Letter from the Editor | Acoustic Guitar, Spring 2026 Issue 357

From the Spring 2026 Issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine

With this issue, Acoustic Guitar settles into its new quarterly rhythm. At a time when publishing—and so much else—feels unsettled, the change has prompted us to look closely at what belongs in each issue and how deeply we want to explore it. A quarterly pace also feels closer to the way many of us actually live with music—returning to the same pieces over weeks and months and hearing something new each time. That spirit of focus begins with our cover story on singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy.

For nearly four decades, Tweedy has been a central figure in American guitar music, through his bands Uncle Tupelo and Wilco and a growing body of solo work. When senior editor Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers met him backstage in Boston, they spoke about songwriting, alternate tunings, and the tiny imperfections that give recorded music its character. The feature is paired with James Volpe Rotondi’s look at Tweedy’s two Martin signature models, as well as a World Premiere transcription of “Twilight Override.” Built on looping nylon-string fingerstyle figures and subtle harmonic shifts, the piece offers a good glimpse into Tweedy’s writing and ideas worth sitting with at the guitar. Even a few minutes inside those repeating patterns shows how much mileage can be gotten from simple materials.

Separate from the interview, Tweedy told Rodgers about a recent mishap at Wilco’s loft in which falling acoustic paneling snapped the headstock off of one of his most prized instruments, a 1944 Martin D-28 nicknamed Hank in honor of Hank Williams’ guitar. That guitar belongs to a lineage we explore in this issue’s special focus on the mighty dreadnought. In a wide-ranging feature, Michael John Simmons traces the instrument’s path from its early Martin origins through the players and makers who carried it into bluegrass, folk, and beyond. The theme continues in Simmons’ Great Acoustics on a rare Larson Brothers Euphonon dreadnought and in Greg Ruby’s review of the new Collings DS1 A Hill Country, a 12-fret, slotted-headstock interpretation that revisits the earliest design while extending its tonal range.

This issue also introduces Crossroads, a new song department devoted to vintage blues, with New York–based guitarist and repair expert Mamie Minch at the helm. The series begins with Furry Lewis’ “Billy Lyons and Stack O’Lee,” drawn from his brisk 1927 recording. Minch walks through Lewis’ rolling alternating-bass style and the way melody and accompaniment work together, giving players a direct way into a foundational blues groove that’s as fun to play as it is instructive.

Elsewhere, guitarist-composer Buck Curran speaks with Welsh fingerstylist Gwenifer Raymond about her distinctly personal solo-guitar language and the influences behind it. Our lesson departments explore melodic variation, fingerstyle arranging, and time feel, and in Makers & Shakers, novelist Joseph Skibell remembers the late luthier Ken Parker, whose designs reshaped first the solid-body electric and then the acoustic archtop guitar.

Together these pieces offer a snapshot of the instrument as it exists now—grounded in tradition and continually reshaped by the people who play and build it. We hope this issue gives you something you’ll want to return to again and again. —Adam Perlmutter

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