It's hard to imagine Ty Segall without his trusty electric guitar, but on his latest LP First Taste, he attempts just that, relying on mandolins, a Greek bouzouki, and a Japanese koto, as well as keyboards, electric omnichord, and percussion, to communicate his ideas. “I just bought a bouzouki,” Segall tells Paste Magazine. “I was really into playing that, and I wrote a song on it and then I was like, ‘I wonder what other instruments I could find that could make a record without guitars.’ I was just listening to some of my older records and thought that I might’ve been falling into a formula a little bit. I just felt like I wanted to break out of that songwriting cycle.”
Since it's Ty Segall, the result is, well, very Ty Segall-esque, as you can hear on today's featured track "The Arms," a seeming ode to adolescence. “A lot of those songs are coming to terms with the world that I’m living in and also my whole life’s history of relationships with people, family, et cetera,” Segall continues to Paste Magazine. “In the middle of [making this] album, I changed my perspective of how I wanted to move forward with interacting with people from my past. So I think that was a heavy moment on the album. I couldn’t even really tell you when that happened, but there was a lot of mental changes of perspective.”
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