Gyan Riley is still (guitar) crazy after all these years.

The SFCM guitar alum recently wrapped up a tour backing Paul Simon, but journeying around for four months with one of the biggest pop stars of the 20th century is par for the course for Riley, who since graduating in 2001 has built an incredibly varied career.

Riley arrived at SFCM "hungry for knowledge" about the guitar, which he started playing at 11 when he won his first instrument in a raffle. "At the time, I just couldn't get enough of learning about the instrument," he says. "I wasn't career-minded or anything, it was just about the music and I had some great teachers who were inspiring in that regard."

"Studying at SFCM helped me in terms of career focus and preparation," he explains. "My major teachers, [Guitar Department Chair] David Tannenbaum and Dušan Bogdanović, literally brought me onstage with them, and that gave me some real experience to hang on to before I actually graduated. Being involved with watching how they prepared for a concert and approached life as a professional artist was really helpful for me," Riley adds. "There were a lot of nuances that I didn't really know about before studying with either one of them."

Riley moved to New York in 2010 wanting to get as much varied experience as possible. "I wanted to sort of scrap the idea that you have to maintain a certain career status and fee structure," he says, "and just tried to get as much performance experience as possible." He did that by immersing himself in the Brooklyn music scene, going to (and playing) as many shows as he could, gathering contact info and building connections. "I would take all these little gigs, and a lot of them didn't pay or they paid very little," he continues. "I was schlepping my amp down on the subway platform like five times a week, and it really sucked, but I was younger then and so it was fine," he laughs.

Part of his shoe-leather approach was reconnecting with Mark Stewart, a founding member of the NYC performance group Bang on a Can All-Stars, who had become Paul Simon's music director in 1998, just a few years before Riley met him. "I sat in with his group while I was still in school, and we just really hit it off," Riley explains. "We did some little projects and duo performances and there's just a really strong mutual respect there; we love playing together."

To tour behind Simon's album Seven Psalms, Stewart had to figure out how to play the complex compositions live, and ended up, according to Riley, "basically transcribing the whole record" to assemble a band around. Simon has been battling hearing loss since 2020 and asked Stewart for another guitarist. "Mark immediately was like, 'I got the guy,' and he called me," Riley recalls. "That was probably a year and a half, almost two years ago now that he first called me. I flew out and met Paul, and then every few months we'd get together and hash out some ideas in terms of performing the pieces live."

Riley admits that he wasn't an expert on  Simon's solo catalog, but ended up finding common ground with the lauded guitarist's technique and, as a composer himself, Simon's songwriting tricks. "One of the things I was fascinated by is how much more classical guitar-adjacent his playing is than I realized," Riley says. "He plays with his nails, there's a lot of nylon string guitar on his recordings and there's just a certain sensibility that's closer to classical guitar than I realized."

"It was also really interesting to me to discover how eccentric a lot of his music is," he adds. "There's so many odd subtleties that I just wasn't aware of; things you might not notice when you have a casual listen. But when you get down to learning the tunes, you realize, 'Wow, that's kind of bizarre, and I love it!' I'm continually surprised and impressed by the depth of his creativity, it's pretty stunning."

Simon is hardly the only iconic musician Riley's worked with. As a composer he's written music for the Kronos Quartet, the Carnegie Hall Corporation, and the American Composers Forum, among others, and he's performed with Indian tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain, Lou Reed, John Zorn, Bill Frisell, the Kronos Quartet, Devendra Banhart, fellow SFCM alum Julian Lage, Nico Muhly, Glenn Kotche, Grammy Award-winning singer Arooj Aftab.

Remembering back to what led him as a teenage guitarist to SFCM, Riley says, "I was really hungry for knowledge; I just wanted to learn everything I could about classical guitar and the history and technique and anything else that to do with it." But, he adds, "I did have in the back of my mind, 'Oh, I do want to do this professionally'—because why wouldn't you?"

Learn more about studying guitar at SFCM.