Derek Gripper
Fearless Connections
by Anil Prasad
Copyright © 2025 Anil Prasad.

Photo: Dmitri OtisDerek Gripper has quietly redrawn the boundaries of acoustic guitar by using it to perform adaptations of the intricate music of the West African kora. The goal for the classically-trained South African musician is to break free from the rigidity of Western forms and explore the infinite potential of his instrument. 

Gripper’s unique approach bridges continents and cultures, as well as the soulful and virtuosic. His expansion of the guitar’s vocabulary has established him as a vital voice in modern music. It’s also informed by an open-minded, seeking philosophy and a desire to pursue positive dialogues at a time when myopia and xenophobia are so prevalent.

His latest album, Everyday Things: Bach’s Second Cello Suite BWV 1008, is the second volume of his reimagining of Bach filtered through African and global music sensibilities. The record also reflects the influence of Soetsu Yanagi’s book The Beauty of Everyday Things. It features some of its text celebrating the value of handcrafted objects made without corporate imperative, as well as mirrors its core messages.

Prior to Everyday Things, Gripper released Lost Time: Bach’s First Cello Suite. It’s a single‑take performance, recorded using the tanpura, an Indian classical drone instrument, to create a meditative backdrop. As with Everyday Things, it offers an innovative take on Bach, using Indian raag and alap constructs to frame his interpretations.

Another recent album, Ballaké Sissoko and Derek Gripper, finds him working with the Malian kora master, further realizing the potential of his guitar-meets-kora proclivities. The LP was made during a spontaneous three-hour session, capturing seven original pieces infused with improvisation. It’s a cross-cultural reflection of the musicians’ shared interest in letting their muses guide them.

Across his recordings, performances, and public engagement, Gripper fearlessly offers his perspectives on social issues and injustices. His extensive travels have informed his viewpoint on shared humanity and diffusing the toxic influence of rhetoric that prioritizes profit, othering, and megalomania.

Innerviews met Gripper at Tea on Piedmont in Oakland, Calif. for a wide-ranging conversation about his current output, as well how he deals with the challenges artists face in the modern music industry.

Derek Gripper at Tea on Piedmont, Oakland, Calif., Summer 2025 | Photo: Anil Prasad

What does music mean to you during this complex era in which we’re living?

It's hard not to feel like it's a meaningless pursuit. I think for me personally, it's kind of a grounding in reality—at a very simple level. We're all following the news and trying to keep tabs on what's going on in this big horror realm that's outside our area of influence. And that's stressing out a lot of people. They want to do positive things, but at the same time they feel paralyzed because there's so much outside of their control. Sometimes I wonder if there’s even any use in knowing what's going on. You sometimes think you're just injuring yourself by exposing yourself to all of it. So, I feel like playing for an hour-and-a-half to people or playing by myself is a nice way back into present reality—a personal moment in time in the meditation-grounded mindfulness space. Beyond that, what it does to other people and what its greater effect is I have no idea, but I hope it’s a positive one.

Do you feel the concert realm remains one in which people leave their differences at the door?

No, because they don’t. I get a lot of emails after concerts. There’s a great tension at the moment amongst people who have seen things on social media I’ve posted or said at concerts. They’ll say the usual stuff like, “You should stick to music. Stay in your lane.” Their idea is “If I don’t agree with you, I’m going to put you down and make you feel small.”

My response to them is, “Please enlighten me as to what your profession is that allows you to have an opinion when I am not allowed to?” It’s an uncomfortable feeling, because as a musician, you’re most happy if people write and say, “I loved the concert and I listen to your music all the time. It’s deeply meaningful to me.” But if they start spewing hateful rhetoric straight afterwards, it’s really unpleasant and it makes you feel quite awful.

It makes me wonder about the ambiguity of music and how so many people can enjoy it as instrumental music, even if they hold unpleasant views. At least with Kneecap, you know what they think through their music and you’re not going to listen to it if you don’t agree. But with instrumental music, you can still project all sorts of shit onto it and have all sorts of people with awful beliefs listening to it.

