Willow Smith has opened up about her “unorthodox” way of learning to play the guitar and admitted that she recorded an album without even knowing what chords she was playing.
Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith’s daughter made the revelation during an appearance on Billy Corgan’s Thirty-Three podcast.
“When I first started playing the guitar, I started in a very unorthodox way. I didn’t pick up an electric guitar… I also told myself I wasn’t going to get a teacher. Even if it was weird, I wanted to develop my own style of playing…” She began.
“The first album that I made with my guitar, I was in the studio and I didn’t even know what chords I was playing. The freedom that gave me to do the craziest stuff.”
“I have a song called ‘And Contentment’, I am pretty sure I completely changed the key in this breakdown in the song. Even though that came from a place of not really knowing how to play the guitar, that is one of my favorite chord progressions I have ever made, because it is so unexpected. My favorite musicians take the song wherever they want to take it.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Corgan, who is the lead singer of the rock band Smashing Pumpkins, asked Willow what she thought about constructed ‘social codes’ being crossed in recent times.
“White society has a lot of codes. We grew up in the ’70s and ’80s versions of that. It was shocking to us – something as stupid as me wearing a dress onstage. People asked, ‘Oh, are you gay? What does this mean? What are you trying to say?’” He said.
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The 21-year-old replied, “So many people took that beautiful rebellious act and have done it – like Kid Cudi wore a dress onstage; my own brother [Jaden Smith] wore a dress onstage. That rebellious nature, I want to thank you for doing that and for setting this beautiful precedent for what rockstar dudes can be – they can be so many different things.”
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