Leo Kottke
Leo Kottke
Leo Kottkeis an acoustic guitarist. He is known for a fingerpicking style that draws on blues, jazz, and folk music, and for syncopated, polyphonic melodies. He overcame a series of personal obstacles, including partial loss of hearing and a nearly career-ending bout with tendon damage in his right hand to emerge as a widely recognized master of his instrument. He currently resides in the Minneapolis area with his family...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionGuitarist
Date of Birth11 September 1945
CityAthens, GA
CountryUnited States of America
We spent a lot of time on that record with the sound and recorded it on the Paramount sound stage which is this huge room where the sound is reflected but the reflection is so late and comes from so far away that it doesn't blur the music but gives you a room nonetheless.
Sometimes you see that place dimly, and you work on whatever you're working on to see it better. I really can just go running around in it when Mike and I are playing.
That was when I found out that you could talk to them and it was a whole other way to blow your stack, and it's so much fun to perform that you want to do it again and the more you get out of it the better.
It depends on the time of the year and who I've been talking to, I try to put people in the studio I like.
We had a day off here yesterday and I just sat in my room and played.
We really don't talk much about how this is or why it works for us. We'll just start playing. ... It's more like a dream that's coming forward.
There are nights when you can feel stale because you've fallen into a pattern by touring too much, but it's easy to get out of it by deliberately getting in trouble and playing yourself into a corner to then see if you can get out of it.
I will literally open my mouth not knowing what is coming out.
Yes and for two reasons: one, I couldn't find anything to imitate at the time, and secondly because what I heard on the radio didn't bear any resemblance to what I wanted to hear on the guitar.
It was a kind of paralysis you would get from tendonitis and I would last about five to ten minutes into the set and it would set in and I really couldn't play.
I'm not subject to their rise and fall because I'm not accepted by them, so I have my own little curve going on. A lot of it is because of how much I play, I think I connect like when all you had was Vaudeville, I think I have an audience by performing a lot!
I was two and a half and my folks would put it on the record player and I would run around the house screaming, but I haven't been that hip since.
Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is not to try too hard.
It was almost two years after I left Capital that I put out the first one on Chrysalis and that was really instructive because it was no better in particular than any other record I'd done.