Samantha Fish admits she used to be trigger-happy with her lead playing, piling on ideas whenever she was given a solo spot. It took some blunt studio advice to change how she thinks about the role of the guitar in a song.
Guitar solos are one of the most demanding forms of electric guitar expression. Get them right, and they can define a career — Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption” didn’t just showcase technique, it reshaped what the instrument could be. Get them wrong, though, and they risk coming off as self-indulgent at best, or meme-worthy at worst.
In her early days recording and performing live, Fish was eager to demonstrate everything she could do as a blues guitar player, often at the expense of the music itself.
“When I was young, any time I got the opportunity to do a guitar solo, I’d throw in every trick,” she tells Guitar Interactive Magazine. “I’m in the blues world, so at a lot of jam sessions it’s about improvising around the original form, and I’d be like ‘Here’s this lick, here’s this lick.’”
If you can return to that hook at the end of the solo when it comes to fruition, that’s where the cheers come from.”
— Samantha Fish
That instinct — which is common among developing players trying to prove themselves — meant the focus often drifted away from the song. What she needed was a reset in perspective.
That moment arrived during the sessions for her 2015 album, Wild Heart, when she was working with Luther Dickinson.
“I was trying to do a solo — ‘trying’ being the operative word here – and he came in like, ‘It’s all bullshit!’” she recalls. “He said, ‘There’s a melody in the song; you can hear the hook when you’re singing. You need to cop that and build something around it — create a counterhook and build off that.’”
“I’ve realized that’s what you do; you create a hook, you build off of that, you weave something exciting, and if you can return to that hook at the end of the solo when it comes to fruition, that’s where the cheers come from,” Fish notes. “There’s something about that return to the earworm.”
The lesson stuck. Rather than treating solos as a showcase for technique, Fish began approaching them as extensions of the song’s central melody—something to serve the composition rather than overwhelm it.
“In music, what are we trying to do other than write great melodies that really engage with people?” she ponders. “As a guitar player, I was getting bogged down with trying to show what I could do. Sometimes the best approach is to lie back, listen, breathe; come up with a real simple idea, and figure out how to execute it with the most drama and dynamics.”
Looking back, she now considers her early approach a misstep, even describing her debut-era instincts as “shitty.” Her recent work, including Paper Doll Live, reflects a more disciplined, song-first philosophy that highlights how far her playing and writing have evolved.
