Switched on Pop - The L.A. guitar shop that reinvented indie folk

Episode Date: February 7, 2023

In 2010, a photographer named Reuben Cox moved to Los Angeles to start Old Style Guitar Shop. In the years since, the instruments that he continues to repair and sell have come to define the sound of the LA indie folk scene among artists like Blake Mills, Andrew Bird, Madison Cunningham, Ethan Gruska and Phoebe Bridgers. Reuben’s guitars are Frankenstein-esque creations, cobbled together from spare parts and neglected guitar bodies found in flea markets and estate sales. The sounds that these make, though, are as eccentric as their source: the strings are laid on top of Reuben’s signature, a rubber bridge. This sound, and the mythos of the rubber bridge guitar, has turned Reuben into a local celebrity and put Old Style at the center of Los Angeles’s indie music scene. In this episode of Switched on Pop, host Charlie Harding explores that sound and the man behind it all. Songs Discussed (playlist) Taylor Swift - champagne problems Olivia Rodrigo - hope ur ok boygenius - Emily I’m Sorry Jenny Owen Youngs - Vampire Weeknight Andrew Bird - The New Saint Jude Marcus Mumford - Only Child Perfume Genius - Slip Away Andrew Bird - Underlands Madison Cunningham - Anywhere Madison Cunningham - Life According to Raechel Phoebe Bridgers - Garden Song Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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from the first instant and he has a wea. Good Girl Jasmine Absolute, hypnotica, irresistible. Discover it now and let you involve for its essence. Welcome to Switch Don Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan.

Nate, over the past few years, I've been hearing this beautiful guitar guitar sound that had totally mystified me. Yeah, like I heard it all over Taylor Swift's Folklore and Evermore albums. It was on Olivia Rodriguez album Sauer. It's on Lizzie McElpine records, Wilco Records. And just the other day, I'm pulling up the new Music Friday playlist on Spotify. And boom, there it is again.

It's the new song by Boy Genius, the Julian Baker, Lucy Dacus, and Phoebe Bridger's supergroup. Charlie, it sounds like this guitar sound is following. you. It is. Now that you brought it to my attention, I think I'm going to start hearing it too, because I recognize that delicate, distant, kind of quiet sound. It sounds like a guitar, but also not. Now you've got me pretty curious.

What is the sound? Where did it come from? And why is it everywhere? Yeah, it feels like it's been following me around everywhere. And I had no idea what it was. Until recently, I was hanging out with my friend, Jenny Owen Young's. We've heard her on the show before. She's this great singer-songwriter who's written with artists like Panic at the Disco and Pitbull.

And so I'm at her apartment and I'm checking out her very extensive guitar collection. And there's this one guitar that makes that sound. You can hear it on her song, Vampire Weeknight. There it is again. The Telltale guitar. Yeah, so Jenny tells me that she bought this guitar just down the street from my former house in Los Angeles at a place called Old style guitar shop, which is wild because I know this guitar shop. I've been there. And so Jenny sends me down a journey to figure out what the connection is between old style guitar shop and this beautiful

guitar sound that keeps following me around. So let's take a trip to old style guitar shop. It's the least assuming spot to be creating some new guitar sound. It's this hole in the wall store, almost more like a shack on a small commercial strip near a residential part of Silver Lake. It's got this creaky front step and a screen door that slams when you walk in. And inside is this musky shop with wood paneling. It's full of old guitars from the 40s and 50s and 60s. Honestly, brands that I've never heard of that would have been sold in like catalogs, like the Sears catalog. And all these old guitars have been. basically been repaired and brought back to life by the shop's owner. He's got his head down at the

workbench over in the corner, soldering and tinkering away. My name's Ruben Cox, and I'm the owner of old style, a guitar shop in Los Angeles in the Silver Lake neighborhood. I build and fix guitars. For the last 13 years, Rubin has been rebuilding and repairing old instruments. It all starts in 2010 when Rubin quits his job as a photographer and educator to follow his then-wife who gets a job in L.A. My son was born two months later, so moving to L.A., becoming a dad, and kind of, you know, starting from nothing. So it was a bit stressful, as you might imagine. California, though, is a great place to reinvent yourself, and Ruben decides he wants to

