THE A PERFECT CIRCLE GUITARIST UNVEILS HIS SOLO DEBUT, WHAT NORMAL WAS, WHICH TAKES HIS SYNTH ROCK AND SHOEGAZE INFLUENCES TO NEW LIMITS
By Amit Sharma
WHEN GUITAR WORLD puts it to Billy Howerdel that his lead lines tend to be single-note ideas — sometimes with the added depth of a lower or higher octave — he agrees wholeheartedly. Caked in reverb and delay, it’s more of a textural approach than anything too chordal, at times tricking the listener into thinking they’re hearing something else entirely.
“What I’m going for is a swarm of many bees,” says the A Perfect Circle mastermind with a laugh. “And yeah, I guess I’m trying to fool people and make them question whether it’s a guitar or synth. As much as I love rock, especially Led Zeppelin and the first two Ozzy Osbourne albums, when I started listening to Cocteau Twins and Siouxsie and the Banshees, I became more interested in soundscapes.”
The British dream pop bands of the Eighties, he notes, seemed to “take more chances” and “go down different lanes,” and while APC have stuck with a hybrid of both styles, this newest release falls more into the latter camp. “I was a late bloomer and picked up the guitar when I was 16; I actually really wanted a keyboard but they were more expensive,” he says. “This is the album I didn’t know how to make and didn’t have the money to make as a kid.”
The What Normal Was solo debut he speaks of certainly has more of an electronic feel than Howerdel’s releases of the past. But what hasn’t changed is his rig, the guitarist simply finding no reason to deviate from the tools that have served him well thus far. There’s the Gibson Custom Classic given to him by Trent Reznor in the mid Nineties, his Dave Friedman-modded 1978 Marshall Super Lead, the Gibson Goldtone he describes as a “pirate sound” — and that prized Experience octave fuzz by Prescription Electronics.
“The Marshall mod was mainly to do with the power tubes and biasing,” Howerdel says. “It’s a fast amp that reacts instantly, which there are pros and cons to... It has a different sound to your typical softly overdriven Plexi head. I found this 60-watt Naylor combo and loved it, so I showed Dave Friedman and he modded the Marshall to sound like that. I don’t even know if they still make those Experience pedals, but they’re hand-painted in different colors and sound great. I enjoy using the Fractal octaver too, rolling the volume down with th
