I've been thinking more and more about people and their relationships with their guitars (and their guitar-adjacent instruments), and what happens when those relationships break up. Or more specifically, when guitars get broken, and those broken guitars break hearts.

There are different kinds of guitar breakage. Sometimes breaking a guitar is the thing ya gotta do to make a point. Then again, sometimes guitars break when you don't want them to break.

This one runs from the ancient suburbs of Cairo to the stages of London, Leeds, and the Monterey Pop Festival. I also explore a work by the artist Christian Marclay, who destroyed a guitar to tell a heartbreaking story.

And I couldn't help adding four stories of guitars that broke my own heart.

All of that in under 30 minutes? I'm dedicated to making the most of your podcast listening time, and you're welcome.

If YOU have any stories of broken guitars that broke your heart (or guitars you broke to make a point) I want to hear them. Tell that story to your phone, send that audio file to me at [email protected], and with your permission I'll include them in future episodes.

I like this one. I hope you do, too.

Thanks to Christian Marclay and Paula Cooper Gallery for providing permission to use the audio from Christian Marclay's Guitar Drag in this episode. Marclay's work has been a longstanding interest of mine, since I found his work Record Without a Cover around 1986, when I was working in a very good record store as a wee lad, and found it at the top of a box of indie rock and punk records from a distributor. I've been fortunate to see him perform twice. I'm really chuffed to be able to present this amazing work to you as a part of this episode. The complete audio of the piece is appended to the very end of the episode, and I encourage you to listen to it after you have a sense of the tragic story it tells. You can learn more about Marclay's work here.

Support the project here!