“All of my favorite players – Paul Kossoff, Leslie West, Jimi Hendrix – play with tonal perfection, but it also often sounds like they’re hanging on by a thread!” Jared James Nichols teaches you the wild drop D blues stomp he wrote with Tyler Bryant

In this column, I’d like to go over the namesake song of my column, Hard Wired, which appears on my self-titled 2023 album. I wrote this song with my good friend Tyler Bryant, and it grew out of a jam session, as many songs do. It’s played in the key of D and in drop-D tuning.

Tyler and I had this idea to write a bluesy “stomp” type of song, like the old traditional blues of Howlin’ Wolf, but for it to have an intensity and energy that would make it heavy. The main riff, to me, has that classic Mountain/Leslie West, Nazareth/early Blue Öyster Cult vibe.