By: Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard Appears on: Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department “Soft Smoke,” at just under one minute long, seems to waft in and out of Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department as quickly as an actual plume of smoke. In its forty-nine seconds, however, Robert Pollard packs in quite […]
Tag: Robert Pollard
Zoom (It Happens All Over The World)
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Airs
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: Honey Locust Honky Tonk For the verses in “Airs,” you’ll just alternate strumming between the G5 and Csus2 chords. In the chorus, however, Pollard uses a two-note chord shape on the second and first strings with an open G note on the third string and moves this shape to various […]
Kick Me And Cancel
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: From A Compound Eye “Kick Me And Cancel” is yet another great example of the Robert Pollard guitar technique I call “Open String Drone.” This technique consists of playing a melody on one guitar string while also playing an adjacent open string. In the case of this song, the melody […]
Pop Zeus
By: Robert Pollard with Doug Gillard Appears on: Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department As I mentioned in the post for “Avalanche Aminos,” another song that was co-written by Robert Pollard and Doug Gillard is “Pop Zeus” from Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department. Just as in that song, Gillard wrote the music […]
Strictly Comedy
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: Kid Marine According to its entry on GBVDB, “Strictly Comedy” from Kid Marine was only ever played live four times. Fortunately for us, there’s video footage of the band rehearsing for one of those performances on the excellent The Who Went Home And Cried documentary (which is available in its […]
Boxing About
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: Normal Happiness I’ve mentioned before on this site that it’s always easier for me to learn Robert Pollard’s songs when I can listen to either a recording of him playing it alone, usually either as a Suitcase track or a demo, or a live version. In attempting to transcribe “Boxing […]
Recovering
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: From A Compound Eye “Recovering” provides Robert Pollard’s From A Compound Eye with a stellar closing track. It starts off with a gentle acoustic finger-plucked verse riff, then blasts into heavy chords for the chorus, using Pollard’s signature two-note chords: a fretted note on the sixth string played along with the […]
Dancing Girls And Dancing Men
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: From a Compound Eye Learning how to play “Dancing Girls And Dancing Men” on guitar had me pretty stumped for a while; with the prominent (and very bouncy) bassline, drums, and keyboards, it doesn’t seem like a particularly guitar-driven song. Especially with the Todd Tobias-produced Robert Pollard songs, I often […]
Far-Out Crops
By: Robert Pollard Appears on: Kid Marine On “Far-Out Crops” from Kid Marine, Robert Pollard uses a songwriting technique of repeating the same guitar riff while changing the chords that are played along with it. You’ll see this happen on two different riffs in this song. The riffs will appear in the guitar tab, and […]
