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Yasmin Williams, folk’s fantastical fingerpicker: ‘Guitar Hero shaped my experimental approach’

After shredding on a video game axe during her teens, the American musician graduated to the real thing. She explains how her music chooses hope during dark times

Within weeks, she’d become a Nirvana and Hendrix devotee and had the game licked – even the ridiculous avalanche of notes that is Thunderhorse by fictional thrashers Dethklok (“a deep cut: very hard, very fun,” she adds.) Williams is certainly forthright – earlier this year she wrote a popular op-ed for the Guardian criticising Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter as “a capitalist gesture” in the world of Black country and folk. And she further widened her frame of reference, accompanying her acoustic guitar with tap shoes and calabash drums, playing kora and making clear her sound couldn’t be contained within the American folk tradition.

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