If you know your rock history, you’ll know that all the greatest rock bands are about the live performance. No smoke and mirrors, no auto-tune or over produced tracks, just a few musicians and their gear laying down tracks. Enter, Jonathan Tyler & The Northern Lights. Their debut album “Pardon Me” is unadulterated, gritty, rocknroll. The way it was meant to be; live and with soul! Check out the gear and guitars they used to make “Pardon Me”.
Recording Live
Jonathan: “Well we’ve been playing 300 shows a year, for the last 3 years, and so we’ve gotten to the point where were are just so comfortable playing live and we feed off each others energy really well. Besides just that, I’ve had experiences where I’ve gone into the studio and laid the drums down one day, and then the next day the bass player would lay down onto of that, and it’s really detached and it doesn’t feel as real as when we get into one room and everything is performed at once. I think there is just more energy and I think that comes across in this album.”
Brandon: “We went into the studio and kind of just said, “We’ve done the other stuff before”, laid down track by track, and it just feels different. We just went in there and set our stuff up and we didn’t say we wanted anything one way or another necessarily, we just started playing a song, recorded it, and by the end of the day that song was done. And we just kept going like that, and we did most of the album that way.”
Guitars
Jonathan:
Gibson 335
Fender American Strat
Fender American Tele Deluxe from the seventies- “It has classic Deluxe Humbuckers. It’s different from the standard Tele. Kind of beefier but it’s still not as heavy as a Les Paul and not as twangy as a regular Telecaster. It’s a nice in-between.”
Brandon:
Gibson Les Paul 58 Re-issue
Gibson 61 SG Re-issue - “It’s one of the newer SG’s. The standards are real beefy and hard rock, but the body’s shaped a bit different and the neck is actually a lot thinner on it. On the Les Paul I’ve got like a baseball bat neck, nice and thick, which I love but the SG is different. I started getting into a lot of slide stuff this year and just looking at all these guitarists who were doing what I was looking to do, and a lot of them played the SG. So I went and checked them out and I didn’t really like the standards but the re-issues had a bit thinner sound and you can cut through with it. It’s totally a different sound than the Les Paul, so it just seemed to be a good choice.”
65 Harmony Rocket
Playing through 100 watt Marshall 4x12. It’s an old JMP it’s a 74 or 76.
Effects
Jonathan:
Memory Man – “I’d don’t use very many effects at all. I run an analog Memory Man for delay and that’s pretty much it; I run straight into the amp and just turn it up. I prefer to get the tone out of the tubes rather than pedals.”
Brandon:
Boss Octave Pedal
Memory Man
Green Big Muff –“The Original Russian! That thing is badass! I’m pretty minimalist but you can get so many sounds out of that those pedals”
Road Warriors
Jonathan: “The one thing I absolutely need on the road…I use white Fender picks. It’s the only thing I will use. White medium, I won’t use anything else. It started as a joke but now it’s getting real. At first, I would always give Brandon shit because he would use these green picks. And I would always be like, “God those are fucking ugly! How can you look down at those when you’re playing!” I was just fucking around and I always just used the white ones because they’re pretty! It feels good too obviously! But it’s pretty!"
Brandon: “He goes to Guitar Center and he asks me if I need anything and so I need picks. He comes back and I’m expecting my green picks and I go look at my pedal board and there are these tortoiseshell brown ones, and I’m like “WOW! They’re beautiful!” I still got one green one left though!”
On Writing Solos
Jonathan: “I think for a song like Gypsy Woman you have to play the same thing over and over. You don’t want to improvise that every night because people know that part and they want to hear it, and as a new band it might disappoint people. We improvise on other songs but when we were writing it, that part came about through improvising. Most of the time I think about my guitar sound as vocals. You hear a melody and just play that. I think that’s what any musician tries to do really, just get to where they can play what they’re feeling or thinking in their head without having to sit down and figure it out. Just let it come out. And I think when we write we take that approach and just take an idea and play whatever feels natural. But I think once you’ve got that part written you should stick to it because it gets kind of boring when you see someone onstage soloing the entire time.“
Brandon: “I remember on it’s either Free Wheeling or Blonde on Blonde- Bob Dylan album- and I just remember listening to it and thinking, “God this albums awesome” and then you got to like the third or fourth song and there is just this guitar that is nowhere near tuned! But I like it! It’s part of the charm.”
Jonathan: “You know a lot of the old albums you try to play to them. You can’t. You have to tune to the song because they’re all off. I mean, those imperfections shouldn’t be cut. I don’t think that you should over work and rework things so much that you loose the little imperfections and the little moments.”
Brandon: “There’s a track- if you listen real close in the background- where Jonathan’s yelling at me for being out of tune.”
Jonathan: “There’s that part in The Devil’s Basement when he’s doing that slide and it’s like a little flat and I’m screaming “You’re off!””
Brandon: “We hadn’t even recorded the song, and we’d never played it that fast and the producer was sitting in there and brings in a six pack and a bottle of whiskey and was like, “Here, you guys just hang out, we gotta do some work.” And so of course we start drinking, and he comes back and he’s like ok let’s do this song and speed it up and get a groove behind it. So of course you add drinking to the equation and..."
Jonathan: “Look, it’s not perfect but I like it! It’s not anywhere near what I imagined when writing that song. There’s a lot of stuff in this album that definitely wasn’t anticipated but it makes it real. I could work things over and over but that’s not rocknroll. This is real.”
You can also check out photos of the guys at this location.
Article and photos by Kristin Tully
What I've heard from this band, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, Mumford and Sons, and the rise of the Black Keys lately makes me excited about rock music's future.