Sam Palladio was a guitar player before he became famous around the world for playing aspiring songwriter Gunnar Scott in the hit TV show Nashville in 2012. Spending years living and working in the Music City however, would provide a priceless musical education for the young British actor and musician
To find his true artistic voice, he had to take what Nashville had given him and come home. He returned with a much better guitar collection than he'd had before he left, the pick of which are a pair of customised Gibson acoustic guitars that he got while on the show. One of them would be the vehicle to write his debut album, The Perfect Summer's Day, Before We Lost the Light, which is dedicated to his late mother.
Sam takes us through the stories of these two unique instruments, and the lessons and experiences he's learned through being on Nashville and beyond ā including where NOT to get Elton John to sign your guitar.
Sam's album is out now, check it out here: https://found.ee/sp_tpsdbwltl
To find his true artistic voice, he had to take what Nashville had given him and come home. He returned with a much better guitar collection than he'd had before he left, the pick of which are a pair of customised Gibson acoustic guitars that he got while on the show. One of them would be the vehicle to write his debut album, The Perfect Summer's Day, Before We Lost the Light, which is dedicated to his late mother.
Sam takes us through the stories of these two unique instruments, and the lessons and experiences he's learned through being on Nashville and beyond ā including where NOT to get Elton John to sign your guitar.
Sam's album is out now, check it out here: https://found.ee/sp_tpsdbwltl
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MusicTranscript
00:00Hey, I'm Sam Palladio, and this is My Guitars and Me.
00:21There was always instruments and always music in the house, and it all came from my dad.
00:24My mum, great music taste, you know, couldn't sing a note, bless her.
00:28But dad was always, yeah, guiding me, guiding me down the road.
00:36So this is the CF-100E.
00:38When they were manufactured, it was one of the first sort of electro-acoustics, really.
00:43There was a really cool old vintage one that we'd used on Nashville,
00:47and our props master, Danny Rowe, had gone out into town to like,
00:50see if there's any of these kicking around, because they're kind of rare.
00:53And he found, at Gibson, this, which was number 100 of a 100 run.
00:58And so, yeah, this just became my guitar for a long, long time.
01:06Because I loved the small body, I think it was based originally on an LG-2, that kind of shape.
01:13And I sort of fell in love with it.
01:14I just fell in love with the look and the curves.
01:16And obviously, I'll talk about the slight changes I made, but,
01:20you know, it has the rock and roll look that's pretty unique.
01:25I'm not a lead guitar player.
01:26Like, I would love to be.
01:27I'm sitting in this room of electrics, and I wish I could shred.
01:30But I think I did write this song called Wet Me Up in Nashville on this thing.
01:34Just kind of like a little moment like this.
01:37And this was like Colin Linden teaching me the sort of finger-picking style that,
01:44you know, which I'd never been able to do before.
01:47And never thought, never knew how to do.
01:51It's learning those little tweaks and those little...
02:00Anyway, a dear friend, Chris Plank, who is Casey Musgraves' guitar tech,
02:05and he has been for years.
02:06I'd said to Chris a couple of years ago, you know,
02:08I'm about to start working on this record,
02:10and I'd love to have a couple of, like, your beautiful faceplates, scratchplates.
02:15What could we do?
02:16So I had a series of three guitars,
02:17and we came up with this idea of the diagonal scratchplate.
02:22So you'll see on the next guitar as well, it's got the identical angle.
02:26It's got two outputs.
02:29So the original was this, I believe, P90,
02:34which gives the guitar a bit more of an electric sort of sound.
02:39So that actually you can have one guitar with sort of two outputs if you want.
02:44So you can have this into your pedalboard and play it like an electric,
02:47which can rip it.
02:49And then you just, you know, switch over,
02:51and you're in here with your much warmer, acoustic, more traditional sound.
02:54So it's quite versatile in that way.
02:57There was a season in Nashville, it was season four,
02:59and I got to sing with Elton John.
03:03So that was kind of one of the best days ever on set, as you can imagine.
03:07And I did get him to sign this afterwards.
03:09So I realized that I just sweat, my pit sweat just goes here.
