Polyphia Guitarist Tim Henson on ‘F1’ Score, Kirk Hammett

Guitar fans — especially Gen-Z ones —  need no introduction to 31-year-old virtuoso Tim Henson, who has been reinventing the instrument for more than a decade with his wildly experimental future-prog quartet Polyphia, who play fractured, trippy instrumentals that often seem more influenced by hip-hop, electronic music, and even video-game soundtracks than rock. He also sparked one of the biggest six-string controversies of the decade a few years back when he playfully coined the phrase “boomer bends” to describe the blues-rock string-bending techniques he’s mostly moved beyond in his own playing.

Even as Polyphia continue work on their fifth studio album, Henson recently finished his highest-profile work outside the band, laying down guitar parts for Hans Zimmer‘s score to the Brad Pitt-starring blockbuster F1. He recently sat down with Rolling Stone to discuss that score, the new album, and his thoughts on Kirk Hammett‘s comments on his playing. ( “I really like his style,” Hammett told Rolling Stone Music Now.  “It’s really unique, and in terms of technique, it’s amazing. But then, it’s the age-old question: How relatable is it? It’s good to listen to, like, three or four times. Can you really relate?”)

So how did you hook up with Hans Zimmer for the F1 soundtrack?
So basically our tour manager, Joe, is friends with Hans’s guitar tech, and Joe told me that he’s gonna go see Hans perform, and he asked me if I wanted to gift him one of my nylon guitars. I was like, “Oh, that’s a wonderful idea.” So we had Ibanez hook it up, and I left him my phone number and my email with the guitar. Then a week later, I get an email from Hans in my inbox and I tripped the fuck out! He said, “Dearest Tim, you know that I’ve been a humble fan of yours for ages.” He said how excited he was about the guitar and how he wants to work on something. I was just reading this email in disbelief, and he attached a picture of himself with the guitar and with Guthrie [Govan], who is my favorite guitar player. My favorite guitar player and my favorite composer posing together with my signature guitar! I was like, “This is a fucking awesome picture. I gotta frame this!” 

I live in Dallas, but I go out to L.A. every month or two and the next trip that I took, I just emailed Hans and I was like, “Hey, I’m gonna be in town for the next two days. Let me know if you want to link up.” He was like, “Yeah, can you come to the studio today?” I dropped what I was doing that day and went immediately there. It was fucking incredible — he told me his studio is modeled after a brothel somewhere in Europe. To me it looked more like a Catholic church. What a beautiful brothel! But he showed me the F1 film that day. He explained what he was looking for and I said, “I would love to be involved.”

But it didn’t actually happen at that point?
That was in November of last year. Then I remembered him telling me that they needed to turn the score in by April. So it was the end of February and just in the back of my mind, I was just like, “Dude, you gotta fucking hit Hans up. You can’t squander this opportunity.” So I worked up the courage to send an email of “Hey, just let me know whenever you’re ready to get started on that.” He gets back to me immediately and he was like, “Yeah, no, let’s do it.” We get the flights booked and I go straight there.

And you were working on the next Polyphia album at the time, right?
Actually we had a two-week session in Miami, and that entails a lot of smoking weed and a lot of being in the hot tub and a lot of playing basketball. It’s just a really awesome way to make music because there’s so much play involved. It never feels like work. I immediately left Miami and went straight to L.A. It was such a different atmosphere because at Hans’s studio it’s very secured.

There are a lot of layered instruments on the finished score. Where can we hear your playing most clearly?
All the really crazy racing scenes are where the coolest stuff happens musically. Obviously in a Hans Zimmer score, there’s so much emotion being pulled in every direction. So you’ve got these really beautiful, long, flowy, sweeping passages that build and create tension and the heart center, and then you’ve got these more musically flashy pieces that really allow the synth work to drive towards just making big climactic moments. 

Were you pretty much improvising? Did he have anything written for you?
Very much, a lot of what I did was layering up the synth lines with guitars. So my versions sound like the soundtrack just on a guitar. But also, lots of cool little nuanced things that if you were to peel back the layers of all the orchestra and all the crazy bells and whistles of the sound design, you’d be like, “Oh, wow, that’s a cool little guitar thing that I didn’t know was there.” Lots of, the more you listen, the more you’ll find cool little Easter eggs and things.

And you don’t use a physical amp, right, only digital emulation?
I was using mostly Neural DSP. Mostly my [own] plug-in. A bit of the Cory Wong plugin. But what was really interesting was the guitar, I mostly used a guitar from Hans, and this guitar is a Telecaster shape, but it’s made out of metal. So it has this super percussive sound to it, which, I have a very percussive playing style. 

