In many ways, 2024 was a year for the pop queens. Taylor Swift’s Eras tour boasted $2 billion in ticket sales, while Sabrina Carpenter and Chapelle Roan enjoyed breakthrough years, and Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts tour sold out arenas across the globe.
While guitars may have had a diminishing presence in the charts in recent decades, some of those best-selling artists are starting to buck that trend and bring guitar solos back to the ears of the masses.
Rodrigo has been playing a special purple version of St Vincent’s Ernie Ball Music Man signature guitar, tuned to drop D, on her Guts shows. “We’re all playing power chords and screaming,” she says, citing bands like Hole and L7 as major inspirations.
Roan’s lead guitarist Devon Eisenbarger, meanwhile, has spoken of the “band vibe” that her live show delivers, with plenty of opportunities to shred each night.
Rodrigo and Roan’s latest albums — Guts and The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, respectively — were produced by Grammy-nominated producer Dan Nigro, who started out as guitarist for the indie band As Tall as Lions. But he never pushed solos onto the singers — they wanted them outright.
“My brain is like, ‘Guitar solos are dated because I listen to Metallica, and Metallica’s guitar solos are from the ’80s,’ ” Nigro tells Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt.
“That’s why I love working with Chappell and love working with Olivia, because their reference points are always current because of their age. And so I’m always learning.”
The pop-punk undercurrent of Rodrigo’s music lends itself quite naturally to solos. The fuzzed-out licks of her song “Bad Idea Right?” — which gets some DigiTech Whammy love on its live version — is just one such example.
But it’s a more surprising facet of Roan’s ’80s synth-pop.
“I remember when she heard the part after the bridge, she was like, ‘No, I want a guitar solo,’ ” Nigro says of “Pink Pony Club.” He considered her new direction telling, since earlier versions of the song had been more synth heavy in that section.
“I went in, worked on it and sent her a version,” he continues. “She was like, ‘It needs to be more melodic.’ ”
Reconvening with Lo Moon guitarist Sam Stewart, who plays guitar across the record, they “workshopped what you hear now,” which is a Neal Schon–esque, chorus-tinted figure with echoes of Don’t Stop Believing.
“I think it was a second pass that we made it super melodic,” he remembers, “and she loved it.”
Eisenbarger says that, onstage, guitars are even more prominent. “I attribute a lot of that to her music director, Heather Baker, who’s a kick-ass guitar player,” she says. “She added guitar parts where there weren’t any on the albums. It’s been really fun to have guitar actually be prominent.”
Rodrigo’s live band, meanwhile, is made entirely of women and nonbinary musicians, and they were assembled to put on a rock show.
“I grew up loving rock music,” she told Rolling Stone. “I love girl rock bands and riot grrrl bands. I loved Hole, Sleater-Kinney, L7, Babes in Toyland. I was really inspired by them, and I think that’s why I wanted to have an all-girl band up onstage.”
Granted, neither artist has quite gone into shred-fest territory yet, but with more than 870 million Spotify streams between those two songs alone, augmented by guitar-heavy live shows, it could turn the tides on the fate of guitars in popular music.
And with Rogrigo championing rock music, and exposing her fans to guitar bands — she even had The Breeders support her for 10 dates of the Guts tour — the future of the guitar in mainstream music just got a lot brighter.
