MY RIGHT HAND IS ALWAYS MOVING WHETHER I HIT ANY NOTES OR NOT!

Funk master Cory Wong is all about the groove. But on his new album with Vulfpeck, he's also rocking out. As he says: "I got to be a little more Eddie Van Halen!"

- Amit Sharma

Cory Wong gets time. As the poster boy for modern funk, the American guitarist knows all about how playing in the pocket and feeling the groove gets bodies moving - it's his area of expertise. He's the kind of guitarist who can make one static chord sound interesting for longer because he'll never run out of interesting ways to deliver it.

2021 was a big year for Wong, with the launch of his first signature Strat and even his own YouTube variety show, brilliantly titled Cory And The Wong Notes. This year, he's teaming up again with funk supergroup Vulfpeck, the band that gained him worldwide recognition, for Vulf Vault 005: Wong's Cafe...

We decided to do this series called the Vulf Vaults,” explains Wong, talking to TG from his home studio - with his 2002 Highway One Strat, bought for just $300 on Craigslist, sat in his lap. It started as a vinyl-only compilation series where it would be songs by just one of us each time. I was talking to Jack [Stratton, drums) and told him there was a bunch of recordings we did pre-pandemic which I liked but didn't make on our last album. Some I'd written with him and some with the other guys, so I suggested using this unreleased material for my vault. He said, 'Produce them, do what you want, and make it very Cory Wong!' So I took the recordings and started to produce them, adding different textures to make them more guitar-centric...

How exactly did you go about making this new album 'more guitar-centric?