What are your thoughts on Kneecap’s forthright approach to public engagement?

I wasn’t aware of their music before the British government made me aware of them by trying to censor them. They’ve been in hot water with the conservative flank for their pro-Palestine stance for quite some time.

I’ve seen their movie and understand they’re young, Irish, and unafraid to say what they think. I think it’s wonderful that young people at the beginning of a meteoric rise in their career are prepared to take such a risk. But this is their brand and who they are. It’s where they come from and it’s beautiful and wonderful to see.

For a long time, I think we’ve been concerned that musicians were just going to be chasing algorithms and playlists and be totally vapid. And that’s very much the case, but there continue to be notable exceptions like Kneecap.

The Gaza invasion is the first time I’ve watched a genocide on a screen I keep in my pocket. This is the first time I’ve been waking up in the morning looking at graphic images of children being killed. But this has been happening across the history of humanity. This feels like the Vietnam War happening all over again, except we are not getting black and white photos depicting it, but seeing it nonstop all the time in full color.

Some people say, “If we got rid of this evil person, everything’s going to improve." But I think it’s important to look at human tendencies. Naomi Klein made a very good point a year ago when she drew a connection between what Germany did in Namibia and then what unfolded during the shocking Holocaust era. That was the first time something like that occurred on European soil in our living memory. I thought that was an eye-opening observation to make.

I don’t know if it helps us to have this context or if it makes us feel even more powerless.

Lost Time and Everyday Things focus on Bach’s First and Second cello suites, respectively. Explore your interest in approaching and interpreting these works on guitar.

They reflect a way of coming to terms with my roots as a guitar player. I’m fascinated with the idea of opening your mind to something new and realizing that something you’re familiar with can actually be transformed into something else. I found it liberating to discover the way we’ve received Bach might be very far away from how he may have played his music or how others played it long ago. I love that.

So, I’ve explored Bach through different lenses, particularly through the phrasing of Toumani Diabaté, the great kora player. I’ve been approaching it through the shared musical languages of Malian musical and kora cultures. It’s very freeing as a classical musician to realize the liberty this enables. Making that connection has allowed me to chip away at my own lack of freedom in classical music, which is essentially the price I paid for coming up within that universe.

Photo: Simon Atwell

The making of Lost Time is a fascinating tale. Describe its beginnings and how you captured it.

I was practicing it with a tanpura, which I found a really interesting approach. We see Bach as the pinnacle of the diatonic system—the guy who figured out how the keys worked and broke away from the church style of intervallic composition. So, jazz musicians love Bach. And they love learning Bach because it teaches you how to use this diatonic system—how to get from C major to somewhere else.

When you practice Bach to a drone, you anchor it back in the original modal system and you realize that it says something different about the music. In our modern conception of Bach, you’re like, “Okay, cool, he went from C to G major.” But then you realize at the end of that phrase, he hit the C again. So, it’s like he changed the gravity of the situation and took you back to that home base.

If you have the drone, you’re experiencing that tension so much more intensely. When you ground it all in Indian classical music, it’s suddenly, “Whoa. Where are we? Ah, we’re back.” You experience a beautiful discourse that happens harmonically.

There’s something much more grounded, human, and simple about Bach’s cello suites, compared to the violin ones which have long fugues that are pretty heavy stuff. I feel the cello suites reflect a more mature, grounded version of Bach. They’re less neurotic than the violin pieces.

So, that was the beginning of the project. I was practicing the cello suites and capturing them on a reel-to-reel Nagra tape recorder. I previously recorded a live album on the Nagra titled Billy Goes to Durban. I loved that. It was great to get back to working with a device that didn’t send me emails or ask me to watch a YouTube video while I was trying to make music.

