About Me:

I grew up in Ohio, spent several decades in Minneapolis (the home of 💜Prince💜), and in 2014 I settled in West Philly, where I’m now living my best life.

I’ve been playing guitar since the 1980s, when I dreamed of being Jimi Hendrix, but I spent most of my life as a writer and literary critic. I have a summa cum laude degree in literature, and I’ve interviewed many of the world’s greatest writers, including Margaret Atwood, David Foster Wallace, Cynthia Ozick, and Tobias Wolff. I’m an academically published Kafka scholar, and my most prominent author interviews have been translated for publication into other languages. Check out my three decades of published writing here.

My guitar reputation was originally as a shredder, but in teaching so many different genres to so many different students, much of my current repertoire comes from dissecting the songs and styles that my students want to pursue. In 2020 a student wanted to emulate Joni Mitchell’s Travis-style picking, but I didn’t even own an acoustic guitar at the time, so I bought one and taught myself how to play like that, and now one of my main reputations is as an acoustic fingerstylist. Musical change and growth can really happen that rapidly.

I originally preferred playing and studying guitar as a solitary pleasure, but almost all of my most striking progress has come from playing with other people. In Minneapolis I was the lead guitarist for a legendary Spinal Tap tribute band, which taught me how to weave my flashy playing style into the texture of catchy songs that people loved singing and laughing along to. We toured the world and elsewhere (😉), and along the way I learned how to negotiate the complexities of band dynamics, gigging, drummer deaths, and spandex pants.

I’m also a longtime radio DJ for a community station in Minneapolis. In the aughts I hosted an eclectic overnight show called Mystery Train, which was a wild free-for-all that featured everything from Indonesian gamelan and Tuvan throat-singing to medieval masses, whale songs, wind-up music boxes, and hillbilly hoedowns. Now I host an even more eclectic show called Grinder’s Switch, as part of a rotating slot called Heavy Rotation, and I recently produced a four-part series of four-hour shows featuring all songs about chickens. Check out my recent radio archives here. If it’s audible, I’m interested in it, and whatever your tastes are in music, I’ll dive into them enthusiastically.

612-701-5150

David@davidwileyguitar.com