03:13I should have put it on the front or something,
03:14but I don't know if you can even pick any of this up.
03:18But we'd love to Scott, because it was Gunner Scott.
03:21And my last name is actually Scott, Sam Scott.
03:23Palladio is my middle name.
03:24So we'd love to Scott and the Elton John squiggle in there.
03:28And so I'd remembered that when I was thinking about
03:30what I should bring over to talk about.
03:33So extra special, you know.
03:36This is a little passage of Fade Into You from Nashville.
03:41It was one of my first sort of songs I got to play on Nashville.
03:58Actually, this has been with a friend, so hopefully she didn't wreck it.
04:04Okay, still got a neck, that's good.
04:07That is a good start.
04:11Oh, not bad.
04:17It's like Big Daddy.
04:20It's the little family.
04:21Now I just need like a little ukulele.
04:30So this is a 2017 Gibson Custom Shop.
04:35Oh, actually, it says, I've just noticed as I've said that,
04:382018, because I see it stamped on the back of the neck, the headstock.
04:43So this is a 2018 Custom Shop.
04:47This is a guitar that I actually played on the full record.
04:53So any bit of acoustic guitar on my album is this girl.
04:59And I think someone named, I think on the guitar case,
05:02actually, it was just like nicknamed Tiger.
05:03So I was like, oh, I quite like that.
05:04This is Tiger.
05:06There's a song, Wake Me Up in Nashville, that's kind of my...
05:12It's like the first song I wrote when I moved to Tennessee in 2012.
05:21And it's the most sort of acoustic, songwriter-driven track on the record.
05:26And it's all this kind of stuff, you know.
05:30So we just found that it really like shone in a recording studio.
05:41I love the little body guitars too.
05:44But yeah, sometimes you just need to, yeah, round it out a bit.
05:48Chris Plank, again, with his great, great work.
05:50And I think they're pretty much the same angle.
05:52And I think if we, yeah, you know, it's nice to have the trio.
05:55And I also have a hummingbird, a red hummingbird.
05:59I'm just realizing that.
06:00I think I probably wrote all the record on this guitar.
06:04Because it was 2019 when I realized that I need to go back to London,
06:08back to my roots, to kind of figure out my journey as an artist.
06:12Because I'd lived in Nashville for a decade and written lots of stuff that felt...
06:18It was fun and it was interesting.
06:20It was very Americana leaning.
06:22And I felt that, you know, a bit of sort of Britpop was kind of missing from my journey.
06:32And like, I needed to go back to Cornwall and write all these songs.
06:38And so they all came out of this, actually.
06:41And I was able to end up on a body of work that felt kind of unique
06:45and felt like the British guy that had been living in Nashville for a decade,
06:49but was missing Cornwall and, you know, and missing home.
06:53And I lost my mum like five years ago.
06:55And so the whole record was dedicated to her.
06:57The record was called The Perfect Summer's Day Before We Lost The Light.
07:01And that comes from a song called Something On My Mind, which is this...
07:05Something on my mind, you know, it's all around here.
07:10And yeah, so I suppose actually this guitar has probably been
07:15more instrumental than I thought.
07:20There was a phase where I was, you know, as a teenager, it was all emo music
07:27and it was Linkin Park and it was, you know, just angsty,
07:29Incubus and bands like that, that I still adore.
07:33And then it was like, oh, Neil Young and Simon Garfunkel,
07:35Crosby, Stills and Nash and fingerpicking.
07:37Oh, this is cool.
07:39So yeah, you know, I ended up meeting and writing a bunch of songs with Ben Taylor,
07:44James Taylor's son, early into living in Nashville.
07:48And so that was weird because, you know, two years prior,
07:52I'd been like, well, I auditioned for this show with your dad
07:54and now I'm staying with you at your mum's house, who is Carly Simon.
07:59I'm staying in Carly's guest house and we're just making music on Martha's Vineyard.
08:03You know, it was, yeah, I've been lucky.
08:07But yeah, that was one that started this journey.
08:10Yeah.
08:29Thank you for joining me today,
08:31listening to some stories about these lovely guitars.
08:34Thanks again.
08:35Take care.