The challenge of writing a monthly guitar magazine column called “Back to Basics” for 12 years or so often led to some, er, imaginative takes on the subject. Topics would suggest themselves, and I would often stretch, or shoehorn the concepts into the “basics” format – with varying degrees of success. As I often wrote in the columns, THE LOVE OF GUITAR is basically about music – the marriage of the physical, the
intellectual, the spiritual, and the emotional. Aesthetics, psychology, philosophy: these kinds of things are fundamental to the artistic process, but at the same time they’re open-ended, infinite, metaphysical, often ineffable and practically intangible.
Here in Book Four, I’ve attempted to pull together the chapters that seemed to offer the most leading questions and pointed towards some of those open portals of the soul and the imagination. Whatever you’re searching for, I hope you find your way to it. Even if you don’t, I’ll still wish you happy hunting.
