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and Heather Tackett Falduto on bass. Janet is all-around magnificent. She plays all
percussion. She's studied in Cuba with the Latin, with those masters down there.

She's done her time at the Kingston Mines and understands the music in a way that
that jazz guy who insulted me certainly did not. Anyway [chuckles], and then Heather
has played with the Mississippi artist Super Chikan for 20 years. She played with A.C.
Reed and Eddy Clearwater, and she's a phenomenal bassist and wonderful person.
The three of us have the band Tres Amigas, and it got started for me because I was

really dissatisfied with my guitar playing and I was really bored with myself and
everything that I did. So I thought to myself, well, what would excite me? What would
I like to do?

I really love Billy Gibbons' approach to guitar. He's the bandleader of ZZ Top, and
I've been following him for years of, you know,
what he's doing and how he's creating, and I
decided that I wanted to learn his style. When

I was becoming a singer, I would just take an
artist, choose an artist, and buy all their
records and sit down and learn their book.
Learn it in their key, learn all their licks, and

just walk around with the earbuds in and that
playing in my head 24/7 until I had copped
that style. I did that with so many different
singers that I was able to come up with my own

thing. But as a guitar player, I had always been
sort of the fill. I was the, what do they call it,
the pad in music production where I would
play the rhythm parts. I always played so that

the other person, the other guitarist in the
band could play the flowery fills and the leads
and the melodic stuff.

BiTS: Do you have a lot of guitars at your house? I mean, are you a guitar aficionado?

LM: I wouldn't call myself an aficionado, but I definitely am a collector and I'm a
Capricorn so that's native to my sign [laughs].

BiTS: I was watching a video of you performing in a club earlier on and you had a

rather nice white guitar.

LM: I wonder if that was my Ibanez. I have a beautiful Talman guitar my husband
bought me. I have a red Telecaster. I have a blue flower Telecaster. I have I think,
three Strats. But the last few years I've been playing Gibsons a lot. I really love my

SG. I love the way it fits my body, but for tone and quality, you just can't beat the Les
Paul [laughs].

BiTS: Liz, over the years, you must have played with hundreds of people. Are there
any artists that actually stood out as a performer when you were working with them?