Will Graefe

Will Graefe needs you to know something about the music he makes: Despite the dazzling array of sounds you will hear from him, he is not a multi-instrumentalist. As the name of the astounding two-volume set he released in early 2025, Compositions for Guitar, makes clear, Graefe is a guitarist. The mistake is easy to make. Though he dances and tangles with steel strings like Fahey on “Shadow Country” and applies a feather light touch to “Tend Your Garden,” both from Vol. 2, he processes his sounds with majesty and imagination on Vol. 1. Where “Heartbreaks” sometimes sounds like a harp drifting through a synthesizer’s haze, “Harbor in the New England Fog” summons the percussive soundscapes of Max Neuhaus. Closer “Christmas Day” sounds like some droning ECM dream.

Graefe has a formal jazz education, and he’s played on a wide range of records as a New York and Los Angeles session ace, working with the likes of Orville Peck and Annahstasia and touring with Joan as Policewoman and Okkervil River. But Graefe grew up with a steady diet of Windham Hill records and formative listening experiences with his family in New England coffee shops and churches, studying guitarists and New Age interpreters. Graefe distills all of that—the erudition, imagination, emotion, and expansiveness—into Compositions for Guitar and his live sets. A consummate stylist with disregard for borders, Graefe needs no other instruments for his vision.