So in some cases you were replacing demo guitar parts or layering over them?
The demo guitar parts are MIDI notes through a [synth sound] that’s supposed to represent what the guitar should maybe do. Then adding, of course, adding my own flair.

It sounds like you’re playing much simpler stuff than you’d play on your own records. Was that a challenge?
It’s really important to understand who you’re making it for and what you’re making. In this context, my job is to serve the movie. In the context of Polyphia, my job is to just make crazy shit: “Let’s just make it crazy as fuck, and I don’t care about anybody else’s opinion about this because I’m trying to make it cool for me.” It’s a very selfish approach to creation. It’s just, I’m doing this ’cause I think it’s dope and that’s it. I don’t care about anybody else’s opinion. Then you come to something on the far opposite end of the spectrum. There’s the director. After the director, it’s the audience. How are we moving these notes to make the audience feel something? A lot of the times, simplicity is gonna be more moving than complexity. So it’s taking into consideration what I’m there for, what my job is, and how I can best serve the music for the movie.

Has this made you interested in doing more of this kind of work?
Oh, absolutely. I am ready and hot to make more stuff in the film industry. Hans is Lion King, The Dark Knight, all the incredibly iconic things from my childhood and adolescence. Working with the master — just such an incredible bucket-list thing, and I have a taste for it now. I’m excited to dive into the pool of working in film. I gotta do more. I’m very excited for the future and what that holds. I would love to be more involved in the composing aspect as opposed to pulling up and it’s already a beautiful score.

I’ve been trying my hand at such a thing with my friend [composer] Bear McCreary, who does [the streaming series of] The Lord of the Rings and just a bunch of stuff. Over the past year we’ve developed this friendship where he’s been giving me the insider information on scoring and such, and even going as far as to give me the blank scenes with no music, where it’s just dialogue and people’s footsteps. So you’re just sitting there in front of the computer and creating a soundscape for a scene. One of the things that he told me that really stuck with me was, when you’re doing this, you want to ask the director, “How do you want this scene to make the audience feel?” That is your cue to build the soundscape. It’s almost reverse-engineering it. I’m excited to get out there and work more and learn more and just make dope shit.

There are a lot of reports about the next Polyphia album, and suggestions it might have people like Serj Tankian on it.
It’s an album that we are working on very diligently and we are very excited, and it’s pushing us in many ways to grow. I am not really doing the [guest singer] talk anymore because we don’t actually know which ones are gonna go on it. As I give too much information about it, it’s misleading to what it actually ends up becoming.

Is it fair to say it might have a wide variety of guests?
Yes. It also might even have none. Who knows? Now I’ve thrown that wrench in there. That comes from the further exploration of the record. Its final form may not be how it originally looked when we first started working on it. It is an ever-evolving process.

Leaving aside the guests, what are your goals for the next album, and do you have a timetable on it?
We wanna be finished by Halloween. We’ve actually put it in the calendar: “Album-finishing-party-slash-Halloween-party” on the 31st, because we’re gonna get drunk that night. Ideally we finish it then, but who knows? This is one of those things where it just might make us both look stupid, because it might not end up being that way. But that’s the goal. Musically, it’s heavy. It’s heavier than anything we’ve ever done. Sonically, it is the most sound-design-heavy thing we’ve ever done. 

At this stage, the concept is very much of creating something that interfaces between consciousness and reality. Music that almost induces out-of–body experiences, playing with frequencies that move your cells in a way that physically change the structure of your body by creating sound that affects you in a physical way. We’re playing with sound design in such a way that the frequencies are intended to evoke different states of consciousness.

When I talked to Kirk Hammett a couple months ago, I asked him about the thing where you called blues/rock string-bending “boomer bends.” His response was a mix of praise for your playing along with a suggestion that it might be inaccessible for a lot of listeners. Did you see this?
I did! I got a Google alert for Polyphia, and I was like, “Oh, what’s this with Kirk Hammett?” I click on it and I started reading and I’m just like, “Oh my God. This is a compliment and a diss at the same time from fucking Kirk Hammett!” [Fellow Polyphia guitarist] Scott [LePage] is a Metallica head. Scott’s father is the singer in Kill ‘Em All, which is a Metallica cover band. That’s what they do on the weekends. When Scott’s dad’s not at his job, he’s fucking doing a Metallica cover band. So Scott got sad. But I was happy because in an interview that Kirk Hammett was doing about Hammett activities and the world of Kirk Hammett, my name was brought up! So I’m happy about that and I appreciate you doing that. I appreciate that he even has thoughts about it. Kirk, if you are reading this one, thank you for the acknowledgement. You’re a fucking legend. Take us on tour, dude. Please. Seriously, man.. Let’s talk about it over a beer, maybe!