Cameron Knowler

At at a time when British popular music has steered away from the guitar, I've found a guitar purist who is fully committed to the instrument.

Cameron Knowler is touring the UK and Ireland this week with his instrumental guitar set so there is no better time to have a listen and possibly grab a ticket here.

A friend recommended him to me and I am really glad they did. Cameron offers something different, and his recent album CRK arrives at the perfect moment to help us calm down and cool off in the hottest summer for half a century.

Cameron Knowler’s main focus is the guitar, and typically an acoustic guitar, and making the guitar the star of the show. As well as playing his own instrumental music, he plays as a sideman based out of Nashville, although he spends a lot of time over in LA too.

His journey is as fascinating as it is unusual. Cameron grew up in a desert town in Arizona, famous for growing nearly all the lettuces in the whole of the USA (I know!) and a high school that used to be a prison. It sounds like the perfect starting point for a road movie, or possibly a horror movie.

One of Cameron’s key inspirations was Norman Blake, a legend in roots and folk music. Cameron also teaches and talks eloquently about the guitar in various podcasts and YouTube videos. It feels like the guitar is the anchor for his musical life but he is also a keen student of its history and future.

“Pure musical expression pulling from over a hundred years of American folk history but still feels unburdened by the past and looks sharply towards the future of what the guitar can be. Everything you want from an instrumental guitar record is all here.”
– Hayden Pedigo

As regular readers of the Vibes will be aware, I tend to focus on the lyrics and the story behind a song. Without a song to write about, I have found the writing process to be more lateral and pleasurably challenging. Can an instrument tell as good a story as a poem or song lyric? I argue that yes, it can. Knowing about Cameron’s desert upbringing and watching his tutorial on George Riley Puckett, another legend, helps me understand his approach.

One problem I have always had with punchy songs, especially with drums and electric guitars, is that they can sometimes be a little too engaging. It surely isn’t healthy to blast Born in the USA out of a convertible car stereo in July, fun though it might sound. There’s no way you can keep below the speed limit.

So often, especially when driving at night, I will turn to BBC Radio 3. It might not be very famous in Tennessee but it provides a mix of more mindful music from the old classic orchestras to roots and folk music, but it’s nearly always instrumental.

At college, one of my room mates was an avid fan of John Williams. My friend was a pretty solid guitarist in his own right and went to every John Williams concert he could find. If you are thinking, as we all did, that it’s the guy who wrote the music for Jaws and ET you would be entirely wrong. It didn’t appeal to me back then, but it really does now in our overloaded, over-stimulated black mirror world.

There’s something extra special about guitars. The best ones are handmade, a process I learned a lot about last year when covering Regina Ferguson and Emmanuelle Pickett’s documentary about the making of Regina’s Ren Ferguson guitar called Lucky. I found out that a guitar maker is a luthier.

The guitar was the one instrument we all wanted to play when we were teenagers, and there is still something magical about it. It is an inherently analogue instrument in a digital world. You can’t get an AI robot to play one, unlike the keyboard or synth. It is heartening and inspirational to find, in Cameron Knowler, a Gen Z artist so committed to the future (and the history) of the guitar. It is the absolute antithesis and antidote to all the claptrap we are forced to listen to about doing things the artificial way.

Cameron is clearly a gifted guitarist and I’ve really enjoyed playing his music over the last week or so. If you’re quick there is still time to catch his UK and Ireland tour this week!

Cameron Knowler is also a prose writer. His writing can be found at Acoustic Guitar Magazine and Fretboard Journal. Click HERE for an in-depth interview with Cameron on the Fretboard Journal podcast. His instrumental music can be found on Bandcamp.