The track centers on Cunningham’s soft fingerstyle guitar, with a string quartet and almost imperceptible bass and percussion. “I wanted it to feel like the eye of the storm,” she says. “Everything else has these more complex arrangements, and that song just needed to be a straight arrow.”
“Life According to Raechel” showcases the haunting sound of Cunningham’s Silvertone guitar with its rubber bridge, in standard tuning lowered to C. You can play her part with a regular guitar and even in E-to-E standard tuning—though I highly recommend trying C standard, which gives any guitar a very different identity.
The song uses chord shapes in G major, which sound in the key of Eb. For much of the verse, play the hypnotic Gadd4 pattern shown in the example, in which the third- and second-string pitches rub against each other a half step apart. On beats 2 and 4, tap on the soundboard with your pinky—that serves as the song’s pulse. “It’s funny to play the song without that little tap,” she says. “The magic goes away. For whatever reason, it’s foundational.”
Continue a similar picking pattern through much of the verse, before going to a light fingerstyle bass/strum on the chorus, a classic I–vi–IV–V progression. On the last line of the chorus, play a series of D voicings that double the vocal melody on top.
Some of the chord shapes shown, like the Em9, reflect the way Cunningham played this song solo in a recent Tiny Desk Concert for NPR. That performance is well worth watching for a closeup look at her sophisticated style on both acoustic and electric guitars.
