John Leventhal on Restraint, Instinct, and Why He Deleted His Best Guitar Take

The Producer Who Never Practiced

John Leventhal has six Grammys, a four decade production career, and credits that include Rosanne Cash, Shawn Colvin, Jim Lauderdale, William Bell, Marc Cohn, and Sarah Jarosz. He also readily admits he never practiced guitar in any formal sense. He got his first electric guitar as a senior in college. He was on his way to law school.

That combination of pedigree and self-deprecation runs through his entire conversation on Playback Sessions with Spencer Handley. What emerges is less a technique lesson than a philosophy of musicianship, and it may be more useful to your playing than another month of scale drills.

The Hardest Lesson: Doing Less

When Spencer asked what has changed about his production sensibility over the decades, Leventhal did not hesitate.

I'd like to think I've gotten a lot simpler, and that my productions are simpler, less cluttered, and the things that are going on have more impact. They mean more and they convey more by me doing less. And that's a hard lesson to learn.

He can barely listen to his early records. Not because they are bad, but because he can hear himself reaching. A Beatles idea here, a Brian Wilson idea there, a Burt Bacharach move, a Billy Sherrill move, an attempt to sound like a Stax record. He was exploding with influences and trying to fit all of them into every track.

The turning point came when he stopped putting effort into trying to have hits, and when he started engineering and mixing his own records. Suddenly the arranging, the engineering, and the mixing all locked together into one coherent creative gestalt instead of three separate jobs handing work off to each other.

What This Means For Your Playing

Most intermediate players do not have an idea problem. They have an editing problem. The painful skill Leventhal is describing is having a genuinely good idea, recognizing that the song does not need it, and taking it out anyway.

• Record yourself playing a part, then record a version with roughly half as many notes. Live with both for a week.
• Ask what job each note is doing. If it is only there because you can play it, it is a candidate for deletion.
• Notice that space makes the remaining notes louder in the listener's mind, even at the same volume.

Why He Deleted His Best Guitar Take

The most concrete illustration of this philosophy came from his solo record, made largely alone in his brownstone studio during the pandemic.

Leventhal came up in 1980s New York playing Telecaster in country bands during a local country explosion. He worshipped James Burton. He could genuinely burn on that hybrid picking, chicken picking vocabulary (a term he says he hates). While making the solo album, he cut a track showcasing exactly that.

I was like, oh, let me see if I can do that. Oh, I could. That's kind of cool. But then when I listened to it, I was like, I don't need to be doing that. There's tons of other guys who do that. I need to find something that feels more connected with some deeper part of myself.

He cut it. That is not humility. That is a working definition of artistic identity: knowing the difference between what you are capable of and what is actually yours.

Good Time Trumps Everything

Early in his career Leventhal landed a gig with Billy Vera, a bandleader whose repertoire spanned jump blues, Chicago blues, Memphis soul, Al Green, Merle Haggard, and pop. Leventhal was thrown into all of it, probably shaky at first. What he learned was not licks.

If you sort of are assertive and take control and you have good time, well, that's all there is, folks. Good time trumps everything. I realized having good time was like the hugest part of the chunk, which a lot of people don't get until sometimes it's too late.

This is the single most transferable takeaway in the interview. Producers hire players who make everything else in the room feel better. That is a time and feel skill, not a chops skill. If your metronome work has been an afterthought, this is the guy to hear it from.

The band's bass player, Tommy Wolk (later T-Bone Wolk), reinforced the same lesson from another angle. Leventhal describes his impact simply: be musical, and you better be good. Figure out how to make the guitar work in the context you are in.

Chasing Hits Always Fails

After Sunny Came Home became a huge hit with Shawn Colvin, the phone started ringing with people wanting more hits. Leventhal tried it. Twice. He was miserable both times, and by his own assessment he did not do a good job.

