Singer and guitarist St. Vincent sat down with the Broken Records podcast and revealed that Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready gifted her one of his signature guitars.
“Mike McCready, who is a friend and a lovely human being, gave me one of his signature Strats,” she said during the chat, and admitted that she had never played a Strat before. “I’ve never played a strat before not because I don’t like Strats. Strats are cool. I’ve never played a Strat because every time I pick up a Strat, I play Jimi Hendrix poorly.”
“A Strat has so much history I don’t know how to approach. A strat. But Mike gave me one and it was great. And it was, ‘Now I get why people love Strats.’ So I did play it on the ‘All Born Screaming.’ I played it on the end of ‘Broken Man,’ that’s a Strat,” she added.
While talking about her album ‘All Born Screaming,’ in another interview, the singer also spoke about her decision to play a Strat in the album.
“I never ever would have picked up the Strat if Mike hadn’t given me the guitar,” she admitted during the chat with Guitar.
The rocker also said she had always avoided Leo Fender’s most famous electric guitar because playing it came with the ‘cultural baggage’ tied to artists like Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. “They’re some of the greatest guitar players of all time, of course, but there’s history to Strats,” she said. “And there’s also a history of people trying to play like Jimi Hendrix and sucking,” she added.
St. Vincent released ‘All Born Screaming’ in April last year — it’s her seventh studio album.
