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My Favorite Picture of You

by Guy Clark • Lesson #268 • Nov 29, 2019

About This Lesson

In this video I’ll walk you through how I fingerpick Guy Clark’s song My Favorite Picture of You – which he released on his final studio album in 2013. This is a great song, with Clark describing the circumstances surrounding a spontaneous Polaroid taken of his wife a few decades ago.

Musically, this features fingerstyle guitar played in a very casual manner – primarily focusing on a change from A7sus4 → A7 → Dadd6 → D. I’ll explain how to play these chords, and give you plenty of tips on how to go about practicing this chords. In the back part of the lesson, I’ll show you the rough tab of how I play things – should you want to get a bit more advanced with it.

Note, you’ll need a capo on 2nd fret if you want to play along with Guy Clark’s version. Willie Nelson’s 2019 cover of this song uses a capo on the 3rd fret.

Here’s my timestamps for this lesson:

  • 0:00 Lesson overview
  • 3:08 Chord progression overview
  • 5:28 How to play the chords
  • 9:03 Playthrough: simple strums
  • 12:43 Playthrough: advanced tab
  • 20:39 Farewell & final advice

Practice Notes 3 pages

It includes all of my notes for this lesson, allowing you to follow along at your own pace. You're free to download, print, and share the PDF across your devices.

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Here's a print-friendly PDF I made with all of my practice notes for this lesson. This lets you follow along with everything I show in video tutorial at your own pace.

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Guy Clark’s telling of the tale

Here’s a short video of Guy Clark telling the story behind this song – i.e., him and Townes Van Zandt were drinking & acting afool, which lead to Clark’s wife storming out of the house. Where, chance would have it, a friend with a Polaroid camera was waiting. In this video he also performs the song. It’s absolutely not as sharp as the official album cut, but it’s still valuable in that it shows how a very stripped back, solo, and minimal performance of this song can still work. Enjoy!

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