Virginia Beach guitarist paints landscapes in new instrumental album

There are no words on Dustin Furlow’s new album, “Woodscapes,” but there are lots of pictures.

The 25-year-old songwriter said the landscapes form a travelogue of recent hiking and camping trips. They take the form of finger-picked guitar instrumentals that hearken to his experiences in nature.

“That’s really one of the unifying themes on the album,” Furlow said. “I wrote about two-thirds of these songs about my experiences in the Shenandoah Mountains, the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, and the Cascades in Washington. It really is about painting a landscape with an acoustic guitar.”

Hence, “Woodscapes.”

Furlow was born in San Diego and has lived in Hampton Roads since he was 7. The Virginia Beach resident has become a fixture on the local music scene, playing shows by himself and as a duo with harp-guitarist Matt Thomas.

His first two CDs, “The Sound That You Call Home” and “Solo,” mixed instrumentals and songs with lyrics. He can sing, and he knows that songs featuring vocals are more accessible to most audiences than instrumentals.

But he has been working diligently at his fingerstyle playing and felt confident enough to put out a full album featuring nothing but strings at his fingertips. He recorded “Woodscapes” at Cimirron/Rainbird studio in York County with producer Kim Person, who has recorded with acoustic music for 40 years and who has worked with some of Furlow’s finger-picking idols, such as Stephen Bennett and Tommy Emmanuel.

“Dustin is coming along really well, and I can see him growing with his melodies and his compositional skills,” Person said. “He’s making a path into the acoustic music world, and he’s becoming a force to be reckoned with. It’s about being able to express your innermost feelings using only wood and steel strings or nylon strings.”

Furlow picked up the guitar at age 11, turned on by the sounds of rockers like Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana. Fate intervened when he was 17, in the form of a friend’s iPod. Furlow chose to start listening to the library at the top — alphabetically, by the artist’s first name. The first artist was Andy McKee, a fingerstyle guitarist who got his start as a YouTube sensation.

“The first time I heard him play, that was my ‘light bulb’ moment,” Furlow said. “It blew my mind and set me on a different path. I knew immediately that this was exactly what I wanted to do.

“I had been playing electric guitar for so long that I had it in my mind, the only way for music to be satisfying is to be in a band, which seemed out of reach. But Andy McKee showed me that you can cover rhythm and bass and melody and all that beautiful playing if you put time into it. He’s a virtuoso, and he can sound like three different guitars playing at the same time. I thought, ‘Wow, I can sit here and play music that sounds like a whole package.’ It was something to aim for.”

One of the songs on “Woodscapes” is a tribute called “Andy’s Gift.” Another, titled “Abigail’s Lullaby,” is a song he hopes to play for his baby daughter one day — many years from now, he stresses.

But most of the songs are about places he has been — “Cherokee Lake” and “Skykomish River,” for example, and “Strange New World,” about his first trip to the Shenandoah Valley.

“The Skykomish runs through the Cascade Mountains, and it’s eerie and beautiful,” he said. “And the Shenandoahs, the first time you see that skyline is just amazing. I’m very much into the great outdoors — it’s my second passion, after music.”

He’s already got several new instrumental compositions ready for his next CD, and he is pleased with the progress he is making with his fingerstyle playing.

“It really is about painting a picture,” he said. “Songwriters traditionally write about things like relationships and breakups, but I have a deep appreciation for music that transports you. That’s my goal on ‘Woodscapes,’ and it’s always my goal when I’m composing a song. I want to transport you somewhere and really make you feel it.”

Dustin Furlow

Virginia Beach guitarist Dustin Furlow’s new CD, “Woodscapes,” is available on his website, dustinfurlow.com.

His next local show, with Matt Thomas, is at 7 p.m. June 26 at Decoys Seafood, 3305 Ferry Road, Suffolk. 757-977-1081, decoysseafood.com.