open a guitar shop. I was on Craigslist buying secondhand tools to set. set up in the basement of my house, beavering away, making guitars, just trying to get an inventory. You know, this is me trying to maintain my sanity and the hysteria of, like, figuring out what the hell is going on in my life, you know? But this isn't a normal guitar shop in the way that you might picture a big box guitar center with your shiny new fenders and Gibson's. Ruben is literally building his own inventory by fixing up old guitars. as he's finding in estate sales and swap meets

and combining parts of these instruments to make neglected guitars strum again. I didn't really know what I was doing, you know. I have no musical talent. I've never been in a band before. Everyone always thinks it's false modesty, but it's true I really don't play guitar. Rubin had tried guitar as a kid,

but it never clicked. He just kind of lugged the case around everywhere and never played. Instead, he took the visual route and decided to go to art school for photography. But he loved the guitar, and while he was at art school, he would have access to all these tools at the shop, and he would try to hack together an instrument out of cheap parts. I knew how to build one specific kind of hollow-body electric guitar.

I had to figure out how to do repairs, restorations, neck resets, and refreading. I would learn on instruments of my own before, like dumpy flea-fey-market guitars that are really difficult to make plays. and it's me nervously watching YouTube videos. Eventually, Rubin feels like he's good enough to open his own shop, but he has no idea where. When I was looking for a retail space in the beginning, the number one criteria was cheap, and I would just park and stroller around my newborn child, and there was the place where the shop is now just had a cardboard sign in the window that said,

for rent. I don't think it was advertised anywhere. Just had a sign in the window. And so that cardboard sign becomes a hanging plywood sign with the words, old style, stenciled in red spray paint. I had it in my head that I would build one or two, I'd sell one or two guitars that I'd made a month and everything would be okay. And I'm just always been good at working really hard.

So I figured that if I just kind of kept forging on, something would happen. Rubin opens the shop auspiciously on April Fool's Day, 2010, right in the middle of a global recession, but by good fortune, people just start rolling in. L.A.'s full of musicians and full of guitars, and there are a lot of people that are just hungry for new sounds, and that if a new guitar shop opens up, they're going to come running and kind of poke around

and, you know, form a dialogue with these folks. Luckily, Rubin had a leg up. He was married into the indie music business, which helps to initially get the word out. My then-partner Miwa was very supportive, She works in the music business and kind of told people to go visit the shop. There's a kind of an opening party for the shop and she was able to get the National to play the opening party. So for the first three years of the shop, it became the guitar shop where the National played, you know.

So it, you know, it lended some credibility. the shop. In fact, Aaron Dessner from The National was one of Ruben's first customers. He bought one of Ruben's first guitar experiments and it ended up on the National's album High Violet released in May 2010. It gave me the ego boost to think that, you know, this is maybe something I can do. So Rubin's got the confidence boost he needs to turn his initial tinkering into a real business through simply learning to repair guitars on the job. It was like sink or swim. I had to figure out how to make them play well if I was going to sell it for whatever. But, you know, it's just like years of buying something for $100 and spending hours and

hours on it and selling it for $250. For me, Ruben's DIY approach is a huge part of the appeal of the shop. Like, so many of the shops in L.A. are these storied institutions with unobtainable $10,000 vintage instruments in the windows that, you know, I'll ogle at, but I could never. forever afford. Yeah, the way you're describing Ruben's shop, Charlie, I'm getting kind of a Geppetto's workshop vibe. Like, this is this dusty, uh, off the beaten track, uh, dimly lit, uh, room where Rubin makes these wild vintage guitars come to life. Yeah. And I get why people are into it. Because when you buy something from old style, it's a one of a kind thing. And so Rubin's reputation,

as a guitar geppetto grows among LA musicians, and those musicians become collaborators and friends. And that, Nate, is how we get to our guitar sound, which takes us to September 2015, five years since Reuben opened the shop. My pal, Andrew Bird, was working on a record in Isett Sound City, which was super cool. I'd never been there before. So I offered to take some pictures.

