning that you might think something is great as a solo guitar piece or for a solo performance and it’s really not, and that you have to modify your arrangements so that the song has life, especially if you think the lyrics are good. You might have to re-arrange the musical portion of it to serve it better so that the song has more life; so that it feels more coherent. That’s just a process that I try to keep an open mind on, really.
GN: What’s your touring schedule like these days?
WP: I’m just getting ready—I’ve got two weeks of rehearsals with the band, and then we’ll do a Midwest run of about 15 dates, which are separated out a little bit so I can get home and spend time with family and stuff like that. That’s very important to me. And then, in November, I’ll do about three weeks with the band starting in Cleveland, and we’ll work our way all the way down the East Coast from New Hampshire. That’s going to be a great tour—I’m looking forward to that.
Visit Willy Porter online at www.willyporter.com.
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