More than sixty years into his storied career as one of the modern era’s most accomplished and versatile guitarists, Tommy Emmanuel is still hungry for adventure.
“I feel like the Indiana Jones of the guitar world,” says the globe-trotting fingerpicker. “I’m on this wild journey, just making it up as I go, and I’m thrilled that so many people are having fun joining along with me.”
It should come as little surprise,then, that Emmanuel’s extraordinary new album, Living in the Light, is easily the most daring—and most rewarding—collection in the Grammy-winner’s remarkable catalog. Recorded and mixed in just four days with producer Vance Powell (Jack White, Chris Stapleton, Phish), the album radiates the kind of raw, electrifying energy that can only come from an artist operating in complete and total surrender to the moment. Emmanuel captured most of the performances here in one or two takes, and the sense of joy and wonder in these sonic explorations is more than just palpable; it’s intoxicating. While many of the recordings are solo instrumentals, Emmanuel lends his voice to several of the album’s tracks, as well, grounding his dazzling, percussive fretwork with a poignant dose of warmth and vulnerability. The result is a record as exhilarating as it is intimate, a virtuosic blend of acoustic pop, jazz, classical, and roots music delivered by a master craftsman with a penchant for living on the edge.
“I think people are going to get a rush from this album,” Emmanuel reflects. “There’s a certain mojo to it. I just tried to let my instincts lead me and hang on for dear life.”
Emmanuel’s been following those instincts since the age of six, when he first began touring his native Australia as part of a family band. In his teenage years, he turned heads as a highly sought after session player and sideman, and by his early twenties, Emmanuel was playing on chart-topping hits and performing with some of the biggest names in Australian music, including Air Supply and Men at Work. Inspired in part by his hero, Chet Atkins (who would later become a friend, mentor, and collaborator), Emmanuel stepped out on his own as a solo artist in 1979, releasing the first in a string of critically and commercially acclaimed instrumental albums that would make him an unlikely celebrity in his home country and beyond. In the decades that followed, he would go on to headline everywhere from the Sydney Opera House to Carnegie Hall; tour with the likes of Eric Clapton and John Denver; win a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement; perform for a televised audience of more than two billion at the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics; and collaborate with everyone from Les Paul and Mark Knopfler to Joe Walsh and Richard Thompson. NPR’s World Café declared him “one of the best acoustic guitarists in the world,” while the New York Times hailed him as a “prodigy,” and Atkins crowned him with the title of Certified Guitar Player (an honorary only ever bestowed upon four other artists).
“I never felt like I needed to prove anything,” Emmanuel muses. “I’m always trying to get better, of course, but all I’ve ever cared about is entertaining people. If the ideas are flowing and the audience is having a good time, that means more to me than any awards or reviews ever could.”
Rather than rest on his considerable laurels, Emmanuel continued to push himself throughout his career, relocating permanently to Nashville in the early 2000s and collaborating with a rising generation of guitarists like Jason Isbell, Molly Tuttle, and Billy Strings on his latest studio albums, Accomplice One and Accomplice Two.
“Those albums were a real labor of love,” Emmanuel explains, “and I was thrilled with how they came out. But I felt a strong desire to focus on my writing again after that, and I found that the songs for Living in the Light just started pouring out of me.”
“I wasn’t chasing perfection with this album,” he explains. “I was chasing honesty. I wanted it to feel like you were right there in the room with me, so I’d play each song once or twice and that was it.”
“There are elements of rockabilly, blues, even traditional African music all woven into the music,” Emmanuel explains. “I’m a world traveler, and I’ve absorbed so much music along the way. It all gets synthesized through a kind of osmosis into my psyche and my soul and then comes out in my own unique style.”
“As I get older, I find myself taking a lot more risks, and having a lot more fun in the process,” says Emmanuel, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday. “When young people come to my shows and have this awakening that it’s okay to be different, that the possibilities of music and self-expression are limitless, that’s what it’s all about for me.”
For Tommy Emmanuel, there’s adventure in every note.
