When Making Music Breaks Your Body
Meric Long had been playing guitar for three years when he realized the instrument could be more than his hobby — it could be his way of communicating, too, of feeling he had something important to say.
At a high-school friend's house party, Long, then an anxious California teenager, smoked too much weed and meandered on an acoustic guitar for several uninterrupted hours. He assumed he was improvising for no one. But people listened, captivated by the sudden volubility of a 16-year-old who considered himself awkward and uneasy.
"I always thought, if I say anything, I am going to say something stupid," Long remembers with a laugh. "I realized that moment is what it felt like to speak and have people value what you were saying." Even now, when he talks to other parents at the daycare of his 3-year-old daughter, Tegra, the guitar gives him something to discuss, a "cool job"-as-icebreaker. "If I could walk into every socially awkward situation with a guitar," he admits, "I would."
When Long started The Dodos, his Bay Area duo with drummer Logan Kroeber, in the mid-2000s, that feeling was still driving him. Having fallen in love with fingerstyle guitar — playing the strings directly, without the aid of a pick — in his early 20s, he resolved to take it to an unconventional extreme: He wanted, as he put it before a recent weekday rehearsal, for "every string to sound like a different drum." The idea became the pair's animating mission, the spiritual center of ecstatic songs that felt too mighty to be dubbed "acoustic rock." As Long yowled quarterlife missives about, or, he clawed and hammered the strings, with Kroeber throwing jabs at each strum like a
