Wilkenfeld, Tal

bassist, guitarist, singer-songwriter who has recorded and performed with Jeff Beck, Prince, Eric Clapton, Herbie Hancock, Mick Jagger, and many others

Tal Wilkenfeld: Music, Guitar, Bass, Jeff Beck, Prince, and Leonard Cohen

Lex Fridman Podcast · Jan 9, 2024

• Tal Wilkenfeld
• Jeff Beck
• Leonard Cohen
• Prince
• bass and guitar technique
• mentorship and grief
• meditation and spirituality
• songwriting process
• Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan
• flow state performance

Core ideas

Wilkenfeld frames her entire approach to live performance around "standing at the edge of the cliff," which she distinguishes sharply from recklessness: it's a deliberate embrace of uncertainty and real-time responsiveness rather than showing off rehearsed skill, because "at the edge of the cliff is all possibilities." She recounts auditioning for Jeff Beck despite having food-poisoning-induced hospitalization hours earlier, and describes their famous 2007 Crossroads Festival duet — where Beck spontaneously handed her the solo on his signature song "Cause We've Ended as Lovers," then bowed to her — as emblematic of his generosity as a musician who plays "for the music," not himself. She distinguishes "confidence" from what she prefers to call "trust": confidence risks becoming an ego-driven "brick wall" much like fear does, whereas trust is simply an open, unattached knowing that "I could do this" without self-mythologizing. She recalls one specific memory of post-show sadness over a single "bad note" at the Montreux Jazz Festival at age 21-22, comforted by festival owner Claude Nobs (invoking wisdom from Miles Davis) who jokingly, then literally, brought her caviar — a story she says fully cured her of dwelling on performance mistakes since.

She describes 2016-2017 as a devastating grief period after Prince's sudden death and, months later, Leonard Cohen's — the latter hitting hardest because their bond was spiritual as much as musical. She processed this grief unconventionally by embedding herself in the community of comedians at LA's Comedy Store (introduced by a friend), renting out her music gear to cover rent so she could remain financially and creatively unburdened, and says she "learned to laugh at absolutely anything" — a trait she credits partly to her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor with an intact sense of humor. This experience prepared her, she says, for grieving Jeff Beck's 2023 death differently: days before an Incubus tour, Green Day's Mike Dirnt (a friend) brought her a truckload of vintage basses to console her, and when she pulled out an Olympic White jazz bass — the same finish as one of Beck's iconic instruments — both of them wept; Dirnt gave her the bass outright, and she named it "Jeff."

On Leonard Cohen specifically, she recounts living at the Chelsea Hotel (subject of his song "Chelsea Hotel #2," about Janis Joplin) as the detail that first connected them, meeting his 105-year-old Zen teacher Roshi at a rehearsal (who tested her presence by asking "Where are you?" mid-handshake — she answered "In the handshake," passing the test), and Cohen's own writing process: he told her to reread a new lyric across many different emotional states over days or weeks (after a walk, high, after a fight, drunk, a week later) so the song would carry the broadest possible resonance — consistent with his reported ~80 draft verses for "Hallelujah" over roughly 15-20 years. She defends the explicit "giving me head on the unmade bed" line in "Chelsea Hotel #2" as one of the song's best, arguing Cohen's later reported regret was about the breach of Joplin's privacy, not the line's quality — noting he was famous for rewriting lyrics freely in live performance yet never changed that one.

On spirituality and grief more broadly, she distinguishes "giving a piece of yourself" to another person (which creates loss when that person is gone) from "opening yourself" to someone (which is loving without being depleting, since if you and others share the same underlying self, nothing is truly lost) — a framework she says lets her miss both Beck and Cohen without feeling diminished. She discusses an eclectic spiritual practice combining Zen monastery stays (long silent sits, minimal food and possessions, discipline without guaranteed answers), Vedanta study of the Upanishads (intellectually resonant, analytical), and Ken Wilber's Integral Theory/"spiral dynamics" (the idea that all spiritual and religious traditions represent stages of a shared developmental path toward self-realization) — and maintains a daily meditation practice, including mandating 20 minutes of silent group meditation with her touring band before every show, which she says produces a noticeably more connected performance.

On learning and craft, she describes practicing only 30 minutes a day as a teenager (parental restriction) and compensating by visualizing the fretboard and rehearsing entirely in her head — a technique she later learned was validated by neuroscience research (cited via Andrew Huberman) showing the brain replays practiced material 20-30x faster during short rest intervals, which is also why she practices in short bursts with deliberate pauses rather than marathon sessions, and why she still writes songs mentally (now mostly lyrics, since "there's so much music in the world" already) during mundane activities. She emphasizes slowing a phrase down to its most minute physical and emotional details — exact finger pressure, angle, intention — as the way a note's full expressive potential survives being played fast later, likening it to sitting with difficult emotions rather than rushing past them. She is largely self-taught but credits direct, unspoken transmission from mentors (Anthony Jackson, Jeff Beck, Leonard Cohen, Wayne Shorter) as something YouTube can't fully replace, and defines good mentorship as supportive space-holding rather than "Whiplash"-style harshness, arguing that anyone truly driven already has their own internal critic and doesn't need an external one — though she notes discipline-based coaching may suit sport differently from art, since art isn't about technical perfection.

On genre and technique, she rejects any real distinction between electric and upright bass, slap vs. fingerstyle, or genre "rules" as absolute — citing her mentor Anthony Jackson's total refusal to slap-bass on principle as one legitimate stylistic stance among many — and argues a musician's distinct "voice" comes as much from their choices as from what they choose not to do, or even from real technical limitations turned into style (citing Hendrix's large hands enabling his thumb-over-the-neck technique). She recounts recording with Prince on his 1998 trio project (later released as an EP, Welcome 2 America-era band work) as her first experience of someone else deliberately keeping her "on the edge of the cliff" — full takes with no tape punch-ins, since Prince believed "whatever happened happened... let's make a new moment in time." She singles out Jimi Hendrix (whose guitar and voice functioned as "two voices combined into one"), Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen as favorites precisely because their singing doesn't sound conventionally polished, prioritizing raw authenticity of expression over vocal technique.

She closes reflecting on impermanence — she has felt at peace with mortality since her early 20s, believing she has "put my everything" into what she's already done — and defines love, in the Vedantic sense she studies, as effectively synonymous with consciousness itself, the one truly permanent thing amid life's impermanence. Her advice to young people is to "tackle the demons as early as possible" through whatever means (art, meditation, journaling), because avoided fears only grow larger over time. The episode closes with two live acoustic performances of her original songs, "Under the Sun" and "Killing Me."

Excerpts