In rock and pop songs, most solos are played on guitar or keyboard, though occasionally the bassist and drummer gets chances to shine. However, these six artists chose pretty unconventional instruments (for rock and pop music, anyway) to play them on. Here are six great songs with solos on unusual instruments.
1. Belle & Sebastian - "Mayfly" (1996)
Belle & Sebastian isn't quite a standard rock band. There are seven official members, and while they play traditional rock instruments like guitar, bass, and piano, they frequently use nontraditional rock instruments such as cellos, tin whistles, and in the 1996 song "Mayfly," a stylophone, which is a tiny, electronic toy instrument played with a stylus.
2. The Replacements - "I Will Dare" (1984)
One of the most famous uses of mandolin in pop music came from Peter Buck in R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion," but he must have gotten the idea from the Replacements when he made a guest appearance on their song "I Will Dare" seven years earlier. After Buck plays a great rockabilly guitar solo, Paul Westerberg brings in a mandolin and plays a bouncy riff for the rest of the song.
3. Cap'n Jazz - "Basil's Kite" (1994)
One of the great things about Cap'n Jazz is what a glorious mess it all is, with moments of pure genius counteracted by absurd juvenile silliness. An excellent example of this is the song "Basil's Kite," which is a beautiful punk anthem for about a minute and a half before singer Tim Kinsella comes in with a hilariously atonal French horn solo. I had always assumed that this was a trumpet until I saw the band perform it live, though Kinsella plays the French horn upside down, which makes it even funnier.
4. Simon & Garfunkel - "Cecilia" (1970)
Though Bridge Over Troubled Water was Simon & Garfunkel's most sophisticated record, the duo stuck to a simple, playful arrangement for the album's third track "Cecilia," which has a percussion loop based on a drum circle that Paul Simon captured on a tape recorder. After the song's second chorus, Simon recorded a solo by playing random notes on a xylophone, an instrument he was unfamiliar with. The track was then mixed so that no specific xylophone notes could be distinguished, since it would have sounded like an atonal mess otherwise.
5. Talking Heads - "Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town" (1977)
Right from the beginning, Talking Heads was one of the strangest and most experimental pop groups of its time. On 1977's "Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town," the first track on the band's first album, there's not just one but two steel drum solos, after the first two choruses.
6. Neutral Milk Hotel - "Engine" (1998)
The bands in the Elephant 6 Collective are known for taking their love of '60s psych-pop to an avant-garde extreme, often mixing in noise pieces with their pop gems. Neutral Milk Hotel often used unusual instrumentation, most notably singing saw, which is literally a saw played with a violin bow, creating a haunting, theremin-like sound. On the song "Engine," the B-side to "Holland, 1945," Julian Koster uses his singing saw to open and close the song.
