WAREWOLF BEST XI:
GUITAR SOLOS OF THE 2020s
Eleven solos from this decade that stopped me cold. Not shred for shred’s sake, not nostalgia for an era when solos “mattered”, just the moments from the 2020s where a guitar said something no other instrument could. Ranked, argued, and playlisted.
Q: Your lyrics feel like they’re pulled straight from a personal diary, raw and unfiltered. Was there a specific moment or experience that made you decide to be vulnerable in your songwriting, or has it always been second nature for you?
This is the one that sounds like it shouldn’t exist in 2024. You get this Steely Dan and early Dire Straits style of playing, tight, precise, impossibly clean, the kind of controlled, jazz-literate rock guitar work that basically nobody is making anymore. Every note is placed exactly where it needs to be, nothing wasted, nothing showy for its own sake.
That precision is the whole appeal. It’s a lost art, the idea that a solo could be about restraint and taste and perfect placement rather than speed or volume, and Allie Sandt plays it like it never went out of style. It’s truly unlike anything else coming out today.
In a decade of guitar solos, the one that sounds like it was beamed in from the golden age of studio craft, and holds its own against it, earns a spot every time.
Q: Listening to your four tracks, there’s this unique blend of folk, jazz and pop. If we were to trace that sound back to its roots, what artists or moments in your life do you think planted those musical seeds?
A: Oh man, there are so many artists that I treasure! I kinda love that those are the genres you picked up on! Over the past few years I’ve really gone on an indie bender mixed with americana or early 2000s country bangers, hah! Before this though, I grew up as the youngest of 6 children in a Colombian-American home-- anything my siblings would bring home, (Shania Twain, Blink 182, Mariah Carey, Imogen Heap, Jason Mraz), music my mother discovered or adored her whole life (Djavan, Silvio Rodriguez, The Beatles), or anything that was on the TV or Radio (insert every early 2000s banger pop star and ofc tswift) were all kinda embedded into my lil songwriter heart.