Petey USA

Guitar playing, to me, it's a vessel for songwriting. It's the easiest way for me to get my songwriting ideas out immediately because I kind of see the big picture all at once, especially vocal melodies and the instrumentation. And for me, picking up a guitar is just the most natural way to get an idea out right away. It's not me at all to play an epic guitar line or ripping an epic guitar solo, it's just not in my wheelhouse. Instinctually, I'm just totally not there. It's a companion for me to sing over and get ideas across and have just this bedrock of chords and voicings that I can scream my lyrics over.

There are some songs that I don't play guitar on and I sing to, and I feel kind of naked up there, like I don't really know what to do with my hands. I definitely feel less confident and it's just nice to have this wizard staff that at least I'm doing this. You know what I mean? And to be able to sing over the sounds that you're creating is a pretty powerful thing. There's a confidence to it that isn't really there when you don't have it. But I started playing guitar to just basically not do... I didn't want to do my homework, so I'd pick up a guitar instead and I didn't want to read. It always has been an amazing distraction for me, but a really rare one where the distraction is actually super productive because it ended up being my career.

I only really know how to play on odd tunings that aren't normal. I didn't learn how to really play guitar and standard tuning until last year. I have two strings in the middle tuned to the same note because I really like drone notes in the middle of all my chords. Chord voicings are the things that draw me to music and what I try and attach the most to my writing. So whatever makes it easier for my hands to make the specific voicings that I want, I'll tune my guitar to that. So I don't know, it just makes for cooler chords, it makes for easier hand shapes. I have no technique, you know what I mean? Sometimes I use my thumb to do the lower strings and I always play power chords with my pinky and my ring finger just because ergonomically it's easier for me to.

My hands naturally just want to fall like this and these shapes are always weirder than this. So I could tune my guitar to be able to just do that. I figured that a thicker gauge string was a lot easier intonation-wise for the tunings that I had. And because I'm not bending much and I'm not playing many leads and I'm mostly just doing downstrokes and playing chords and making sure that those voicings can really come alive, having the thicker gauge strings has helped a lot.

Reliability is really key and just like how many other guitar players I know in my network, in my band who use Earning Ball strings. As sort of someone who's new to guitar, co-sign of just peers who are all using them was really important for me. Definitely from a reliability standpoint too. The fact that I use really obscure tunings, tunings that easily fall out of tune if you don't have the right strings on them. So it's just nice to know that there's strings that can handle it.

What drew me to being a songwriter is that you have the freedom to not follow any of the rules because you're not playing other people's songs, you're playing your own music, you're creating something from scratch. So I don't know, it's pretty liberating to realize you can do whatever you want. There's no rules. You can tune the strings to whatever note you want. You can use whatever fingers you want as long as you're not hurting yourself. That's been nice for me. You know what I mean? It's just kind of how I do things.

When I first started playing, I was really uncomfortable with it and playing guitar in front of a lot of people and singing at the same time. And I used to watch people sing and play guitar at the same time and be like, "I would never be able to do that or I don't have the brainpower to do both those things at once and remember lyrics." So when I first started playing shows right after COVID ended, I was really uncomfortable with it and I was really rigid with it and I was really safe with it. And that's probably one of the reasons why I gravitate so much towards drone notes and stuff. It's because my music's so droney that you can just play downstrokes on one note and allow the bass to change underneath it.

It's really effective in my own music so I kind of set it up that way almost like as a way to quell my anxiety about playing. And now recently on my last tour, it's a lot more involved guitar wise. And I realized after touring for three and a half, four years or whatever, I'm doing stuff that I never would've imagined I can do. And so the cumulative effect of that is pretty cool. It was a real slow build, but recently I just sort of took a step back and been like, "I've definitely grown a lot as a player just through immersion."

I'm a big Moon & Antarctica guy and then We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes by Death Cab, I think those are my two most formative albums, especially with guitar playing. Flight of the Concords for sure was an early comedy influence. Portlandia has a huge influence on me. Modest Mouse, Death Cab for Cutie are probably the two most influential bands on my sound. Just in my formative high school years, that's what I was listening to the most. Isaac Brock has such a lackadaisical and unique and just true to him style of playing guitar that again doesn't really follow the rules of guitar playing, especially melodically. I'm really into the idea that only he can do certain things and if anyone else did it, it would be really weird. I think something like that can only happen if you're not following normal song structure, normal guitar playing.

I mean, I think having the first shows that I ever played be completely sold out, it was pretty crazy because I went from doing all this stuff during COVID to not seeing a single person once for as long as three or four weeks to right when we started playing shows the rooms were all sold out. We were doing two shows in a city, 400 cap rooms. It was shocking. The first show we played was in Chicago was at a venue called Subterranean. It was packed with a room full of people and they were all singing every lyric back to me. And it was the only thing that made it real because at that point I had a million followers on TikTok or whatever, but it still seemed fake. Nothing on the internet seemed real. I'm not like an internet guy. I'm not a fan of the internet.

What I would strive for is to create as much separation from my career from social media as possible. Because I mean, it's a crazy thing to have your success and your job and your product be you and have the only way to market it be on your phone, which is the thing that I think is destroying the entire planet. So it's just weird cognitive dissonance that goes on from being your own product and then having to use this horrible poisonous thing to be successful in it, but you have to do this and you're trying to be your authentic self. And I mean, I'm so grateful for my career and everything's so awesome, but there is this thing where I'm just like there are certain people who reach a level in their career where they can divorce themselves from the iPhone of it all. It takes a lot to get there, but I think it's a goal worth striving for.

Just the feeling of having all these followers on social media and not really feeling anything about it to then performing my first live show and seeing a room full of people and realizing that they were real. I mean, that's what validated the entire thing to me is just to understand that, oh wow, we're all in a room together. We're all experiencing this together. And that's what's so cool about going to a concert. It's just like automatically just by buying a ticket to a concert, that's like getting out of your house and seeing live music. And it's so nice to have this completely separate part of my career that's so in person and it's really important that I have that to be able to bounce off the other thing. Otherwise I would probably go crazy.