Watch Neil Young Give Meryl Streep a Guitar Lesson
“All I did was I turned everything all the way up,” Young told Streep. “That’s what you always do.”
Meryl Streep revealed awhile back that Neil Young gave her a guitar lesson to help her prepare for her role in the 2015 film Ricki and the Flash, in which Streep plays an aging rocker.
Turns out there’s a video snippet of their meeting, and you can watch it above.
Using a black Fender Strat through a Fender amp, Young coaches the three-time Academy Award winner on the finer points of playing rock guitar. The video opens with Young dialing in a distorted tone on the amp and Streep plunking away on the Strat.
“All I did was I turned everything all the way up,” he explains. “That’s what you always do. Everything!”
After Streep hands over the guitar, Young spends a minute doing some impromptu riffing.
The film's director, the late Jonathan Demme, set up the meeting between Young and Streep, who received guitar lessons from others after she and Demme decided she should actually play the instrument in the movie.
“From our first conversation, we agreed it was going to have to be live performance which, as you know, is a departure,” Demme told Entertainment Weekly. “On most movies, [performance] is done through playback [i.e. post-production dubbing]. So we agreed implicitly that Meryl, who did not play guitar, was going to have to learn to play electric guitar credibly.”
Get The Pick Newsletter
All the latest guitar news, interviews, lessons, reviews, deals and more, direct to your inbox!

Christopher Scapelliti is editor-in-chief of Guitar Player magazine, the world’s longest-running guitar magazine, founded in 1967. In his extensive career, he has authored in-depth interviews with such guitarists as Pete Townshend, Slash, Billy Corgan, Jack White, Elvis Costello and Todd Rundgren, and audio professionals including Beatles engineers Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott. He is the co-author of Guitar Aficionado: The Collections: The Most Famous, Rare, and Valuable Guitars in the World, a founding editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine, and a former editor with Guitar World, Guitar for the Practicing Musician and Maximum Guitar. Apart from guitars, he maintains a collection of more than 30 vintage analog synthesizers.
“We worked out a big, long harmonized guitar solo. It’s my little homage to Thin Lizzy.” Foo Fighter Chris Shiflett on his new solo album Lost at Sea and why he's happy to not be the loudest guitarist in the room
“I had a gold Klon but I lost it in Hurricane Katrina...” Blues supremo Eric Johanson on being both a Metallica and Jack White fanboy and why he’s into tone as much as music
Most Popular
By Jimmy Leslie
By Jas Obrecht
By Joe Gore
By Lisa Sharken
By Jon Sievert
By Dan Forte
By Derek McCabe