Joe Satriani and Steve Vai have toured together, played together and been lifelong friends. But it’s only been in the past couple of years that they finally formed their first band together.
SatchVai — featuring the two guitar legends plus guitarist Pete Thorn, bassist Marco Mendoza and drummer Kenny Aronoff — are currently in the middle oftheir debut North American trek, whichbegan in April in Seattle.
Animals as Leaders are opening the dates, which find the pair starting the night with a preview of three songs from their upcoming album, including “Dancing,” the latest single. As VaitellsUCR, they’ve been having a lot of fun working on the album, but as fans will hear, they’re not going to debut their new bossa nova sound.
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What to Expect From the SatchVai Album
“Primarily, if Joe and Steve get together to make a record, it’s going to be the celebration of the rock guitar,”Vaisays. “You know, there’s gonna be guitar. We didn’t sit down and say, ‘Okay, we’re gonna do something completely different. Nobody’s gonna even recognize it, like, something like David Bowie would do, or just a complete left turn.’
“We’re not those kind of animals, you know. But I feel that we raised each other’s bar a bit,” Vai continues. “Joe would send me an email. I’d see the email and say, ‘Okay, here we go.’ He’d say, ‘Well, okay, I put this solo down. What do you think?’ I’d listen and think, ‘My God, what am I going to do?’ Because it’s so great and so interesting.”
Watch Joe Satriani and Steve Vai’s ‘Dancing’ Video
Satriani washaving a similar experience on the other end, as he shared during a separate conversation with UCR.
“Every song that Steve would send me, the first thing I would say was something like, ‘Oh, that’s really cool.’ And then I go, ‘How am I going to play any of that?’ He figures out a way to to present me with stuff that I haven’t played before,” the guitarist explains. “Sometimes I’ll figure out a way of coming in sideways. But I think as we played on each other’s songs, or as we would contribute to the slow building of a song together over time, challenging each other was the key to making the album really fun to listen to, top to bottom.”
Satriani continues: “There was a song that turned out really great called ‘Bronco Freight Train.’ And it started with these two or three parts that Steve had sent that didn’t really define themselves, other than, here’s an amazing Steve Vai intro and here’s an amazing Steve Vai riff, and then here’s this really cool little breakdown.”
That was enough for Satriani. “He said, ‘I don’t know if it’s a song, and maybe we shouldn’t do it.’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no. This is classic Steve Vai. We’re definitely doing it, just give me a couple of days. So I wound up writing… I kind of took his riff and simplified it a bit, and then I wrote a verse and a chorus,” he details. “And then I expanded the breakdown, which I thought was just such a beautiful solo section. I crossed my fingers and sent it back to him. I said, ‘What do you think?’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, that’s great — but what’s the melody going to be?'”
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In Vai’s opinion, the push-pull and challenging nature of the materialhe and Satriani havebeen sending each other is going to deliver some of the best music that fans have heard to date from either artist.
“This is the fuel for going deeper, you know, because the last thing I’m going to do is do something like he did,” Vai points out. “That’s not what people want. That’s not what I want. You want to be pushed into your own creative potential more and more. Most of the time, the most effective way [to accomplish that] is to work with people that are monsters. And Joe’s a monster, you know? It helped me to push myself into even more Vai-isms. So it’s a great record. I think the fans are going to really hear that intertwining guitar elixir kind of thing and the camaraderie and the melodies. So I’m very excited about it.”
How Working With Vai InformsSatriani’s Own Material
AsSatriani and Vai have been working on the upcoming SatchVai album, the former has also been considering a follow-up to his most recent solo album, 2022’sThe Elephants of Mars.
“I think in many ways, Steve and I are similar in that when we’re working on one thing, it inspires us to imagine something completely opposite,”Satrianisays. “Steve’s talked a lot about [how] he’s been working on an acoustic vocal album for a while, and that’s the complete opposite of everything that he’s been putting out in the last couple of years.
“And I certainly have entertained the idea of trying to strip down my production ideas quite a bit. I think I was starting to go down that road with Shapeshifting and What Happens Next,” Satriani shares. “But during a period of the pandemic where a lot of people were working remotely, [that] sort of lended itself towards not being recorded live in a room, because people couldn’t be together as much as we wanted to be.
“So people started layering a lot more because they were working remotely. They’d be by themselves in the studio and they’d say, ‘Okay, keyboards, organs, strings, synthesizers, tambourine, acoustic banjo.’ So I started to think [differently]. The Elephants of Mars, I had such an intense time making that record,” he explains. “I thought, ‘Next time I go out, I think I want to do something really stripped down, a power trio or something like that.'”
But come 2024, Satriani also found himself on the road with Sammy Hagar and Michael Anthony as part of the Van Halen-centric Best of All Worlds Tour.
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“The workwith Sammyand Mike sort of intervened, and then this work with Steve kind of intervened,” the guitarist says. “So now I’m not really sure where I would go next. But I have a lot of songs written that could go in either direction, where there’s a lot of production or there’s very little production. Honestly, I don’t know where I’m leaning yet.”
Listen toJoe Satriani and Steve Vai’s ‘The Sea of Emotion, Pt. 1’
When Will the SatchVai Album Come Out?
Three songs off the forthcoming SatchVai album have been released so far, including the Glenn Hughes collaboration “I Wanna Play My Guitar.”A release date for the 10-song project will be announced in the future, but both guitarists are excited by everything that’s happened so far.
“Wedidn’t plan on forming a band, but we kind of knew it’s probably inevitable,” Vai says. “But when it happened, it happened very organically, smoothly, transparently and beautifully. So that’s a great move forward. Plan only to do what feels right when the time feels right.
“It’s hard to talk about the future. I [can] tell you thoughts and ideas and goals and stuff, but we have no idea what’s going to happen,” he continues. “But in the process of making this music, yeah, we had a lot of songs. I think we had like, 18 tracks. Most of them were completed, pretty much, and some of them were just demos that we each made.”
Picking the winners, Vai says, was a simple matter of intuition.”Oneof the things that Joe and I just, without discussion, stuck by was when we both agreed on something, then it was the right thing,” he explains. “If one of us had a feeling about it, then it was no question. I would never try to talk him into liking a song or make a demand or something. You work together. When you both go, ‘Aha, that done,’ that’s [when you know].”
The forthcoming album is a testament to the guitar virtuosos’ irreplicable chemistry. “We could have had a 17-song record.So will they be reworked in the future? Who knows, but the making of a song for me with Joe Satriani is a pleasure,”Vai enthuses. “It’s fun, it’s creative. It’s something that I don’t know if it’s possible to do in the way we do it with anybody else, because of our connection and our similarity, our likes, these kinds of things.We thought, wouldn’t it be nice if we continued something like this in the future? But we both know that it just has to happen organically.”
The SatchVai tour continues through the end of May.
Watch Joe Satriani and Steve Vai’s ‘I Wanna Play My Guitar’ Featuring Glenn Hughes
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Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso