Liona Boyd
L’Enfant
Sorceress
Labyrinth
Persona
Liona Boyd’s wikipedia page says that she is “often called the first lady of the guitar” with a big fat [citation needed] next to it because it’s probably not true. She has an album called First Lady of the Guitar, but using an album title to designate yourself a grandiose moniker is like trying to give yourself your own nickname the first day of junior high; it’s just kind of sad. If I was forced to designate someone as “first lady of the guitar” I guess I would probably choose Bonnie Raitt? I don’t know, the title itself is kind of demeaning, doesn’t it mean that the woman is married to her guitar? Am I overthinking this? Probably, I got a lot of free time, after all.
So who the hell is Liona Boyd and why the hell am I sharing her music? These are valid questions. Liona Boyd is a guitarist (duh) with a lengthy career that goes back to the 1970s with over 20 albums. She’s not a shredder or anything like that, she’s a classically trained guitarist who specializes in acoustic music. She primarily performs classical music, with some excursions into other, equally mellow genres. She has a lot of Christmas albums, which makes sense.
I don’t know anything about her career. I’m very sorry for all of the die-hard Liona Boyd fans out there. The songs I’m featuring by her tonight are from her 1986 album Persona. And to be perfectly honest, I’m not featuring said songs because of Boyd herself, but because of who joins her on said songs.
The tracks “L’Enfant,” “Sorceress” and “Persona” all feature guitar by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, while “Labyrinth” includes electric guitar by one Eric Clapton. The entire album is full of guest appearances, actually. Yo-Yo Ma pops up at one point, and nearly all of the album features work by composer Michael Kamen (Lethal Weapon, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Dead Zone), performing various other instruments. He also arranged the entire album. I have to imagine that the guest spots by the two superstar guitarists were the work of Michael Kamen as well. He had worked with Clapton on the Lethal Weapon movies, and he’s worked with Gilmour quite often.
I typically can’t pick out instrumentalists just by hearing them, but I was able to guess pretty well which tracks Clapton and Gilmour played on this album without even seeing the liner notes beforehand. Sure, it helped that they’re both playing electric guitar on an album that is largely dominated by acoustic guitar, but I think that nearly everyone with even just a passing interest or knowledge in Clapton would be able to instantly recognize his style on “Labyrinth.” The obvious blues influence, the sustain, even the pacing of the notes, it all screams Clapton.
Gilmour is a bit harder to spot on a few of his tracks. I hear hints of him on “L’Enfant,” but the only reason I think he’s playing anything on “Sorceress” is because the liner notes tell me so. However, about two minutes and twenty seconds into “Persona,” an electric guitar solo kicks in that sounds like it was taken from outtakes of the “Comfortably Numb” sessions, it’s that recognizable at Gilmour’s work. It’s always hard for me to define what makes a Gilmour solo sound like David Gilmour, I guess I just know it when I hear it, like on the absolutely stellar “Pink and Velvet” by Berlin, which features one of Gilmour’s best solos of all-time. Listening to that track for the first time, I could tell instantaneously that it was Gilmour kicking out that solo. That album also features a shockingly good guest solo by Ted Nugent too. Weird record.
Again, hope everyone out there is staying as safe and as sane as humanely possible. Do whatever it takes not to go crazy. I’m trying my best and losing, so if you got any pro-tips in that area why don’t you pass them along.