Artist Feature | Donovan Raitt
What first drew you to music and songwriting?
So I’ll answer this question in two parts because I was drawn to music much earlier than I was drawn to songwriting. I started playing piano when I was 5, and I played for five years which gave me a really strong background in basic musicality including theory and skills and a general foundation. My piano lessons were every Friday after school with the same teacher that my mom took piano lessons with when she was my age, so my teacher at this point was probably in her early 90s and wasn’t afraid to go old-school with the ruler when I made a mistake. LOL. So anyway, after I decided that I had had enough piano, I made a deal with my parents that I would keep playing music but I could switch instruments. So at this point, I had discovered Pearl Jam’s album Ten which came out in 1992 right around the same time as Nirvana’s Never Mind, Metallica’s Black Album which were actually the first three records that I ever bought. I still love those records by the way. So, after hearing those albums and the incredible guitar playing on each of them, I decided that I wanted to try playing guitar, and so my parents got me a $40 left-handed guitar because I am left-handed, but I hated it and switch to a right-hand guitar because that felt more comfortable for me. Once I picked up the guitar I was hooked, learning every song I could possibly learn, and I haven’t put the guitar down since.
Growing up I always admired the idea of songwriting and the image of being a songwriter, and this was a great period of songwriting in my opinion. Kurt Cobain and all of the early 90s grunge artists still hold a very special place in my songwriting aesthetic, and I think even though I write mostly for solo guitar, a lot of the early 90s harmony and song structure can be heard if you listen carefully to a lot of my songs.
I actually didn’t start writing songs until High school when I started a heavy metal band with my friends, and I wrote some, let’s just say generic, metal songs, but I distinctly remember playing a battle of the bands show my junior year of high school and debuting a song that I had written and having the crowd really connect with it. Obviously, there was a very long solo section in it, and I got to show off what I thought at the time were my impressive guitar playing skills. That was particularly fun, but I finally felt like I could connect with people through writing music and that was right about when I discovered that I wanted to be a musician for the rest of my life.
While I was in college, a friend of mine who is a fantastic songwriter from Colorado named Owen Kortz encouraged me to start writing songs for solo guitar after I’d shown him a short little demo of a piece I had been working on for years and never really found the time to put lyrics to. I’ve never been a great lyric writer, or at least, I’m very self-conscious around writing lyrics, and I do much better if someone else brings in the lyrics and I work on the music around them.
It was around this time that I discovered solo acoustic fingerstyle guitar artists like Michael Hedges, who completely blew my mind on the possibilities of the acoustic guitar. This was when I really started pursuing writing music for instrumental fingerstyle guitar, as I felt like it was the perfect way to connect my guitar skills with my songwriting skills and be able to express myself through my guitar playing rather than through words or lyrics. It’s a lot harder to tell a story with no lyrics, but it also gives a listener complete freedom to interpret the song how they want to, which is what appealed to me so much about writing instrumental music.
If you had to choose one record, one band, and one book that has had the most influence on you as a musician and songwriter, what would they be?
As far as the record, it would have to be Andy McKees, Art of Motion which came out in 2005.
I was teaching guitar lessons and I had a student bring in one of Andy‘s songs to learn in the lesson, and although I had heard a lot of instrumental fingerstyle guitar before I hadn’t heard anything quite like Andy‘s record, and it’s still one of my all-time favorite records. It influenced me to pursue my own songwriting more deliberately and Andy’s style really connected with me on a deeper level than any other artist I had heard before. From start to finish it’s an absolutely fantastic record.
It’s hard to pick one band in particular. I guess I’ll have to say Pearl Jam since it was the first record I ever bought, and they’ve released consistently good music for the past 30 years. They always stay true to their ethos in terms of how they write music and what they stand for. I’ve always found them very authentic and very honorable for that. So I guess if I was in a band I would probably model it after them.
One of the most important books I’ve ever read was a book called The War of Art. Now don’t get it confused with The Art of War, it’s a very different and much shorter book. But The War of Art talks about how to deal with the negative voices that the book refers to as “resistance” that keeps you from realizing your creative process. Every time I hear a voice in my head that says this isn’t good enough or you can’t do this, I realize that it’s the resistance talking trying to keep me from my goals, and so reading this book really helped me to deal with a lot of those negative emotions, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone having difficulty with the creative process.