Using the Nagra also meant it was harder for me to erase and change things. When you press record on a digital system, it’s so easy to delete and start again. On tape, it’s really hard. You’ve got to stop, rewind, and tie the tape back on to start again. So, I found the process much more grounding.

I went off to a friend’s holiday house in the mountains. It’s a beautiful, very stark place, with no people. I spent three days recording the album onto tape, among beautiful frog and nature sounds. When I got home and listened back, I wasn’t particularly happy with the results. I’d had a lot of technical problems with the tape machine. It wasn’t aligning correctly. So, I re-recorded it using a nice preamp and two ribbon mics plugged into my computer.

Something similar happened for the recording of the second cello suite, which I did more recently. Once again, I came home and decided it didn’t work, so I re-recorded it in a studio in Cape Town called Milestone. But I made the recordings using the original sketches from tape in mind. We recorded it there in one take with the drone in the headphones. So, it took an hour to make, as opposed to three days crying over tape. But that also served as the preparation.

Last year, you also released Ballaké Sissoko and Derek Gripper, which you’ve described as a project reflecting both control and freedom. Tell me about that perspective.

The project started with my album One Night On Earth, which involved transcribing the music of Toumani Diabaté for acoustic guitar and creating scores that other people could play and interpret in many ways, as we have now done with Bach.

The question in my mind for that project is when you do that, what does that mean for how we think of kora music and musicians? We can always dismiss a flamenco musician, Indian musician, or kora player, from the point of view of classical music, as improvisors or folk musicians, in contrast with what are considered great composers such as Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven.

That’s how it started. I just wanted to play that music on guitar. But as soon as I did that, I realized the score disintegrates, because the music is so modular. You can put it in any order. You can also just roll the dice. You can take each musical phrase, write them onto 50 cards, and then throw them in the air, pick them up, and play them in that order and it would also work. You can’t do that with Bach. So, the nature of music in terms of the linearity of a score, is about something that begins and ends. But with this music, it’s a bit more like choosing your own adventure. After 10 years of performing this music, I got more and more into improvising within it, so it became a language.

With Ballaké, we’ve taken that to the next level, with the realization that this beautiful modular language has endless possibilities. We have a deck of cards each. Some of the cards are shared and some are not. But we’re able to have them talk to each other. So, working with him was a little bit less about improvisation and more about collective remembering, but something new would come out of the combination of pre-existing things. Now, that’s related to how improvisation works in most music, but that’s especially the case for Malian music.

I think it’s a myth that improvisation is genius that’s pulled out of the air and is something that has never been heard before. That’s not the case. I think it’s beautiful that we have shared elements we talk about and elements that are individual and complementary. It’s a conversation on a very deep and beautiful level in which memory is as important as originality.

Ballaké Sissoko and Derek Gripper | Photo: Gopoland Ledwaba

How did you first connect with Sissoko?

I first met him in a hotel lobby in Copenhagen, perhaps in 2012. We were playing at a festival together and I went up to him and played one of his pieces at breakfast. He just said, “Great, carry on.” Years later, I was working with his agent in France, and she invited him to join me at a concert I was playing in Paris. We improvised together during the last piece of the concert.

A month later, in December 2022, I was invited to join him at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, in London for a performance he was doing to celebrate 50 years of kora. Fifty years previously, Ballaké’s father, Djelimady Sissoko, had played kora at Number 10 Downing Street. He was instrumental in much of the kora’s global recognition at that time.

It was a beautiful evening of exploring the kora, Ballaké did a solo set as well, and then I did one, and then we all played together.

I’m not normally very savvy about being opportunistic about these kinds of meetings. I usually think, “Great, I got to meet him.” But my record label, Platoon, has a beautiful studio in London, very close to SOAS. So, I arranged for Ballaké to stay an extra day and then the next night we went into the studio. We improvised together for three hours. Six months later, I revisited that recording and it became the Ballaké Sissoko and Derek Gripper album.