You want some pictures of you in the studio, and it's like, oh, yeah, that'd be great. something we need. Andrew Bird is my favorite songwriter, violinist, slash virtuoso Whistler, whose music I've been listening to more than a decade. And he's hanging out at Sound City, which is one of these major music studios where countless rockers have recorded their albums. We're talking Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty, Metallica, Johnny Cash. It was even where Nirvana made Nevermind. But in 2015, it's Andrew Bird's term. He is hanging with the record producer and guitarist Blake Mills, who's been setting up in Sound City, making records for a while.

Show up to Sound City, and they're hanging out, and I'm looking over at Blake Mills' corner over there, and he's got his guitars and all these amps, and then he had this 50s' Harmony Electric Banjo. In the 1950s, the Electric Banjo Maker Harmony is trying to figure out how to get more volume out of the banjo to compete with electrifying instruments. So they basically build an electric guitar with five strings, and it has this little rubber stop on it to make the sound a little muted, a bad approximation of a banjo. I talked to Blake Mills about it, the owner of said banjo. It came with a removable stop that you could wedge up underneath the strings by the bridge, and the stop was like an L-shaped piece of wood with some rubber

stripping on the top that contacts with the strings. When that mute is in there, it deadens the strings, and it sounds a lot like pizicado electric violin. So I thought that would be useful playing with Andrew. Do you know what record it might have ended up on? Yeah, it was on, I think the record is called Are You Serious? And I definitely play it on mute St. Jude. I think it just kind of caught Ruben's interest.

and he said, hey, can I take a look at that? And I said, sure. And one of us came up with the idea of, you know, what would it sound like if a full six-string standard-tuning guitar implemented this design? Or maybe it was like, can you build one of these little mutes for a guitar? I just kind of went to Home Depot and kind of poked around. And I think I ended up in the plumbing department,

and there are these six-inch square, 16th-inch chunks of rubber. which are gasket blanks for installing toilets. And I was like, let's give that a try, you know. And so went home to my basement wood shop, and I had some random parts. There's like an 80s squire bullet neck and this plywood telebody that was scrapped from another project

and then made the first rubber bridge. So Ruben bolts on the neck to the plywood body and finds a scrap guitar bridge, the part of the guitar where the strings rest down by the pickups. When I wrapped two layers of rubber around it and glued it in place and wrapped thread around it. He puts on this really loud humbucker pickup you find on like a metal shredder guitar.

But then adds flat-wound strings, which you'd conversely find on a jazz guitar, it's a strange pairing. I plug it in and it sounds cool, but I'm thinking maybe this is, you know, we'll workshop this and put my kid in the car and we went over together and dropped it off. And it kind of turned out to be a bullseye. I think there's two videos on Blake's Instagram page from that evening.

So that's the beginning of the rubber bridge. Almost like the equivalent of like a craft test dummy guitar. It was just like everything was just sort of hastily put together to demonstrate the effectiveness of. the bridge. So when you have something dampening the sound, what you end up being left with sometimes is more of the fundamental quality of the note. I mean, I've used that guitar on every record. I've worked on since having it. Okay, so this is interesting. It's not like there was this coordinated plan to create this guitar and have it take over the sound of,

Indie folk. Definitely not. This was kind of an accidental musical discovery, it sounds like. This is just one of those spontaneous, magical moments that happens when a bunch of creative people get together. And they fall in love with the sound so much that Blake says, hey, Rubin, we build me another one of these. He asks for an acoustic version.

And Rubin makes it out of an old Stella cowboy acoustic guitar body. And this sound quickly finds its way onto some very very... impressive records. The first track that you can hear it on is Marcus Mumford's song, Only Child. It was actually only finally released this year. That is a beautiful recording, and it's maybe not what you would expect. That is a beautiful recording, and it's maybe not what you would expect from that kind of song and that kind of vocal. You might expect a really kind of rich, full, acoustic guitar strumming sound in the backing up that vocal. And instead what you get is very sparse, kind of stark, and incredibly poignant, I think, to listen to because it's so kind of

delicate. Yeah, that's what the rubber bridge does. It stops the string from resonating so that it feels halted and very intimate. It sounds familiar, but also totally ineffable, which was my experience of hearing this guitar for the very first time. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready. Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. No. We'll dive into their stories and

get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. The first time I heard Rubin's rubber bridge guitar in action without knowing it

was on one of my all-time favorite songs, Slip Away by Perfume Genius produced by Blake Mills, released in 2017. I heard that sound, and I had no. idea what I was listening to. I thought it was like maybe some kind of new synthesizer or something. The intro is like an electric, almost like a giant electric bera harp, so like a thumb piano, the size of guitar.

