How Ben Garnett Turns the Acoustic Guitar into the Engine of a New Kind of String Band

It’s 8:17 pm on New York’s Upper West Side, and Ben Garnett is rotating. Huss and Dalton dreadnought acoustic strapped to his shoulder, he stands on a white wooden makeshift stage facing about 50 enraptured listeners in the front room of a cozy apartment on the fourth floor of a 19th-century brownstone. With bandmates Brittany Haas on fiddle and Dan Klingsberg on upright bass flanking him, Garnett lights into a lengthy, many-mooded solo exploration that’s one third Tony Rice, one third Lenny Breau, four sixths Steve Howe and two sixths Peter Green on Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well (Part 2).” 

As Garnett plays, establishing a bodily rhythm no metronome could follow, he bends his right knee and leans forward from his hips, then lifts the sole of his left mfoot off the stage to raise his torso back up to a straight position. A second or two later, he does the same thing again, and then again. The guitar follows its player’s repeated motion, describing a tight circle in the air and producing an effect much like that of a Leslie speaker. For the next couple of minutes, Garnett doesn’t just sound eclectic, he sounds psychedeclectic.

This private house concert is the final stop of Garnett’s initial U.S. tour in support of his second album as a leader, Kite’s Keep. On both that collection and its predecessor, 2023’s Imitation Fields, the guitarist and composer succeeds in making the kind of music that Duke Ellington approvingly called “beyond category.” Is it a) progressive bluegrass fusion, b) acoustic string band jazz, or c) contemporary American roots chamber music? The correct answer is d) all these things and more. It’s also transfixingly gorgeous.

Born and raised in Arlington, Texas, Garnett has been based in Nashville for the past eight years. During that time, he’s worked with newgrass artists like Missy Raines and Circus No. 9, and he’s recorded entrancing duo EPs with fellow guitarists Celia Hill and Ethan Sherman. But his solo work is on a different plane altogether, both more refined and more emotional. On a Zoom call two weeks before his New York show, Garnett spoke about that work and its prime mover, the acoustic guitar.

So where did all this uncategorizable music come from anyway?

Who knows? As my friend [and producer] Chris Eldridge likes to say, musicians love music. And to think of music as genre . . . you know, genre is a completely constructed taxonomy, labeling something for the sake of how to market it. It’s pretty far removed from the actual creative intent—from where the bodies are buried, so to speak. I’m just trying to write stuff that gets me excited to want to play it—and, in a way, to host a party and be a good host. I’m writing for the musicians that I’ve hired; I’m creating opportunities for them to shine and maybe showcase parts of their musicianship that people haven’t heard before. Just trying to make the best possible environment for creating something powerful.

How much of your original material is actually written out?

Quite a bit. I went to school at the University of North Texas, and my main area of study was jazz. UNT is famously a big-band school, and I was taught in my jazz arranging classes that to bring music in general to other musicians, you write it out. Sometimes in these big-band arrangements, you’ll have very specific articulations, what to slur and not slur. There’s no tighter big band than the One O’Clock Lab Band at UNT, because there’s so much attention to detail. So I’m definitely coming from that. 

What’s interesting is that that couldn’t be farther removed from how most string band music comes to be. A lot of that music is passed down via an oral tradition. You don’t usually learn fiddle tunes by sheet music, you learn them from recordings, or your grandpa shows them to you. There’s also this casualness to string band music, this inherent interpretive quality. It’s like a game of telephone. Someone’s gonna hear a fiddle tune slightly differently, and then it’s gonna become a variation on the original. 

That sort of improvisation has a big influence on how I write. So even though a lot of the stuff may be in a composed form, there’ll be, say, an open repeat section, with one person leading the charge and others supporting them. On the new album there’s this tune called “The Clockmaker,” and the whole idea of it is group improvisation based around a texture, and how we can all take this texture and use it to dance around each other.

I gather you used two 1930s Martins on the new album.

Yeah, both belong to Chris Eldridge. He’s very gracious with lending his instruments to his close friends, and so I got to borrow those two to record on. The main guitar on this record is a 1937 D-18, and it’s the same D-18 that Chris plays on the records he made with Julian Lage. I think he plays it on three Punch Brothers records, too. The other guitar is a 1939 Martin 00-17, which is an insane recording instrument. You play a G chord and there’s just like the gooiest, most beautiful aura around it. I used that on “Tell Me About You,” “A Place for the In Between,” and the last track, “Somewhere Near Hope.”