The follow-up record to that hit is one he still cannot listen to, not because of Colvin's work (he praises her lyrics and singing) but because he can hear himself working overtime to manufacture a hit. He lost twice: it was not a hit, and it was not his best work.

Contrast that with the record that started everything. He and Colvin made a demo cassette of songs they wrote together. Columbia signed her and let an unproven Leventhal produce on the strength of that tape. The record, Steady On, won a Grammy and made him a producer overnight.

Following your instincts, that's what you need to do. Don't worry so much about what the record company's yapping about or what the industry wants. Just follow your instincts. And that has more or less served me for 40 some odd years.

Notably, when he made that record most of his New York musician friends did not get it. The town was competitive and pointed toward commercial pop. The deeper affirmation was not the Grammy but a handful of artists he genuinely admired turning out to be fans.

Tools of the Trade

The Tuning

The hymn he performs in the episode uses a tuning he has leaned on heavily: drop the low E down two whole steps (to C) and the A string down a whole step (to G). The result is wide, low, open triad voicings that are almost impossible to get in standard tuning. If you want a fast route to a fresh compositional idea, retuning is often more productive than learning another scale shape.

Hybrid Picking

Leventhal holds a Blue Chip pick and adds his middle finger. Hybrid picking gives you the attack of a flatpick with the interval leaps and simultaneous voices of fingerstyle, which is why it shows up constantly in Americana and country session playing.

Vintage Acoustics

He calls old acoustics his one material vice, and his criteria are worth noting because they are the opposite of what most players chase in a store. He wants guitars that sound dried out, not sparkly, not hi-fi, not big on either end of the spectrum. Guitars with huge low end and huge top end take up too much space in an ensemble mix and are harder to record. His workhorses are Gibson jumbos: a 1930s J-35, a 1940s Southern Jumbo, a 1950s J-50. They record effortlessly, strummed or fingerpicked.

Harmony as Emotional Vocabulary

Leventhal never transcribed formally in the academic sense, but he obsessively figured out chord sequences that moved him: Motown, Brian Wilson, Bacharach, Howlin' Wolf, and later Copland, Ives, and Samuel Barber. He even adapted the opening of Copland's Clarinet Concerto for electric guitar on his solo record.

His compositional signature is a small deliberate wrinkle inside otherwise tonal writing: an unexpected chord, an unexpected root motion, a passing tone that adds tension before resolution. He credits Bach for the model, where diatonic motion sits over shifting bass notes.

The advice he gave his own son is a perfect practice assignment:

We can just take one chord and I could spend days showing you how you could play that chord 20 different ways. And each way has a different intent and meaning and will have a different emotional impact.

Ry Cooder and Getting Past the Guitar

Touring behind Ry Cooder for over a year is something Leventhal calls a highlight of his life. What he took from it was not licks. Cooder, like Bill Frisell, uses the guitar to get at something beyond the guitar. That is the standard Leventhal holds himself to, and it explains why he never tried to sound like Cooder even while absorbing his root movement and voicings.

Practical Takeaways

• Work on time and feel first. It is the thing that gets you hired and the thing most players address too late.
• Learn to delete good ideas. Serve the song, not your resume.
• Identify the quirky things in your playing that are actually yours and lean into them rather than trying to sound like the current session standard.
• Do not chase what is already successful. It rarely works and it usually produces work you cannot listen to later.
• Take one chord and find twenty voicings. Learn what each one feels like, not just where it sits.
• Try altered tunings as a composition tool, not a party trick.
• Remember that Leventhal's practice was writing songs and playing gigs. Application beats isolated drilling.

Still Asking the Question

What makes this conversation land is that after six Grammys and 40 years, Leventhal is still openly wrestling with why he makes music at all. He admits he needs more musical input, that he closed the door on new influences somewhere around 1990, and that scrolling Instagram and seeing the sheer volume of extraordinary players makes him think he needs to up his game.

If a producer of his stature is still asking those questions, the questions are probably the point.