Why is the intersection between guitar and kora so appealing to you?

I was looking for a way out. I was trained as a classical guitarist. I remember going to Germany to play a concert in the early 2000s. I was driving on the autobahn and listening to Egberto Gismonti. I was going to play Bach, Villa Lobos, and Takamitsu pieces to a classical guitar society.

As I was listening to this beautiful Gismonti recording, I was thinking, “Why am I playing this music? Is it because it’s the path of least resistance?”

It took me quite a while to find a way to transform the guitar into something that reflected what I was interested in and was listening to. Toumani Diabaté was a big part of discovering that was possible. His 1988 album Kaira showed the beauty of simplifying and using cyclical phrases more rooted in the Western Cape where I come from. It was the beginning of me evolving a minimalist or more cyclical guitar language.

There was still a part of me that wanted to be complicated as well—the side of me that likes to play Bach’s fugues. But when I heard Toumani, everything clicked. He combined complexity, improvisation, and freedom in a very grounded way. He also used wonderful phrasing and has an effortless virtuosity which you don’t hear on the classical guitar. With classical guitar, it’s so much more intentional and obvious.

During the process of listening to Toumani’s music, the first step was focusing on his phrasing, taking that back to Bach, and then writing music that felt like a combination of the two. I wasn’t sure I could play it on a guitar. I eventually got a kora. I spent six months with it and tried to imitate the masters. But I wasn’t proficient on it. I would break strings. I gave up on it and went back to guitar with my tail between my legs. It was a few years later that I cracked the code of how you could take a similar approach on guitar. And that was a great moment, because it brought together a whole lot of things for me that had previously been separate.

Photo: Simon Atwell

Let’s focus on Gismonti and how he served as another key inspiration for you to emancipate yourself from acoustic guitar norms.

When I first discovered Gismonti, I was playing with Alex van Heerden, who was a trumpeter and accordionist from the jazz scene in East London, South Africa. He went on to become part of the Cape Jazz scene of Cape Town and played with some of the greats. He was somebody who came out of a white Afrikaans upbringing and then white English upbringing, because his family shifted from speaking Afrikaans to speaking English, early in his life.

So, when he started playing jazz, he started asking, “What is Afrikaans music?” And then he realized that it was music that crossed the color barrier of apartheid-era South Africa, because Afrikaans is not only spoken by white people. He also realized the music that grows out of the language is on both sides of the divide. He engaged in a personal archaeology project to discover some of its connections. One of the people he discovered was Gismonti and he introduced me to his music.

Gismonti and Naná Vasconcelos represented an inspiring story for us as South Africans. Here they were, very steeped in all things Brazilian, and they created this music that was still Brazilian without excluding global elements. I lived with this mythology for a long time and the work I did with Alex reflected the idea that our music also must be from South Africa, even when it includes outside influences.

You went on to spend a lot of time with Gismonti. How did that friendship develop?

He’s a real character. I first met him in London somewhere around 2015-2016. He was playing at The Barbican with Ralph Towner as part of a double bill. I got hold of him beforehand and totally fanboyed him. I said, “Could I meet up with you?” And so, we had breakfast at his hotel the morning after the concert. I then played six or seven compositions for him. He was super-excited about the approach I was taking. He offered some great advice on what elements of the music to focus on and what to discard.

We’ve kept in touch ever since. I invited him to a festival I helped curate in Turkey sometime before the COVID-19 pandemic. We spent two weeks together on a beach there teaching for the festival. He did two beautiful concerts, one on guitar and one on piano. He also conducted some workshops with local students. It was fascinating to hear his stories. By that time, I was playing less of his music, but it was very nice to return to it in that context. I really find his work from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s very inspiring and wonderful.

You’re an avid photographer. Discuss the imagery and technology you focus on.

I’ve gotten into it a lot recently. Because I’ve done a lot of traveling, people would say, “You must get a camera.” This was before we had them on our phones. I’d respond, “What’s the point? There are millions of photos on the Internet. Why make more?” But I ended up getting into it through the technology of photography.

