BARTEES STRANGE
Words Amit Sharma
Photo Julia Leiby
It’s hard to place your finger on what exactly makes American singer-songwriter Bartees Strange one of the more wildly eclectic guitar stars of the modern age. Perhaps it comes down to how he’s able to seamlessly shift his jangly overdriven tones through jazz, hip-hop and filmscore ideas, while also exploring more atmospheric approaches to the six-string, surprising the listener at every turn. As it turns out, a lot of that musical open-mindedness is something he absorbed from Omar Rodríguez-López – the mastermind behind the fretwork in At The Drive-In and The Mars Volta...