Scott Holiday has a black hole where his memory should be. All the Rival Sons guitarist remembers was cycling home just after midnight, on a souped-up electric bike but not doing “anything crazy”, when he hit a car coming out of a parking lot and bang!
He woke up in hospital and in a whole world of hurt.
“I broke six ribs on this side, and three of them were broken on both sides, so I had floating ribs,” he says. “They had to put titanium plates on those. The pain from that was just insane.”
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The following weeks of his life were to be spent sitting at a 45-degree angle, in various degrees of agony, and trying not to laugh.
“Dude, this was a real thing! I love to laugh. We love to laugh. I literally had to turn off movies,” he says. “I couldn’t watch anything like The Office. I couldn’t look at memes from my kids. Then the idea that I can’t laugh just sends you into a thing, like you’re trying to hold it back so you start laughing more. I’m like, ‘I can feel things tearing!’”
That was bad. But it’s the memory loss that worries Holiday the most. It worries him still. He’s used to being on-point, setting the agenda for Rival Sons, being a dad, being in command of his faculties, taking responsibility, and all that grown-up stuff. But his head hit the ground and he was out cold, and your guess is as good as his as to what happened in those moments after impact.
“It is a little bit of a blank spot, which is by far the most uncomfortable thing of the whole accident,” he says. “To not be able to be in control of that blank moment is difficult for me. It’s just like, ‘Oh, wow! What happened there!?”
What was happening at the time was Holiday’s solo album. It was happening, and he was some way through writing it when the accident occurred. It left him with plenty of time to think about it as he recuperated, with nothing but his thoughts to keep him occupied.
Weirdly – foolishly? – for a man with broken ribs, he decided that he was going to sing on the record. When it came time to finish up writing and recording it he let it all pour out, like “releasing a valve”.
Topology, which Holiday has released under the name HOl1D4Y, will strike some Rival Sons as a strange trip. It’s a heady, spaced out record, hard to age, and it makes perfect sense when Holiday tells us that a lot of the ideas for it came to him in a dream.
“I have a guitar next to my bed, and I’ll play it into my phone. ‘Okay, there it is. That’s it. Now I have it.’ I’m kind of half-awake, half-asleep,” he says.
Constellations was a track that came together like this, Holiday’s note choices more guided by dream logic than music theory. Automatic writing carries with it no small measure of risk. It can all fall apart. It’s a little like fishing for good ideas with no expectation that you’ll find one. And yet, if you can commit to it then it can yield some remarkable results, giving recorded music the unpredictability of improvised composition.
“I have guitars and instruments around me, and keyboards, synthesizers, and I have my drums in here,” says Holiday. “I’m just grabbing things and kind of like, ‘This is what I need, an eight-bar section.’ I made it very automatic writing, and very quick like that, because I find when music is written this way, it is exciting. It’s exciting when I can write quickly and off-the-cuff. I feel like people end up having to be hanging on in the song in the same way.”
Holiday chose three electric guitars that could handle all the tones he was looking for. He had his 1961 Gibson ES-345, a 1965 Firebird with a Platypus headstock, and a 1966 Gibson ES-330, and played them through a bunch of small Supro tube amps.
“I used this beautiful Martin OM-42 that I’ve been using a lot with Rival Sons, too, and it’s like a 000 body size, and really, really, really beautiful sounding,” he says. “And I have a 12-string that I use for Constellations, the big Guild [acoustic].”
I know this isn’t everyone’s favorite thing to hear, but man, nowadays, the stuff that UA’s doing… Their amp modeling is really beautiful
One of the themes in Topology is how about how humankind is wrestling with technology, and what AI means for our flesh-and-blood selves. Are we writing ourselves out of existence? Or usefulness? That would be bad enough. Holiday, sounds bullish on all this, argues that it’ll all make us the best version of ourselves, and that if we are making an all-new species that wants its own autonomy then so be it – “I feel like we’re going to have to just accept that full Blade-Runner style”.
With that in mind we shouldn’t be so surprised that he’s embraced guitar’s digital transformation and used Universal Audio’s suite of amp modelling plugins to record direct and complement what he had coming out of those little 1×8 combos.
“I know this isn’t everyone’s favorite thing to hear, but man, nowadays, the stuff that UA’s doing… Their amp modeling is really beautiful,” he insists.
There are all kinds of strange sounds and textures on Topology, with Holiday reversing fuzz guitars through Holotropic, all skronky and squirrelly and drowned in reverb. Equanamity calls to mind the Apocalypse Now soundtrack, all that up-river synth squelch, while Love Of Separation plays out like a little study on acoustic guitar.
“I’m playing a lot of rock and roll on the road, so when I come home, it’s a lot of bebop, it’s a lot of jazz, it’s a lot of freak-out, textural, experimental music,” says Holiday. “With a song like Constellations – or any of these – these are just the textural colours that I’m thinking of, and the places I am on the guitar, or the synthesizer, or whatever. This is just what’s there for me, and it’s not too premeditated.”
There’s something about the healing process that awakens the creative impulse. Maybe it has something to do with your body putting itself back together again, the mind follows, or that something gets jogged loose in the tumult. “It made me think about everything else, all this very metaphysical stuff while I was lying still,” says Holiday.
Or maybe you’ve just got to lie still to give the mind permission to roam, and when the mind cuts loose, it’d be a fool to stop it from wandering, not when you’ve got a record to write, broken ribs or no broken ribs.
- Topology is out now via Sacred Tongue Records.
