Joe Satriani Interview - November 2010

I conducted a lengthy telephone interview with Joe Satriani in November 2010. He called me from Madrid. Joe was very gracious with his time and I was able to spin two separate articles out of our conversation. The shorter of the two pieces can still be found online at http://www.guitar.com/articles/future-joe-satriani. The original assignment was for Crawdaddy so I gave them a much longer piece that contained what I thought was probably the more interesting stuff that Joe and I had discussed, with the more guitar-centric content going to guitar.com. The following article appeared on Crawdaddy.com in January 2011. -rh


***


Twenty years ago you couldn’t swing a dead cat without knocking down a dozen guitarists who were high on flash and long on speed. Sailing smoothly above the fray as he did even way back then, it’s no surprise to find Joe Satriani still going strong and making some of the most adventurous music of his career. With Black Swans And Wormhole Wizards, Satriani spotlights an unusual variety of tonal textures from the middle eastern vibe of “The Golden Room” to the ethereal, spacey soundscapes of “Wind In The Trees”. The virtuoso guitarist makes confident strides into previously uncharted territory with his fourteenth record, including among this sparkling set of new mood pieces a gospel-tinged ballad of striking beauty called “Littleworth Lane”.

Satriani says “organic” is the key word when it comes to describing his creative process. “When I’m in my home studio working by myself all I’m doing is really trying to connect with the inspiration behind the song. I can turn around and plug into a variety of amplifiers that seem to sync up and support this feeling that I have, the story that I want to tell.”

In the studio with the band, Joe tries to keep the organic vibe alive with the assistance of Mike Fraser. “We move into the second phase when the band starts to hear the music,” he goes on to say, “and we start to add their tracks to previously recorded guitar stuff that was done at my house. That’s where the engineer and co-producer Mike Fraser really has a great, positive influence over us as a band. He helps us to achieve our goal of keeping that organic feel and making sure that all the tones evolve in the best possible way for each of the players.” With drummer Jeff Campitelli, bassist Allan Whitman, and the multi-instrumental mastery of former Zappa band member Mike Keneally on keyboards, Satriani has recruited the most phenomenal sidemen imaginable for his current band.

No Chicken Little when it comes to the unpredictable ups and downs of the music industry, Satriani speaks calmly of the unending upheaval therein. “Ever since I started in the music business when I was 14 years old it’s been chaos, you know? I started to educate myself about the music business. I found that ever since 1900 there’s been a series of upheavals where new people become franchised and another group of people become disenfranchised at the same time. Currently, the trend with the internet in full swing is doing just what publishing did at the turn of the century and the advent of recording did a few decades later.” Laughing, he concedes, “We never have a shortage of this feeling like ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ in our business!”

Satriani’s virtuosity and unique vision have guided him through much more recent changes in the public’s passing fancy, leaving him and few other guitar instrumentalists standing after the 80s metal craze came to a close. “I remember back when I was working on the idea of a solo guitar career,” he reminisces, “I refused to be a ‘shredder’”. He was turned down many times before getting signed by Relativity Records. Even then, Satch laughs, “The president of the label turned to me and said ‘Your record: I don’t get it. Where’s all the shredding?’ And I had to tell him that’s not what I am. I’m a rock artist, not a ‘shred’ artist. I’m not heavy metal. I celebrate all forms of music and, admittedly, it’s sort of a broad approach, you know?”

Having already released his first record on his own label in 1986, Relativity put out Joe’s breakthrough LP Surfing With The Alien the following year. All these years later, Satriani still marvels at the record’s unlikely success against long odds. “Somehow, while Michael Jackson and Motley Crue were battling for number one, out came this record of mine and it sort of caught the imagination of a lot of people. And it was my sophomore effort, which I thought was really interesting because usually that’s where a lot of new artists fall apart. But people picked up on my second album and it was just the right record for people to like because I really liked it too. Because nothing’s worse than getting popular for something you hate, you know?”

Enjoying some unexpected laughs on this leisurely stroll down memory lane, Satch feels for those artists who reluctantly do a pop song and all of a sudden it becomes a big hit. “They’re kinda stuck with it for the rest of their career. But Surfing With The Alien was the right record for me to hit a home run with because I still love playing those songs to this day.”

Though he’s already begun to collaborate with Sammy Hagar for the next Chickenfoot album (the band reconvenes to begin recording in January), Joe doesn’t like to divide his attention by thinking about other projects when he’s on the road. “When I’m on tour”, he says, “it really is difficult to clear the set that you’re going to play that very evening from your head and work on an entirely different set of music. I find it actually not a pleasant mental experience. I like to devote my life on tour to just the live show. That’s all I like to think about: How to improve it every night. And then once I get time off I can easily switch off the tour and say ‘Now I’m home. Now I can write for the next gig’.”

When pressed, Satch did admit to being interested in maybe someday doing an acoustic record or perhaps something with chamber musicians. “That’s kind of been done a million times by every guitarist,” he notes. “But I’d like to do something where the guitar is more properly integrated into what we would consider to be a symphonic arrangement. I would want to write all original music for it and that would take quite a lot of time. In between my solo stuff and Chickenfoot right now I don’t think it’s gonna be coming in the next year or so.”

Having just wrapped up several weeks of touring in Europe, Satriani and his band are on tour in the US through December and on into the new year.