It started when I was 19. I was friends with the son of a South African photographer who knew another very famous South African photographer named David Goldblatt. He had a 1960s-era Leica camera. And I knew about the mythology of this device. So, the idea remained with me—carrying a beautifully-simple, well-made device that breaks the separation between the use of a thing and the thing you use it for. It’s the same reason I got into using the Nagra recorder for recording music.

Getting into photography through mid-century Leica cameras and teaching myself how to take photos was a really cool process. It was pure learning, involving a lot of trial and error. I spent a year 100% focused on that and learning how to print in a darkroom. I’d apply the same principles I’d learned in my guitar journey to photography, which were to take on something new and expand the possibilities.

I thought to myself, “I’m going to be a beginner. I’m going to work out how to take this activity and become a virtuoso on it.” And that built up slowly and has been a wonderful experience with many nights spent in the darkroom within this non-distracted, focused, creative experience. That’s something which is hard to find these days.

What I love about photography is the rapidity and singular nature of it. You have this one second in which you take a photo, and then you develop it, and there’s this picture. That’s it. There’s nothing more to it. It’s a really freeing and creative act that’s so beautiful. It doesn’t require you to spend seven months in a studio overdubbing 700 parts or writing for an orchestra. It’s just about a single moment in time.

I went on to use some of my photos for my album art, in collaboration with Toby Atwell, a wonderful designer who’s worked on more than half of my record covers. I also make prints of some of my photos and sell them at the merch stand and then give the proceeds to the Gift of the Givers foundation, which is one of the biggest humanitarian organizations on the African continent.

As you’re aware, the recorded physical object has been so degraded in value that I almost find myself apologizing for the format I present my music within. I can make a CD, but I feel embarrassed about that, because not many people have CD players anymore. Sometimes, people really want a CD because I’ll sign it, but they’ll also say, “I don’t know if I can listen to it. Maybe I can in my car.” So, there’s this object you put your heart, soul, and all your creative abilities into, and it’s not considered as valuable as it once was. But that’s not true for a photo. It’s something that still has relevance to people.

I also sell USB drives, but that’s not a great medium. It loses all the physicality and the artwork. So, I think a lot of the enjoyment I used to get out of making physical albums now goes into making photographs instead.

Photos: Derek Gripper

I understand your label Platoon has figured out a way to make streaming more financially beneficial for you. Provide some insight into how that works.

During the COVID-19 pandemic era, I started working with Platoon. They were able to playlist my music well. There was renewed excitement for me in recording albums because they supported me by giving me studio time and paid for design, and within a few months after release, I would actually make a significant amount of money at a time during which I couldn’t perform.

Now, there was discomfort in knowing that I was making money through the anonymity of playlist placement. And years later, we know what a black hole of horror playlist culture is and how terrible it has been for musicians. The only thing ahead for playlist culture is more dark horror.

I was happy to be recording again and making money through it, but I’m not inspired by the lack of focus on the artist. Bandcamp worked much better in that regard. Ten years ago, I’d release an album there and it would work. Loads of people paid to download my One Night on Earth album and I made enough money to create a physical edition. It was a real movement for me and many others.

Years before that, I’d burn CDs on my computer and use rubber stamps, and hand assemble them. It was great to make those, sell them, and have the money go directly into your pocket.

When people talk about the death of recorded music, what they’re talking about is the death of a music industry that made money by selling physical records. But for me as a South African, who didn’t have access to CD pressing plants, it meant the death of the cottage industry for my recording projects, which was a really wonderful period.

There’s something about making something that only goes up online digitally that feels kind of meaningless. There’s nothing to sign, to hold, and experience. I don’t even make liner notes for them. That totally kills the joy of making an album compared to 10-20 years ago.

What sort of money are you earning from playlist placements?