And then the guitars that come in with it are the rubber bridge guitars. that sort of choked quality of the umbura and the rubber bridge guitars to me sounded kind of harmonious. It's fun when you just sort of like you sort of go, I don't know what I'm hearing or I don't know what I'm tasting and I can't figure it out. So I give in and I just, you know, like at that point you're like, okay, I'm in your hands. Do with me what you will. No matter who picks it up or who's playing it, it sounds different. And of course, one of the people who picks up the instrument after Blake is Rubin's buddy Andrew Bird, since he was there from the very beginning.

Rubin makes one for him as well. You can hear it all over his album Inside Problems. Here's Andrew Bird. It must have been like a $5 guitar back in the day. It's really, it's just plywood, but it sounds awesome. That's what's on the opening of Underlands, just the opening track of Inside Problems. That's when I started recording with that, I was like, yeah, this is kind of going to be the sound of this album. There's really not that much to it, except just, you know, Rubin has a good sense of how to get a great sound out of the old guitar.

I'm not much of a guitarist technically. My main instrument is violin, of course. But what people noted, though, is that this sounds a lot like the pizicado violin that I play. When I play violin like a guitar, it's a similar kind of sound, but the guitar is just sometimes more immediate. Honestly, when I first played a rubber bridge at Jennings,

I thought it sounded a little bit dull. And so I wanted to know from Andrew what drew him and his musical peers to this rubber bridge sound, you know, I feel like the guitar is really all about, like, bigness and distortion and reverb. It's like distortion and reverb are like facial hair, you know? They start making everyone look kind of the same.

The more you add, they just make everything more uniform. It's kind of a beard is a beard, you know. But this is going until the opposite direction and taking away that stuff so that you can see that, natural features. Everyone's trying to just get away from the shreddy kind of tendencies of the instrument, you know, and maybe this helps with that in some way. Okay, first of all, I need to shave my beard and sell my distortion and reverb guitar

pedals. And second, I love how far the pendulum of the L.A. sound has swung. Like, at one point, the sunset strip was known for, like, Motley Crew and Guns and Ruffel is the loudest guitar, as you can imagine. But now a quieter sort of scene has emerged due in no small part to Rubin's rubber-bridge guitars. It seemed like something that was missing from the L.A. landscape. Something that's a conduit for people of similar interests. In this case, a guitar shop.

It's just like a clubhouse, you know? Musicians are congregating an old style, and people like Blake Mills are putting Ruben's guitars into more people's hands who fall in love with the sound and find their own way into it. One of my favorite L.A. musicians right now is Madison Cunningham. And like so many other people, she finds this crew hanging around and she hears the rubber bridge. I think I first saw one in the wild in Blake Mills's hands. I think I was that old style. I think he was playing at the shop. And I don't know how he's getting that sort of like pizicado sound. Just like when I heard Blake perform on perfume genius,

she's enthralled by this rubber bridge sound and very curious about it. And just by hanging out at the shop, one of course eventually falls into her hands. Her producer friend Tyler Chester gets one of these rubber bridges and gives it to Madison to see what she can do with it. I honestly have it here. It's a silver tone, baritone, acoustic. This is it. It's experienced a lot of wear and tear, and it sounds beautiful. I've never changed the strings in like, I mean, it's been like five years.

Those dead old strings on the beat-up old baritone are a perfect compliment for her songwriting. The sort of like lack of sustain on the guitar sort of caused me to play in a different way because it's not like I can just like play a big chord and let it ring out. I really feel like it's starting to. to shape my songs. There's a song on my latest record called Anywhere. Jasmine on the Vine, clothes drying on a chair. Ain't no mind to me. It's the sort of lynchpin of the whole tune and that's why the song was created was because of this guitar. It's made it on every recording since I've owned it and probably will for until, I don't know, until it may be,

