Emily Wolfe doesn’t play guitar. She bends it to her will. Like a bronco buster taming a stallion, she saddles up on her signature Sheratons and lets it rip. Much of the magic felt and heard on her self-titled debut was pure adrenaline hitting your speaker. And while her second album, 2021’s Outlier, incorporates Wolfe’s love of Motown grooves and modern-pop stickiness refreshening her songwriting with backdrops of more polished, waxy tones, but tumbleweed oscillation, helicopter, square-wave chops, and barbed-wire fuzz are still howls welcomed in this Wolfe pack.

“When I go up there, something could hit me at any point—an emotion that I felt 10 years ago could come out in a bend on the low E. There’s so much rawness [to classic rock]; the edges are not perfect, but there’s a magic in that,” explained Wolfe to PG.

But how do you marry earworm poppiness with a gunslinger’s approach to guitar?

“Some of my rock friends say, ‘Pop isn’t relevant,’ and I’m like, ‘What are you talking about—it’s everywhere!’ It’s so sticky for people, and that’s really fascinating to me. I want my music to have that quality … but also the realness of a raw guitar tone. [With Outlier] I wanted to make something that would be classic 10, 20, 30 years from now,” she told PG in 2021. “That was the goal, and I think we achieved it.”

Before Wolfe’s headlining show at Nashville’s Blue Room (located inside the Third Man Records compound), PG’s Chris Kies joined the shredding songwriter onstage to talk shop. The resulting conversation covers the development behind her Epiphone Sheraton, how a boring night in Cleveland spent with her “Chex-mix crushing, brother-in-tone” bass player Evan Nicholson convinced her play a doubleneck guitar, and we discover what three pedals work together to make what she describes as “the sound that belongs to me.”

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[Brought to you by D’Addario XPND Pedalboard: https://www.daddario.com/XPNDRR]

*© Copyright Gearhead Communications LLC, 2023*

00:00 - D’Addario XPND Pedalboard

00:15 - Emily Wolfe Playing Intro

00:34 - Chris Kies & Emily Wolfe Intro

01:08 - Epiphone Emily Wolfe Signature Sheraton Stealth

05:36 - Selecting the Epiphone Alnico Classic PRO pickups

08:48 - Emily Wolfe's Strings & Picks

10:31 - Epiphone Emily Wolfe "White Wolfe" Sheraton Signature

13:09 - Epiphone G-1275

17:05 - Fender Hot Rod DeVille 410 III

19:51 - Emily Wolfe's Pedalboard

#guitar #rigrundown #guitarist #epiphone #guitarplayer #emilywolfe

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