What’s happening with your solo on “Cellar Door”? It seems to go all acid rock for a few seconds.

There were a number of fun recording techniques that we used. The main mics on my guitar were a pair of [Neumann] KM 84s, modded by this guy named Klaus Heyne. But we also had two [Neumann] U87s, one on the neck, one on the body. And then in the middle of the KM 84s, we had a Shure SM57, which was going through this tiny overdriven Fender Champ. That combination of mic and amp was the basic “Cellar Door” tone, and the mix engineer added some phasing to it later. I just told him to go crazy on that part. It was mostly in-the-box effects, although the amp sound was recorded live.

How did you get into guitar in the first place?

I’ve always loved music. I took some piano lessons for a while when I was five, kind of hated it, and then I joined the school band playing tuba in sixth grade and stuck with that throughout high school. At that same time I started playing guitar. I was really into rock bands like Green Day. But a couple months into playing guitar, my dad told me that we have this cousin on his side of the family who’s this well-known rock guitar player, and his name’s Andy Timmons. For those who know him, he’s one of the best living rock guitar players. That’s probably my family bias, but the older I get and the more musical experience I have, I just appreciate him so much. On top of being a great instrumentalist who’s made a ton of records under his own name, he’s an epic session musician. He was Olivia Newton-John’s musical director for 20 years.

So I got introduced to Andy’s music, I guess that was around 2006. He had just put out a record called Resolution, and that changed my life. I was like, “I want to do that.” He also lived not too far away from us, in a town called McKinney, Texas, and so my dad occasionally drove me up there. He got to reconnect with his cousin, whom he hadn’t seen in a long time, and then he was like, “Hey, my son’s playing guitar!” I got to see his upstairs studio with hundreds of awesome vintage amps, and I got to see how someone of that caliber lives their life. It was a really special thing. And my relationship with him only grew, especially when I got more serious about guitar playing. He was a huge supporter and linchpin in all of that.

At that point you were playing mostly electric. What brought on the switch to acoustic?

The duo album Julian Lage put out with Chris Eldridge in 2014, Avalon, is basically the reason why I play acoustic guitar. It laid the groundwork for me to want to pursue this as a lifestyle.

Which makes it fitting that Chris is now one of your closest collaborators. And you’ve worked with Julian too, right?

In 2017 I went to a weeklong music camp in Savannah, Georgia, called the Acoustic Music Seminar. The year that I went, the people on the faculty included Julian, Bryan Sutton, Mike Marshall, Edgar Meyer, and Sarah Jarosz, and I was one of two guitar players selected to go. I never took a private lesson with Julian, but he was a mentor for a lot of the group sessions I was in, and he kicked my ass. Anybody who knows Julian knows he’s the sweetest, most humble person, but man, when it comes down to business, there’s no one more intense. He has this way to psychologically get to the root of what might be blocking you from achieving the next step.

Does any particular example of this come to mind?

Yeah. Our ensemble was playing a song, and I think he was standing behind me, almost whispering into my ear. It felt like he was the voice in my head or something. At one point I was taking a solo and he was like, “Okay, now make the banjo sound better.” In other words, enhance the performance of this other person while you’re playing a solo. That’s a real reversal of things, because usually I’d be like, “I’m taking a solo, they should make me sound good.” Julian tapped into this relational thing that has absolutely changed my perspective.

And that’s led into the aesthetic of how I think about music and write music for string band. I think acoustic guitar in a string band is this engine that can provide a world-building stage for other instruments to stand on and inhabit. In my mind, I’m making guitar records. To most people they may not sound like guitar records because I’m not playing a ripping solo all the time. But I feel like I’m celebrating the guitar for what it is: this really expansive thing that can create all kinds of textures and rhythms but can also play melodies—and make other people sound good. Minus maybe some later Tony Rice records, I don’t think that aesthetic has been explored so much. So it’s interesting for me to do that and see what’s possible.

What He Plays

Ben Garnett’s two principal acoustic guitars are a 2013 Huss and Dalton TD-M and a 2009 Martin 000-18. Strings are D’Addario phosphor bronze (medium gauge for the Huss and Dalton, light gauge for the Martin). Picks are generally Wegens, but a few BlueChip TAD50s and TAD50-1Rs receive some studio use. He’s currently in the market for a new capo. For live shows, Garnett employs a Grace Design FELiX preamp/signal blender, in conjunction with a Neumann MCM 114 clip-on mic and the passive L.R. Baggs pickup on his Huss and Dalton.  —MR