goes out of style or I doubt that it will. It's really like become kind of a cornerstone for the LA music scene and I think it's starting to like spread like a wildfire, which is really cool. It all goes back to Rubin and sort of, I think the scene that's been brewing in L.A., and I think it's cool that we have like some form of identity. Madison Cunningham's album Revealer, just won Best Folk Album at the 65th Annual Grammys, where she represented the LA scene by playing her rubber bridge guitar. Madison Cunningham is one of my favorite musicians out there right now, and it's cool to hear her use this guitar in kind of a different context than we've heard it so far

and shows us another application of this unique rubber bridge tone. That's the thing. Everybody who tries a rubber bridge guitar puts their own spin on it, And it's all just happening behind the scenes. Musicians showing up, buying guitars, playing them on records, and sharing them with each other. Rubin told me that his customers are his evangelists. I mean, it's part of that kind of crew that hangs around the shop.

And, you know, there have been a number of people, the producer and musician, Ethan Gruska, has been a big cheerleader for the shop. And, you know, I owe him multiple lobster dinners for his evangelizing of these guitars, because I don't know how many times someone has come directly from his studio and bought a rubber bridge guitar from the shop. You know, it's happened a bunch of times. My name is Ethan Gruska, and I'm a producer and songwriter in L.A.

Ethan has worked with artists like Remy Wolf, Kimbra, Bruce Hornsby, Weezer, and he produced Phoebe Bridger's 20-20 album Punisher. He's very sought after, as I found out when I interviewed him. Actually, so funny, Rubin is telling me right now, but I'm going to tell him, I, will call him in a moment. That's funny. That is really funny. I was supposed to go over to his place later today to drop off a few guitars that need a setup. So I think he's just, yeah, he's the man. Like so many other people in L.A., he first heard the sound on a bunch of Blake Mills records.

When I heard him doing that Perfume Genius song, I had a similar reaction to you where I was like, I didn't know it was a specific instrument because in my head, Blake can make, you know, an acoustic guitar sound like anything. But at that time, when I heard that record, I was also working on some of my own stuff and some of some Phoebe Bridger's stuff with Tony Burr. Tony had just died in a rubber bridge from Rubin. We just both kind of at the same time, like, got obsessed with that tone. And so by the time we started Punisher, like, we were both, like, ready to just, like, go on that thing. I really think that her records, like, are so suited for that sound because it's, like, she has, like, such an incredible guitar playing and parts. and like the register of the frequencies like stay out of her local range.

And that's also like another plus about it is that you can like be playing guitar, but it like doesn't compete. Like so many other people loved this Phoebe Bridgers record, Punisher. Ethan also has a great record coming around the same time called On Guard, and the rubber bridge is just all over it. I love this sound. And it's a sound that Phoebe Bridgers has taken with her on her latest endeavor. brings me back to that new Music Friday playlist that I had heard.

And boom, there's the rubber bridge. And on the credits, Ethan Griske is in there as well. So I had to ask him how to happen. I think it was something different when I first heard it. And then I got like a second draft to like throw something at it. And they had changed it to this baritone guitar. And I was just like, oh, that's magic. You know, it just, it has that quality.

And so does Rubin. And Ruben, like, everything in his shop, there is this sort of, like, there's something magic. I think a lot of people have become, like, interested in him as a character because it's, like, person who's, like, putting tools in the hands of people, and it's, like, having these really inspiring results for those people. So he's just, it's the coolest. How many guitars do you think you have inadvertently sold? Honestly, probably a lot, because I get excited when other people get excited to play it. So if I put it in somebody's hand and they're like, wow, I'm instantly like, yeah, like, you have to have one. But, like, Ruben has definitely invited me over a couple weeks ago and made me like this amazing, like, C-Cute gumbo as like a, I was like a dude like you.

This is how, this is the only way that I can hit you back. Through the cheerleading of Ethan Grisca and the natural wildfire of just hearing this sound everywhere, so many musicians have acquired a rubber bridge. Ruben has sold them to folks like St. Vincent, Jeff Tweedy of Wilco. Even Taylor Swift has one. She worked with Aaron Destner of the National on many of her recent records. Aaron was the first customer of old style, and so when they were recording together, he wanted to get one for Taylor. Here's the story, according to Rubin.