At its height, I might have had months making perhaps $5,000-$8,000 USD a month from playlists. It isn't like that anymore, but it got me through the years I couldn’t perform, with lockdowns. Now, it comes and goes in spikes, depending on if it’s new music or even where in the playlist you’re featured. Being towards the top of a playlist is more impactful than being further below in it. It’s all rather boring.

I have friends who are globally-known musicians who don’t make $8,000 in an entire year from streaming, much less a single month.

Yep. And I can tell you they have many more listeners on their Spotify than I do. Again, this goes back to the dark horror of playlist anonymity. If I show up on the “Classical Guitar Chill” playlist, a single track of mine might get 2 million streams. It’s horrific and yet fascinating. But that’s not my goal in life. I’m not making music thinking, “Is this piece going to work for ‘Classical Guitar Chill’?”

So, making that money from a playlist isn’t because I have that many fans that are listening to me.

Given the state of things, can you blame the people who make ambient music for going to sleep? You know, those “White Noise for Sleep” playlists? A lot of people are in a gold rush for that shit. And even that will go away, because AI is already making a lot of that music, today.

You have a unique approach when it comes to booking and promoting concerts. Describe the model.

In 2020, I had a tour booked for Australia, which got cancelled. A guy I’d met, Michael MacManus, who previously had me perform at a festival there, said, “Hey, instead, let’s organize some house concerts in Australia and you can still come.” I thought, “Cool, I’ll go on holiday to Australia and do that.” He got excited and then said, “Actually, let’s book some halls, instead.” So, we ended up doing a 16-city tour of Australia using social media to promote them. And it was a great tour. I played to bigger audiences than I had played in ages. By the end of the tour, I was at the top of my playing abilities. I was so excited about playing live. And it also made me consider a new way of making shows happen.

Given the type of musician I am, I felt it was important to connect with promoters who could help organize gigs, because the audiences would always come if the promoters were doing their jobs well. So, for a decade, I was working only through promoters, instead of actively building a direct listenership. Because of the way the music industry works now, having a large listenership, which in the world of solo guitar is more “large” than large, doesn’t mean you can make a concert happen. To book a concert, you typically need to rely on the promoter and their relationships.

But this stopped working well. I realized after 10 years playing in America, I could play shows, people would come, but they wouldn’t necessarily come to subsequent concerts. And that’s because different concert societies would be involved and an audience member perhaps wouldn’t be on that mailing list or be aware of the organization. So, they might quickly forget who you are because they haven’t been communicated with after attending your previous concert. America also has these rules about not playing a festival twice in a row or being barred from playing venues near other ones you’ve worked at for up to a year afterwards.

And COVID-19 hit, we had lockdown, and I didn’t perform again for two years. We did a lot of online events, like six hours of virtual concerts in a day across three time zones so cities like Melbourne, London, and New York could watch them live. That was fun and hundreds of people participated. I also felt that perhaps this was the future with people sitting at home watching livestreams. Thank God, that didn’t turn out to be the case. But it was still a great way to connect with a lot of people.

Eventually, I went back to the performing arts circuit after the pandemic. But I wasn’t even breaking even. I was getting low fees and barely making it work. If I was lucky, I’d come home with a total of $500. Michael MacManus, who is now my manager, came up with a great alternative idea, which was to book concert halls directly, and cut out everyone else. At the beginning, we both found halls, which was a lot of work, because you also have to do your own ticketing. But he set up the infrastructure for doing that.

This was all running on my own capital. We’d sell tickets directly and the money would come in every day and then that money would get reinvested in social media ads. The risk that was created was high. We’d get to three weeks since a concert was announced and we’d have spent thousands of dollars in ads. So, it became a crazy venture. But it allowed us to play concert halls that were always over 500 people. It’s a lot of money to invest and very complex work. And that’s before the tax nightmare. I quickly realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do for a living and handed it all over to Michael.

