Jeff Lang
He Likes it Loud
by Pamela Murray Winters

On stage, Jeff Lang travels familiar territory: blues, Celtic tunes, covers of Tom Waits and Richard Thompson songs, as well as originals that evoke the same treachery and heartbreak. His music is dark, atmospheric, often delivered at dangerous speeds. But between songs, and offstage, he reveals himself to be a sunny character, with the boyish good looks of actor Giovanni Ribisi and an unpretentious attitude. This is a guy who, in the grand foyer of the stately Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, uttered the sentence: "If anyone out there is trying to tune a guitar made out of sardine cans, it actually helps to clench your buttocks." And then demonstrated.

The guitar's not really made of sardine cans, and he didn't get an endorsement from a tuna company to play it, as he sometimes jokes. All three of his most-often-used instruments were made in his native Australia: the lap guitar and the cutaway acoustic by David Churchill, and the steel guitar by Greg Beeton. "That one's made like the old tri-cone National guitars from the 1920s," Lang said. "That [guitar] really projects a long way. I picked up that guitar and twanged it just before our sound check, picked it up and played it in that long big hall at the Kennedy Center…You almost didn't need a PA for that guitar!"

Lang knows a thing or two about being loud. At his Kennedy Center show, a 70-something woman in the second row had her fingers in her ears by the second number. But she stayed through the whole set.

Lang laughed when he heard this story, then explained thoughtfully: "I have the idea that when you go to a show, because you're on your own, and you're with an acoustic guitar, there's a sort of automatic assumption that it's gonna be one quarter the volume of a band, and one quarter the power…Without a certain level that you can bring it up to, your dynamics are severely limited. I like being able to take it up there and bring it down to where you're just touching the guitar, barely touching it, and one can hear everything you're doing. 'Cause if you've got the sound level really quiet, you can't really play that softly. No one will hear it. You might hear it in your hands, just quietly on the stage, but it's not reaching anyone.

"Quite often, my problem with the sort of folk approach to acoustic guitar sound is that it's kept within a certain threshold. It doesn't go lower than a certain point, and it doesn't go any higher. Without that dynamics, a lot of what I do just doesn't live and breathe fully."

This is an excerpt from issue #92.
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