WHY A WHIRL OF ALTERNATE TUNINGS MIGHT BE THE SECRET SAUCE FOR THIS SELF-TAUGHT GEN Z GUITAR HERO
By Joe Matera
AFTER BEING HANDED a secondhand guitar from her dad when she was 17, British indie rocker beabadoobee (born Beatrice Laus) has been on an upward trajectory. “Coffee,” literally the first song she ever wrote, went viral and lifted Laus from bedroom strummer to Gen Z guitar hero. A succession of EPs soon followed, and her debut album, Fake It Flowers, appeared in 2020. Along the way, she’s racked up live performances at Coachella, Jimmy Kimmel Live, the 2020 Rising Star Session at Abbey Road and more.
Her sophomore effort, Beatopia, sees the 21-year-old Laus throwing out the rule book and delving into psychedelia, emo, fuzzy rock and pop. “I just felt like there were no more rules. I wanted to do everything I could,” she says. “We just wanted — depending on the song — to capture the vibe of what we were trying to create with the way the guitar sounded. So I explored a lot of weird, strange ways of recording the music.”
Much of Laus’ sonic palette is heavily infused with the spirit of Nineties grunge. “It’s part of my vocabulary,” she says. “It’s within my world and personality, and it almost threads its way into my music without me even realizing. It’s subconscious because I listened to so many bands from that era. Especially with Fake It Flowers, I was listening to a lot of My Bloody Valentine — and it just kind of happened.”
Teaching herself guitar from YouTube videos — with a playlist rich in My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth and Elliot Smith — led her to experiment with alternate tunings.
“We’ve been trying to limit the amount of guitar changes on stage — because I have too much,” she says. “But with some songs, yo
