Mixing Things Up, Joe Satriani

It was pretty humorous when the end of October came last year and we said ‘We’re stopping the tour.’ It was kind of like a built-in joke, but we were really just pausing,” an affable Satriani says, reflecting on life after releasing last year’s Unstoppable Momentum album, his 14th.

"We’re stopping the tour.’ It was kind of like a built-in joke, but we were really just pausing"

Joe says the truncated tour, which is about to finally make its way Down Under, was a result of everyone in his touring ensemble’s hectic schedules, and all the other projects Joe had on the boil. “We had so many other things to do, I was really grateful to have everybody in the band give me the amount of time they gave me, but they had to go off and do work with their other bands and I had to do Chickenfoot and do stuff on my animated series, so I was grateful to be able to shift gears for a few months.”

Hold on, woah, woah, woah… Back up there Joe. An animated series?

“Yeah, it’s a digital animation series. I’ve been writing a script with my collaborator Ned Evett, who’s a fellow musician and has toured with me a lot. We came up with this sci-fi series based on some drawings I published in 2013 and I’ve been concentrating myself more on the artwork and the music and Ned has been more into the digital animation and has been the head writer, and we’re very close to having that pilot finished. And we’re hoping to get the series picked up by Adult Swim or FX or something like that.

“Brendon Small [the creator of Metalocalypse] has been great; he’s sort of been our mentor in this… We’re keeping the story under wraps until we know who exactly is going to be with us in the final production, but you can be sure there’s some guitar playing involved: intergalactic guitar playing, ya’know.”

Back behind the fretboard Satriani has been writing stuff for his next solo record, and there’s also good news for fans of his work with supergroup Chickenfoot, who are getting together to work on a follow-up to their 2011 record.

“After I got off the road, I really got down to focusing on writing for Chickenfoot. And I wrote a large number of tracks and condensed them down to ten songs and sent the demos to everybody, and we’re in the process now of reviewing all the songs that we’ve got and we start to try and figure out a schedule… And that’s always the hardest thing, so I can’t actually say when we’re going to get into the studio, but I do know that we’re very close to figuring that out. Because the music is there and we’re all onboard.”

So, when his various projects allow, how much is he still practising his chops? “I think early on when I was a player I realised through teaching, there were some gifts that I did not have and that my students did. I could see them. As a 16-year-old giving a lesson to a 12-year-old, I’d be amazed. I’d go ‘Wow, this kid learned faster than I did,’ and that was the point that I realised that I’m the kind of guy that needs to practise. And so I’ve been busy doing that ever since I was a teenager. I was busy doing that earlier today – I was working on techniques and thinking about what I could do to make the show more interesting for myself and the fans and see if I can push the technical barriers a little bit. It’s just something I love though, so it’s a passion for me. But I still work on it every day.”

"you know what works and how to make the songs sound better in the live arena"

Satriani says all that constant practice means that come November the songs off Unstoppable Momentum will sound better because he and the band have had more time with them.

“I think with us you can count on us to stretch out and try some things that we haven’t tried before. Because when you start out, everybody’s learning how to play the new material, especially me. I wrote it, but I didn’t spend a lot of time playing it. So when those first few months of the tour come you’re trying to figure out how you can play all of those guitar parts live, and then later on in the tour you’ve got all this experience and you know what works and how to make the songs sound better in the live arena. And that relaxes you, and that’s the best thing, because then everyone is in the mood to be a bit more exploratory with their playing.”