Some people say guitars have songs living inside them. Aaron Livingston, the Philadelphia-based musician who performs as Son Little, experienced this firsthand while touring through Australia last fall. He’d been working on his second album, and believed he’d written all the songs he needed. But near the end of the tour, in the country’s Northern Territory, he was loaned a guitar by the beloved Aboriginal singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu.
“I feel like his energy was in the guitar, and I could feel it while I was playing it,” Livingston says from a tour stop in Annapolis, Maryland. “I holed up in this hotel room for really just a few hours and ended up with five songs—three are on the record. I think there was a certain vibe that got in there, and I realized that I wasn’t quite done; I had a little bit more to say. Those three songs that I did use became the heart of the record. I think that’s when I would say it really came together clearly for me.”