The Arms Of The Ocean, So Sweet And So Cold

Well, what do we have here.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I've done a fair amount of business with the great people at MusicStoreLive in Vermont. They were the dealer reps who worked to create my Private Stock Ocean Fade; they also sold me a Green Fade when I had a fit of pique and swore that I would never even look at a blue guitar again.

The last guitar I bought from them, I bought in December, before the accident. It was an on-a-whim purchase, really. An all-black McCarty Korina with a Brazilian Rosewood fretboard, plus soapbar pickups. It looked bad-ass. Even notorious PRS-hater Sam Smith, the man called "the next Peter Egan" by pretty much everyone except Peter Egan, admitted that it was cool. It was cool. So I bought it, and it was delivered right before my crash, and I didn't play it until I was able to come home from the hospital and unpack it.

That's when I realized that, as cool and minimalist and tough as it looked, and as right as all the materials undoubtedly were, this PRS didn't have "it". It sounded terrible in my hands. No doubt it's perfect for someone else. But I wanted it gone.

So I reached out to Ben at MusicStoreLive and we made a deal: that guitar sent back, plus a mildly daunting amount of cash, would get me the guitar you see on the left. A (deep breath) Paul Reed Smith MusicStoreLive Limited Wood Library McCarty MC-58 Brazilian With Indian Rosewood Neck and Brazilian Rosewood Fretboard.

In Blue Fade, to match my Private Stock and my Carvin B25P, as seen in the photos above and below.

Exhale.

Now she's here, and oh how I love her. But she's fussy. Doesn't like the big clean Heritage Patriot amp. Wants the squish of the MESA Maverick. There's something about rosewood necks (not fretboards) on a guitar. They play beautifully but none of them sound aggressive. And yeah, I know that to a 99% extent an electric guitar's sound is entirely dependent on pickup composition and positioning. But the rosewood-necked PRSi I have don't growl. They don't drive hard. They are titanium-stiff and they expose mistakes and they require a certain approach. I'm working on that.

As for the looks... The Private Stock guitar has a perfect top, of course. That's why you pay the big bucks. And it looks oceanic, exactly as I requested. The PRSMSLLWLMCMC-58BWIRWNBRWF, or MC-58 for short, has an imperfect piece of wood. It looks turbulent. It looks like the ocean I talked about back in May. Back then I carelessly wrote that

The reality is this: you can drown at any moment. You can lose your job or break your leg or hit your head the wrong way and fall all the way down, out of the sky and into the deep water, beyond your ability to kick free of the undertow. You can fall out of love in the blink of an eye and never feel safe in those waters again.

Or, I should have said, you can crash your car, you can nearly kill your son, you can look over to the passenger seat and see what you think is a dead woman sprinkled with broken glass, twinking in the winter sun on motionless skin. You can fall into a deep hole, zoned out on Dilaudid in an bed that moves under you unbidden while your lungs fill with fluid. You can wake and escape, you can limp and drag, you can stand and walk, you can swim up to the surface, you can make the decision to give yourself to love.

[gallery ids="1266,1262,1265,1264,1263"]