Parallel Worlds: Gretchen Menn Is Equally at Home Playing Dive Bars and Concert Halls

A conversation with the California-based guitarist-composer, plus a transcription of her literature-inspired composition “Hellward Swoon“

Several years ago—I think it was just before the pandemic—the guitarist-composer Gretchen Menn invited me to see her Led Zeppelin tribute band, Zepparella, play a small club on the coast south of San Francisco. I had grown unaccustomed to spending late nights in rock venues on account of fatherhood, and at first, I was too distracted by the increasingly drunken rowdiness of the crowd and its uncomfortable proximity to pay proper attention to the music.

But once I was able to focus, I appreciated the studiousness and curiosity with which Menn approached Jimmy Page’s iconic blues-rock riffs on her Gibson Les Paul, sometimes playing them with uncanny faithfulness, and other times making slight but reverential modifications, like interpreting parts of “The Lemon Song” with more of a swing feel than the relatively straight lines on the original studio recording. It was exciting, to say the least, to revisit the music I had found so riveting in my formative years and to hear it in new ways.

And it was not surprising that Menn had clearly spent so much time analyzing the Led Zeppelin canon and presented it in such a meticulous way, even in less than ideal circumstances. As an editor at Acoustic Guitar, I had worked on a series of lessons she had written for the magazine, as well as her book and video set The Way Music Works, and was always impressed by the clarity of her writing and her ability to clearly explain music in ways that make it understandable to guitarists with no previous knowledge of theory—something that can paradoxically be more difficult than illuminating more complex topics.

Menn’s most recent project was performing the premiere of composer Steven Mackey’s electric and nylon-string guitar concerto, Aluminum Flowers, with the Utah Symphony. I was curious to hear about how that went—and wanted to learn more about my occasional colleague and her music than our email interactions have allowed—so I visited Menn at the home studio on the San Francisco peninsula that she shares with her husband, guitarist-composer Daniele Gottardo. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.

What it was like growing up nearby in Palo Alto with your father, Don Menn, being the editor of Guitar Player? What impact did it have on your musical life and path?Maybe this is true of a lot of kids, but I was mostly just concerned about getting to hang out with my parents. And so what their actual jobs were was very fuzzy to me until I got older. I do remember that my dad worked at GPI Publications, which is what it was then called, and he had stationery that had the logo on it. I also remember some of his coworkers that we stayed really close with.

My parents were hippies; they just wanted me to grow up to be self-actualized, a person of integrity and self-sufficiency. Music was valued in my household, but it wasn’t pushed on us. My sister and I had piano lessons when we were little, and I don’t remember ever practicing.

In school, we had the option of taking lessons on different instruments. I chose the flute—and I still have the instrument somewhere—mostly because the music teacher who came to talk about all of the different instruments gave this whole scare story about how difficult the flute was, and I wanted to take on the challenge.

I played the flute for maybe two or three years, and then, when I fell in love with guitar as a teenager, my dad, who was no longer with Guitar Player, gently reminded me that he knew a thing or two about the instrument. And so when I was discovering Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, he would take me to see players he had gotten to interview while working at the magazine, like Steve Morse. I remember my dad taking me to Tower Records and recommending the antecedents to whatever I was into. He would say, “Okay, you’re listening to AC/DC and Aerosmith? You should know about Johnny Winter.” The bottom line was, once I expressed interest organically, I had a lot of great pointers in the right direction from my dad.

Did your father teach you anything specific about the instrument, or was he more of a general influence? My dad doesn’t really play guitar. He’s one of those annoying people who has an incredible ear and natural ability and can pick up any instrument. His passion has always been writing, and he was much more into teaching me about the history of music. On that same shopping trip at Tower, he pulled out this Django Reinhardt CD and said I needed to know who Django Reinhardt was. So we came home with a stack of CDs, including a Reinhardt album with the Hot Club of France featuring Stéphane Grappelli. It instantly became one of my favorites. I related to it more easily than, say, the Jeff Beck Group albums, which at the time sounded cheesy to me because of their production. For those of us whose ears were tuned to post–Mutt Lange production, it was harder to hear the charm of those records, but I can now.

So he didn’t really impact your development as a guitarist, at least not from a technical standpoint, but what about as a writer? Did you get into that work because of him, or more just as a means of explaining and teaching music? I come from a writerly family—both of my mom’s parents were writers, and my paternal grandfather was at the Kansas City Star for many years. Reading was a big thing for me growing up. I think I read my first Shakespeare play when I was in third or fourth grade, just because that’s what my parents put in front of me.

In college, even though I was a music major, I had some professors who were absolute sticklers for writing. I remember poring through The Elements of Style by Strunk and White multiple times, because one of my teachers said, “If I see anything in your writing that shows you didn’t read this, you’re going to be heavily penalized.” But even earlier, when I was in high school, my dad had me look at his writing, and that gave me the opportunity to fine-tune copy and learn about the editorial process.

So probably some of the writing is in my blood, but I don’t think I take the same pleasure in it that my dad does. He’s a true writer; he sculpts with words. I’m just trying to get my point across, and it sometimes feels effortful.

Like many guitarists, you started out steeped in rock. When did the classical guitar enter the picture? I got serious about it when I was in college at Smith. The school didn’t have a jazz program; it was classical guitar or nothing. I heard that all students of Phillip de Fremery—who still teaches at the five colleges in the area—developed perfect technique, so I was like, “Sign me up!”

Like our parents, our teachers are so important. They can really make or break your love of and desire to continue the subject. And I give Phil so much credit for the fact that that I continued.

How so? He was really selfless. A lot of guitar teachers play the entire time, trying to show you how good they are, and then give you a printout of some scale shapes. Phil was so completely focused on his students—and on verbalizing what he was hoping for them to figure out—that he wouldn’t take the easy route of just demonstrating. I think he only ever played anything if I asked him to. His guitar stayed in the case almost the entire time I studied with him.

And he was really good at fostering patience, which doesn’t come naturally for me. He wouldn’t just hand me a piece and say, “Learn this for next week.” Instead, he would say, “Learn the first four bars and make sure that the tone of each note of the arpeggio and between each of your right-hand fingers is really balanced.” We would spend 15 minutes in the lesson going back and forth between two fingers, so I could really find the balance: Do I need to use a quicker finger attack on this note to compensate for the thinner string? He forced me to see the joy and the benefits of going so slowly and listening more deeply than I would have on my own.

You once told me that after college, you became a pilot, and I was surprised to hear that. How do you think that learning to fly a commercial aircraft—and being responsible for the lives of so many passengers—shaped the way you would approach music as a professional? There are times that I’m definitely conscious of bringing back pilot-training stuff. Most recently—and very consciously—I was playing a new Steven Mackey concerto, Aluminum Flowers, with the Utah Symphony. The music mandated a number of different pedals with different settings, and I had to make a lot of changes for every movement, and sometimes within movements.

The delay settings were integral, and if any of the settings got accidentally changed, then the movement could be ruined. So I really got into pilot-training mode by having checklists for everything, pointing to or touching every setting, confirming that a delay was set to 140 b.p.m, and things like that.

Also, I think being a pilot bolstered my natural tendency to be an organized person and gave me a clear framework for that. It has definitely helped with music. There are so many different moving pieces, from travel logistics to managing the amount of material you need to keep in your brain. Whether it’s emergency procedures that you drill on for an engine failure or what happens if you break a string, the idea is that you’ve gone through everything that can happen and you have a plan. 

Menn plays Steven Mackey’s guitar concerto with the Utah Symphony. Photo by Seth Ian Mower