There’s a simple reason why Marissa Paternoster was merely ranked as the 150th greatest guitarist of all time on Rolling Stone‘s “250 Greatest Guitarists” list, but few are willing to say it: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Tom Morello and Eric Clapton slept their way to the top. Absolute creeps!! Paternoster always seems to have way more fun playing guitar than anyone else anyway, whether it’s with her long-acclaimed group Screaming Females, her current project, Noun (borne of a solo endeavor long ago (as you’ll learn below)), or through her ingenious, guest-laden Patreon recording project. She’s got a mighty discography under her belt, full of pounding anthems and brooding twisters, and is a perfect subject for the Worst Song series. Unlike the rest of this series’ interviewees thus far, Paternoster takes her teenage self to task, and I’m here for it. Please enjoy her worst song here, which is still better than Steve Vai’s very best song (ranked #127 on the greatest guitarist list, another blatant scammer).

(photo by Jersey Wall)

MP: I actually know exactly which song it’ll be. I recorded this when I was sixteen or so; it really makes me cringe. It’s a Noun song called “Electric Love” and it sounds like it’s about a vibrator. Not only was I unfamiliar with vibrators, but I was also unfamiliar with the realities of romantic love. Regardless, I wrote this piece of shit and I’m sure some people will find it cute but it makes me want to put a gun in my mouth.

YGR: So wait – does it sound like it was about a vibrator, or was it actually about a vibrator? I feel like “Electric Love” is vague enough to mean a variety of things…

MP: It’s definitely not about a vibrator, it just sounds like it’s about one, haha.

YGR: Ah see I thought there might’ve been some lyrical factor here that made it your worst. Phew! I have to say, “Electric Love” strikes me as incredibly sophisticated for a sixteen year-old. Drum tracking, that weird guitar interlude, the overdubbed soloing… how did you figure all this out at such a young age? Were you lucky enough to have someone who could show you?

MP: I appreciate the kind words, but I guess once a friend of mine said, “This song sounds like it’s about a vibrator”, I really couldn’t unhear it – and now this song gives me the ick! The drums aren’t real, in fact, I didn’t even know how to program drums, so I would play the drum pre-set on some sort of Yamaha keyboard I had at my Grandma’s house. Each key voiced a different part of the drum set, and after doing it for such a long time, I got pretty good at it. I recorded everything onto my father’s work computer (he was a grammar school principal) using Audacity, which was free at the time and perhaps still is…?

I think I was trying to emulate this Swedish rock band called Sahara Hotnights that I was really into, and that’s probably where the riff came from. I’m sure the spacey guitar interlude was some sort of nod to Smashing Pumpkins, which was basically all I listened to. I had only been playing guitar for like two years, but I had this crappy Digitech multi-effects pedal with a lot of voicings on it, so I was pretty obsessed with bouncing through all of the presets and basically just recording whatever sounded cool. I didn’t even have a proper microphone, I just used the internal mic that was on the computer, and once in a while I’d even use a set of headphones as a mic. No one taught me how to record, and I really don’t remember how I picked up the inclination to even discover operating a DAW, but I was so interested in songwriting. Once I got something working I was just… totally obsessed. A lot of bad songs came out of this period of my life, but a lot of good learning!

YGR: If you could offer one piece of advice to the sixteen year-old who wrote “Electric Love”, what would it be?

MP: “Hey kiddo, just change the words. Anything else with the same amount of syllables will do. No one will hear this song, so don’t even worry about it!”