Tell us a bit about what your creative process looks like.
My creative process is Rather scatterbrained and disjointed, so I don’t know if I would necessarily recommend it to anyone. For me, my phone has become my single greatest songwriting tool because anytime I get an idea I can turn on the video camera and record it and archive it until I’m ready to come up with the next part. Sometimes I’ll come up with a great section for a song and then not know what to do with it so I just let it sit for a couple of months, and then, later on, I might hear something that might connect with it and then I’ll put the two together and see what happens.
As a solo acoustic fingerstyle guitarist, one of the ways I’ve been able to force creativity or at least encourage it is to experiment with alternate tunings on my guitar. Out of my three solo records, I think I’ve used the same tuning on two different songs, so each other song has a completely unique tuning. This poses a big challenge for me, first of all trying to come up with interesting things to say at shows while retuning my guitar, but putting my guitar in different tunings forces me to think purely with my ear and not with my hands or my head. There are sounds that I couldn’t get in standard tuning that I can get in alternate tunings, but I have to search for them. The instrument becomes completely foreign to me in terms of where the notes are and where to put my fingers to play them, so it forces me to think purely musically and not get into positions and patterns and ruts that guitar players often find themselves in. Most of my songs are written in small snippets of videos that are compiled together later on as I figure out where the song wants to go and how it wants to get there, so recording everything is incredibly important. Mostly so I can remember what tuning a song is in and how I played it so I can go back and teach myself how to play it after months and months of letting it sit on my hard drive.
As you’ve developed as a guitarist, from your early years playing, to now, how has your approach to playing changed and evolved?
I feel like the more that I’ve learned about the instrument and the more I’ve studied guitar, the less I think about the guitar and the more I think about music. I’ve gotten to the point now where I don’t think much about scales and modes and all the technical stuff because that’s something that I feel comfortable relying on and utilizing as a player at this point. As a guitar teacher it’s incredibly important to focus on technique, learn to read music, learn about music, and learn about it as much as you can, but what it comes down to in the long run is that all your technique is simply how you get an idea from your brain into your hands and into someone else’s ears through your instrument. If you can’t communicate effectively through your hands, then you can’t communicate effectively to someone else, so learning techniques and study in the guitar allows me to have a seamless connection between what I hear in my head and what someone else hears from my instrument. It’s the primary motivating factor for practicing my instrument. I look at playing the guitar like speaking a language, and I try to get more fluent in that language every day by learning new words or phrases or how to re-purpose something I already know in a new way. Going back to the language analogy, when I see a particular chord progression that requires me to improvise in a certain way or using a certain scale, I simply look at it as someone asking me a question and I’m trying to answer their question by staying in context and addressing the question in a way that’s relevant. So, in music, that means using the right notes over the right chord. However you wanna think about it, it’s simply communicating, and the better I am at communicating the more people understand me.
What advice would you give a young guitarist?
Find your voice. Find something that is unique about what you do that no one else can do. All the great guitar players were able to do this in one way or another which is why we remember them. Sometimes you come about that by studying others and combining different influences into something unique, or you come about it a different way, but there are hundreds of guitar players out there who can play just about anything better than I can, but I feel like I’ve developed something of a unique voice on the instrument that separates me from Other players in a way that makes me more marketable as a musician.
Tell us about what you are currently working on?
Right now I am finishing up the third year of a doctorate of musical arts and guitar performance at the University of Southern California Thorton School of Music, which I hope to have completed by the end of the year. Within that program, I am working on a series of solo guitar arrangements of various artists including an album and transcription set of Steely Dan songs arranged for solo fingerstyle guitar. I am also studying flamenco guitar which is by far the most challenging thing that I have ever tried to learn on the guitar, I’ve always looked for new challenges on the instrument and this has been, by far, the most challenging one yet simply because it’s a completely different rhythmic structure and language that a western music education doesn’t lend itself to necessarily. I also just released my last album a year ago, and I have started putting together some primary ideas for the next one, though that may be a few years away at this point