Premiere: tripliciti’s ‘Journey of Love’ is visually and aurally beautiful

tripliciti. // photo credit Pat Johnson

Local fans of acoustic fingerpicked guitar are sure to be familiar with Topeka’s Andy McKee, whose viral videos have led to a diverse and exciting career, including performing with Prince. McKee’s latest musical outing sees him joining with fellow musicians Calum Graham and Trevor Gordon Hall for a project called tripliciti. The fingerstyle guitar trio’s self-titled debut released in early April, and has garnered ecstatic responses from the likes of Steve Lukather, among others.

Alongside the album’s release, tripliciti has put out a series of videos that see the trio performing their gorgeous melodies in a variety of visually stunning locations.

We’re excited to premiere the latest, for the track, “Journey of Love,” below, along with an interview from tripliciti’s Andy McKee about the band and the new video.

The Pitch: What brought the three of you together?

Andy McKee: A music festival in Pennsylvania! I think it was around 2015 or so. We were all performing at this acoustic-centric festival and we just hit it off straight away. We realized pretty quickly that we’re all goofballs but we have a real affinity for instrumental guitar music, we all admired each others playing, ya know?

Given the fact that you are all road dogs, when did you find the time to write and record?

Over the years we’ve had some chances to play on the road together, either I’d be out with Calum or Trevor or sometimes they would have shows together too. Whenever we had those opportunities, we would pick a couple of tunes from each guys repertoire and then come up with parts to accompany each other as encore pieces. We really enjoyed that and thought “Man, everything sounds so good, we oughta get these tracks recorded!”

We took some time out in the summer of 2022 to record at an incredible studio in Connecticut, it was built in an old barn that had been refurbished and designed by the same guy that engineered the record, Corin Nelsen. He did some work with Windham Hill back in the day, he really set the album over the top. I can’t believe how great the record sounds!

You’ve made tabs available for all the songs on the album. How important was it to you all that your fans could learn these songs themselves?

Man, I can tell you, it was really hard to find tablature or sheet music for the guitarists I was into in the late ’90s. Guys like Michael Hedges, Don Ross, Stephen Bennett, or Preston Reed. The internet helped turn that around and I’m happy to try and help people learn this stuff if they’re interested!

We all have some teaching background, and to this day I host an annual guitar camp called “Musicarium”. We’ve done it for almost a decade now in California, New York, and Tennessee. I always have Calum and Trevor as guest instructors as they’re great at explaining what they do on the guitar.

Where have you shot these music videos? They’re remarkably simple, but the venues in which you perform really complement the music without drawing away from your performance chops.

Thanks, man! We shot them kinda all over the place. Earlier you mentioned being road dogs, well one side benefit of that is that you will always have new and interesting places to shoot videos, hahaha! Some of the locations we shot video were Orange County, CA; Montreal, Quebec, Nashville, TN; and more. One of the considerations for the videos is that we didn’t want anything to distract from the music. Sometimes we use unusual techniques or instruments, but we wanted the music itself to be front and center.

With all three of you having deep discographies, does a tripliciti live show focus mainly on these new songs, or do you take on each other’s repertoire?

It’s mostly the stuff from the album, but we try to leave some space for each guy to play solo a bit too. Since our fans know each of us individually as soloists, we wanted to keep a bit of that in the show as well.

What plans do you have for the rest of the year?

World domination. Hahaha, actually, we just hope that enough people catch wind of this project and give it a listen. Honestly, I think a lot of people might benefit from listening to instrumental guitar music. The world seems a bit intense and difficult to navigate these days and for me, nothing helps more than disconnecting and disappearing into music that has some real humanity to it.

We did our best to capture something accessible yet full of wonder, we love trying to tell stories without words, ya know? As far as touring, we’re all a bit busy with our solo careers but we’re lining up some dates in the fall/winter of 2024 and 2025.