He bought one to give to her as a gift, which I delivered to her compound in some neighborhood that you can imagine what it's like. It was wild. There was like a very tall gate and armed guards, and the gate opened up about a foot and a half, and our arm reached out and grabbed the guitar, and then the gate closed. And so Taylor has one, and so do so many other people. You know, Blake Mills keeps putting them into people's hands at Sound City, where he is now set up making records. I've, like, seen that guitar in, like, McJaggers' hands and Keith Richards, and I've been in situations where, where I've kind of pinched myself or sent like Ruben a little covert picture, iPhone photo,

of like somebody playing it. That was just like, can you believe, you know, this thing that you made in your basement? And it has, it has Ruben's child scribbles underneath the paint, like little drawings from when they were a kid underneath the paint. It's like, you know, in this room with this person right now. And it's just wonderful. And Taylor is not the only superstar

that Rubin has built his rubber bridge guitars for. The last five he made. If I use carefully chosen language, I can say it's for the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney, but it's actually a gift for them. So I'll just presume that they got them and they looked

at them and possibly played them or something. So there's a lot of rubber bridges out there, and there's a lot of people putting them on their records. And that also means that there have been a number of copycats. A lot, yeah. It's interesting, like very blatant rip-offs of the rubber bridge guitars. Maybe that means you've arrived if you're being copied.

You know, there's this one guy, I think he's in Tennessee. It's like, oh, the West Coast sound, those guitars are shit in a minor, infinitely better. Full respect to Rubin, you know, it's just, I just laugh. Or people will call up the shop and they'll just say, can you just say, can you tell me how to make them or what do you do? And it's just like, it's a piece of rubber glued to a piece of wood. They hold no secrets, you know. I haven't patented this. You know, a lot of it I feel like my job security is they, the amount of restoration some of these guitars need and like a neck reset where you steam off the neck of a guitar. It's really tedious. It's like ditch digging. It's kind of

a blessing and a curse. It's nice to have something that people pay money for, but it's not like I can send an email and send me 50 of these things, and then I put them out in the shop. So it's just a good vibe knowing that the vast majority of the stuff in my shop is recycled or upcycled or whatever you want to call in. 13 years in, in addition to all the rubber-bridge guitars he's made, Reuben estimates that he has repaired somewhere between 12,000 and 14,000 guitars, according to his receipts. And the shop is doing great, but it is still just a shack in Silver Lake.

The overhead's pretty low. I've got three people working for me right now that are just amazing and I'm very, very lucky. And like just now, like being a kind of a shy, somewhat antisocial person, I've, you know, I learned how to deal with people, run the shop, you know, comfortable doing a lot of repairs that used to bring, you know, a lot of anxieties. Old style of guitar shop still has all the troubles of any. small business, but with a twist. I asked Reuben what it feels like to have his guitars on so many spectacular records. I mean, that's the highest compliment if someone takes your instrument and, and, you know, it inspires them to write a song or whatever. It's great. It's the best feeling. Hey, Nate, just before we go, I got to show you something. Okay, what's that? When Rubin told me that he

had built guitars for the Rolling Stones in Paul McCartney recently, I was like, will you build one more? It's a rubber bridge guitar. It's my very own rubber bridge guitar. It's the guitar you've been hearing this entire time underscoring the episode. And it sounds absolutely amazing. Wow. Switched on rubber. Yeah.

You know, I recently left L.A. And I'm now in New York. I haven't found my guitar shop yet. But I do feel like I have a little piece of that L.A. guitar scene from old style guitar shop. This 300th episode of Switched on Pop was produced by Rihanna Cruz. edited by Art Chung, additional editing by Megan Lubin and Jolie Myers, Engineering by Chris Shirtliff, illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr.

Special thanks to Alice Gou and Corey Petrick. Our executive producers are Hannah Rosen and Ashot Kerwa, or a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. If you're a longtime lover of the podcast, I'd really appreciate it. If you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or go buy some merch at our website, Switchedonpop.com or at Switchedonpop on social media, let me know on Instagram and Twitter what my new New York guitar shop should be. But if you are in Los Angeles, you should stop by old style guitar shop.

Tell Ruben I said hi. We'll be back again next Tuesday. And until then, thanks for listening.