Kim Gordon's Signature Fender Jazzmaster Sold Out — Ten Years in the Making

Kim Gordon's signature Fender Jazzmaster went on sale in October and sold out on the company's site. The white guitar took ten years to develop, and its designer — the Sonic Youth founder best known for playing bass in the band — admits the project sat oddly with her. "It's not like I saw myself as a guitarist," Gordon said in a Zoom interview with Rolling Stone.

Gordon has favored guitar over bass on stage throughout her solo career, and the Jazzmaster has long been her instrument of choice for practical, unromantic reasons. "Jazzmasters were workhorses; [you could] put in different pickups and change the bridge, and they would hold heavier strings for different tunings better," she said. "They weren't precious, you know? They sounded good; they could be loud."

What does the guitar actually offer?

Gordon worked with friend and fellow musician Salar Rajabnik to replicate a Mexican Jazzmaster she used in 2008. The finished instrument pairs Seymour Duncan humbucker pickups with standard single-coil neck pickups — a combination she calls "the best of both worlds." She is quick to deflate the spec sheet, though. "I don't really care about this shit — the technical stuff," she said. "I learned a lot about it, but it just sounds good. I'm really happy with the way it came out."

The design brief came down to low end, not gadgetry. "It had to have enough low end; it's a full sound, you know? It's got a lot of bass, actually," Gordon said. "I hate to say [that] — it's a little misleading — but it's just a very meaty sound that you can really just kick out the jams, as they used to say."

That bass-forward character traces back to Sonic Youth's earliest days. "When Lee [Ranaldo] and Thurston [Moore] and I started playing together, I might have been playing guitar," she recalled. "But I was basically kind of playing bass lines on the guitar, so it just made sense to play bass. I love the bass; it's just so mysterious, and it's the glue and the sound."

Rethinking the next record

Gordon frames her music-making as an extension of her art practice, not rock celebrity. "I moved to New York to make art, and I basically always saw myself as an artist who plays music. I still do," she said.

Her solo work — No Home Record, The Collective and this year's Play Me — is built on hip hop-inspired beats from producer Justin Raisen. The pair have already sketched roughly three pieces for the next record, but Gordon says the collaboration itself is under review. "I think we're kind of at a moment where we're rethinking everything," she said. "Maybe it would be just me turning all the knobs, you know? Or turning the knobs with him."

Her ambivalence extends to Los Angeles, the city that enabled the solo records. "I never would have made a solo record like this if I hadn't been in L.A.," she said, before adding: "The industry I really associate with L.A.; being nominated for Grammys and seeing that world and kind of getting too close to it has kind of left me with a bad taste. I feel like it just fucks with your head a bit. Makes me want to go back to New York."

A sold-out signature model, then, has not softened the skepticism. Gordon's next move — back to New York, back to the knobs — looks set to shape whatever the rethought collaboration produces.