Lights

More than sixty years into his storied career as one of the modern era’s most accomplished and versatile guitarists, Tommy Emmanuel is still hungry for adventure.

“I feel like the Indiana Jones of the guitar world,” says the globe-trotting fingerpicker. “I’m on this wild journey, just making it up as I go, and I’m thrilled that so many people are having fun joining along with me.”

It should come as little surprise, then, that Emmanuel’s extraordinary new album, Living in the Light, is easily the most daring—and most rewarding—collection in the Grammy-winner’s remarkable catalog. Recorded and mixed in just four days with producer Vance Powell (Jack White, Chris Stapleton, Phish), the album radiates the kind of raw, electrifying energy that can only come from an artist operating in complete and total surrender to the moment. Emmanuel captured most of the performances here in one or two takes, and the sense of joy and wonder in these sonic explorations is more than just palpable; it’s intoxicating. While many of the recordings are solo instrumentals, Emmanuel lends his voice to several of the album’s tracks, as well, grounding his dazzling, percussive fretwork with a poignant dose of warmth and vulnerability. The result is a record as exhilarating as it is intimate, a virtuosic blend of acoustic pop, jazz, classical, and roots music delivered by a master craftsman with a penchant for living on the edge.

Emmanuel’s been following those instincts since the age of six, when he first began touring his native Australia as part of a family band. In his teenage years, he turned heads as a highly sought after session player and sideman, and by his early twenties, Emmanuel was playing on chart-topping hits and performing with some of the biggest names in Australian music, including Air Supply and Men at Work. Inspired in part by his hero, Chet Atkins (who would later become a friend, mentor, and collaborator), Emmanuel stepped out on his own as a solo artist in 1979, releasing the first in a string of critically and commercially acclaimed instrumental albums that would make him an unlikely celebrity in his home country and beyond. In the decades that followed, he would go on to headline everywhere from the Sydney Opera House to Carnegie Hall; tour with the likes of Eric Clapton and John Denver; win a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Arrangement; perform for a televised audience of more than two billion at the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympics; and collaborate with everyone from Les Paul and Mark Knopfler to Joe Walsh and Richard Thompson. NPR’s World Café declared him “one of the best acoustic guitarists in the world,” while The New York Times hailed him as a “prodigy,” and Atkins crowned him with the title of Certified Guitar Player (an honor only ever bestowed upon four other artists).

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