Michael started his own agency to do this work, and he’s been working with a lot of wonderful musicians, in addition to me. I’m now working in a hybrid mode in which I use my old agency and promoter network, together with the shows that Michael makes happen. It’s a very nice mix. And because of that, I’ve played more than 50 concerts in the US just this year, which I never would have been able to do in the past.

However, this is not a forever strategy. These things always have a shelf life. The noise online is always getting louder. Our results are less positive and more expensive than they were a few years ago. For instance, I recently did three weeks in Australia involving 10 concerts. I realized Mark Zuckerberg was making much more money than we were on those events. If I had to physically illustrate what was happening, I would be going to the concert hall, standing at the front, getting the ticket money in coins, putting it all in a sack, playing the concert, opening the sack and giving some of the money to the halls and people involved, and then closing up the sack, and driving it up to Zuckerberg’s house, and leaving the rest of the sack at his front door, and driving away with a little money in my wallet. That’s exactly what it would look like.

As much as performing is exciting and wonderful, this is entirely prostrating before these fucking oligarchs. I don’t know how we escape from that. Building a mailing list is now totally useless, because it gets spammed. Regular media is totally useless, because if somebody sees something in an online newspaper, they’ll then be distracted by an ad or clickbait before they have a chance to buy the ticket. So, there’s really no way to sell a ticket without putting an ad before people’s eyes that they can click and make a quick purchase from. Social media is the only way for that now. And the cost is exorbitant.

To sell 1,000 tickets, you can easily spend up to $30,000 on social ads. And if your campaign isn’t going well, you’ll be spending at least half of what you might earn—and a third if it’s going okay. So, Zuckerberg is making a lot of money off me. I’m performing the music, but he’s making all the money. It feels like a betrayal of people who are paying for tickets and it’s certainly a betrayal of my music.

Photo: Simon Atwell

Clearly, this approach is a double-edged sword.

It’s a great success depending on what you want. If you want to be a musician and reach people, it’s 100% a great success. But it’s a bitter success—like the playlist success. The real winners in these worlds aren’t the musicians or presenters. The real winners are Meta and Alphabet. So, that’s depressing. Those aren’t companies I want to support. I dislike having to be trapped in an economic reality I don’t believe in. But I kind of have to shut my eyes to it all and go, “You know, I want to play this music in front of people.”

What keeps you motivated as a creative entity today?

Good sound is a wonderful thing. I put a lot of work into solving the problem of how I can make a nylon string on a classical guitar sound incredible in a big space. That’s a really fun thing.

I spend a lot of time exploring everything from microphones to preamps to create the optimal physical analog version of what I’ve been doing digitally.

Recently, I’ve been using Neve preamps which add a beautiful warm saturation to the sound. I’ve also started using a modern remake of the Roland Space Echo by an Australian company called Echo Fix in a live context.

So, I’m trying to push what I can do live with a nylon-string guitar and it’s a pleasure to have the audience witness it and for us to enjoy that sensation together. Having this massive, rich sound reverberate through a hall is an example of a positive energy transfer. For 90 minutes, I’m locked into a very simple thing together with the audience and it’s pretty cool. Nobody seems to be on their phone much when I play, either. So that’s got to be good right? Even if they got there because of their phones.

Yes, I get negative about us giving all our money away to Zuckerberg. But I think any musician in the history of the music industry could say the same thing. Many people have sold millions of records for a major label and have had nothing to show for it. The music industry has always been sick and twisted.

The beauty remains those moments when someone is putting your record on and is immersed in it, as opposed to having it on as part of a playlist at the gym or for sleeping.

It’s the gigs that make me want to carry on. And I’ve started getting creative about those, too. I’ve started bringing some of my family on the road with me, so touring becomes an exploration of different cities and countries with them.

What's the most positive element? When I wake up in the morning with a concert ahead of me. Later that day, I’m thinking, “This is cool. It’s amazing I get to do this.”