onathan Segel started on guitar at seven and picked up a violin at ten — mostly because of a crush on a girl who played one, and by his own account he wasn’t very good at it. He kept going anyway. Walking across a quad at UC Santa Cruz not long after, violin in hand, he was stopped by some kids who’d just moved their band up from Redlands, California — Camper Van Beethoven and the Border Patrol. He joined in 1984.

His violin became the sound that set Camper Van Beethoven apart from everything else in the mid-’80s American underground, cutting through the ska breaks and punk snarl of Telephone Free Landslide Victory and “Take the Skinheads Bowling.”

It didn’t last, not the first time. Clashes with frontman David Lowery pushed Segel out in 1989, a year before the band broke up. He’s summed it up with dry humor: “The singer gets to keep the band.”

Segel spent the ‘90s in San Francisco’s experimental underground, later earned a master’s in composition at Mills College under Fred Frith and Pauline Oliveros, and toured for years with Mark Linkous in Sparklehorse. He rejoined Camper Van Beethoven in 1999 and never left again.

“I’ve been playing guitar longer than I’ve actually been playing violin,” he told Paste in 2012. Ask him to define the band’s genre-hopping sound, and he keeps it simple: “It’s rock music, even with all the other things thrown in.”

He’s still going: this June (2026) he released Puzzle World, a new solo record, with guests including Scott McCaughey and John Moen. He’s called a lot of musicians his age “going to seed” — which, for him, sounds more like a late, stubborn bloom.