Shane Guerrette’s musical DIY stance

BY COLIN MCGUIRE Special to The News-Post

From YouTube covers to originalsongs success, Shane Guerrette has been working his whole life for the opportunity to tour. Now he has it. After wrapping up a quick stint with Black Joe Lewis earlier this year, he’ll hit the road with The Heavy Heavy for a 15-date trek that will take him up and down the East Coast.

Before he does that, however, he’ll make a stop in Frederick at New Spire Stages as part of the Weinberg Center’s Tivoli Discovery Series on March 2.

72 Hours recently caught up with Guerrette to talk about how he got into music, the influence of John Mayer, making a record in his bedroom and how important the release of those YouTube videos were to the beginning of his career.

I was listening to some of your music earlier today. It’s a very distinct style, and I love it a lot. I’m wondering how you came into playing the sort of music you play.

It’s really interesting because when I was starting out learning music, I was 14 years old and started on an acoustic guitar. My first influences weren’t necessarily what they are now, so it’s cool to look back and see how I was inspired by different genres. In high school, I really liked John Mayer. I just thought he was an amazing guitarist. It puzzled me how he could play guitar like that. I fell down the rabbit hole of tracing his inspirations and, in that, I found a lot of blues music. His main guy was Stevie Ray Vaughn. You trace it back and there were the Kings — B.B. King, Albert King, Freddie King — and I landed in a place where one day I woke up and all I was playing was blues-inspired music.

I grew up listening to Led Zeppelin and The Doors. It was classic rock, through and through. I went through a phase where I was just trying to figure out what my sound was and where I felt the most inspired writing and not just listening. When it came down to writing, I was wondering what I was trying to sound like. It came down to this mesh of everything, really.

These last couple years, I’ve been influenced by soul music, so it’s kind of a mesh of all the influences through the years. The approach is pretty DIY. I recorded the album myself, but I wouldn’t call myself a producer.

It sounds like retro music that was recorded in 2023 in a bedroom.

That’s very true. One thing that really struck me was your voice. You have a very soulful voice. How did you come into that?

It was me just doing it for so long. I’ve been singing for as long as I can remember. My older sister was always singing. My mom was always singing, growing up. I was always around it, and I just kind of fell into it. The first song I remember singing was U2. I really liked Bono when I was really young, and people told me I sounded like him growing up. I sang in chorus throughout high school, and I ended up doing pop covers on YouTube in high school. It was this thing of figuring out my own voice. One day, I just kind of started writing differently and fell into it.

Back to your album. You said you produced it yourself — was that something you always wanted to do, or were there other people you were hoping to work with on it?

It’s funny, actually. I recorded a debut album during COVID, when everything was coming back to normal, and at the time, I was working a job and I took a couple weeks off to figure out how to do music full-time. I visited my brother in New York City, and I was doing these open mics, and

Shane Guerrette

When: 7:30 p.m. March 2

Where: New Spire Stages, 15 W. Patrick St., Frederick

Tickets: Advance tickets are available for a suggested donation of $10, or pay what you want at the door. Info: 301-600-2828, weinbergcenter.org

I felt really discouraged because there wouldn’t be a crowd. You’d just play to other musicians.

So, I decided to shift my efforts towards recording my own music and getting it out into the world somehow. At the time, I had done some production for those YouTube covers, and I kind of had a hand in the production world. I’d watch tutorials on music production and all that, and to be honest, I was recording the album as a demo to send to producers to help me record an actual album.

I had a list of producers I did reach out to. Some were interested and some of them got back to me while others didn’t, but I was only recording it as a demo to find a producer to record it as a polished album. By the time I was done with the demo, I sent it out to producers and also sent it out to friends and family to see what they thought, and everyone seemed to like it. The whole process was so fun because I wasn’t worried about making this perfect thing. I didn’t have the pressure of the thing that stops me the most, which is perfection. It wasn’t even a worry because it was just a demo. I released the album one single at a time and made videos around them online, and they slowly picked up some sort of buzz, and here I am now. It’s been a gradual thing.

One thing I liked about the songs I heard is that they aren’t that long. Most of them are between two and three minutes, and you don’t see that a lot nowadays. Was that a conscious decision on your part?

It was and it wasn’t. I was aware of it towards the end of trying to record those songs. It was something I was considering changing, but I like being conscious of the era we’re living in and how people consume music. I knew being an unknown artist, it would be easier to capture people’s attention by releasing one song at a time instead of an album all at once.

The second part of that is the length of the songs. I figured I’d leave them at that timeframe because it was easier to digest. People weren’t so eager to sit down and listen to a fiveminute song, let alone a whole album. It was the times we were living in.

I’m interested to see how that translates in your live show. Coming to Frederick, will you have a band with you, or will you perform solo?

This show is with a band, a threepiece: myself on guitar and vocals, and I’ll bring a drummer and bassist along. It’s another thing I never thought about while recording the album. How am I going to do this live, and how will it translate? It’s been its own thing. How do I make it sound like the record, but also, how do I make it different? It’ll be different in some regards. I like working in intros and outros. I want it to be fresh, so I’m not doing the same thing day after day. It’s all part of the plan, figuring out how to keep it where it’s familiar but also interesting.

I noticed you have a nice amount of dates on your website. Is this year the most you’ve been able to tour, or have you been on the road a lot?

Touring has always been a goal of mine since I started doing music. It’s

(See GUERRETTE 10)