Interview – Joe Satriani on What Happens Next, retiring his alien persona, and the return of Chickenfoot

Real life guitar hero Joe Satriani has left the cosmic realm behind. The highest-selling instrumental rock guitarist of all time made his name with sweeping metal / hard rock hybrid albums that were often tied to a science fiction theme, from his 1987 breakout LP Surfing with the Alien to 2015’s Shockwave Supernova. After officially retiring his space-faring alter-ego on the latter album, Satriani has returned with the appropriately titled What Happens Next, a stripped-down record influenced by the formative guitar players he worshipped growing up.

We caught up with the affable guitarist just after he had returned from a massive 70-date G3 tour (his collaborative guitarist tour which featured John Petrucci and Phil Collen on this run) to discuss what inspired his new direction, why he feels he isn’t as technically proficient as his peers, and what he thinks of all the “Rock is Dead” think pieces.

Joe Satriani brings his What Happens Next tour to Montreal’s MTelus on Friday, May 25th at 8:00 pm. Tickets are $60 in advance, available here. For all upcoming tour dates, visit the official Joe Satriani site.

What Happens Next is a more stripped-down album than anything you’ve done in the past. What did you want to do differently this time around? 

Well, I wanted to return to the musical elements that got me the most excited about guitar music when I was a young kid, even before when I was a drummer, before I was a guitar player. The last album cycle was a really big one, it was an album called Shockwave Supernova, there was a narrative that was kind of blown out of proportion, slightly fictionalized or dramatized to tell a story about me and how I sort of developed this persona or alter-ego to deal with my natural shyness, and wouldn’t it be funny if it took over, if it tried to take over my personality. So I wrote a whole album around that, but then as I was on tour, looking at the end of the tour, like the last 6-8 months of it, I started to realize that it was a bit prophetic, that I actually did want to somehow cleanse myself of this persona, and start from scratch. And just by coincidence, my son had come out to start to film some background footage and it turned into a documentary about that, because he noticed my artistic turmoil, and said, “You know, this is what’s really happening dad. We should capture this and you should open up about it.” So that resulted in Beyond the Supernova, the documentary, that should be available on Qello in about a month or so.

So during that process of him filming for that, I’m putting together like, how can I engineer this new beginning for myself, what does it really mean, and what is it that I’m yearning for? And it was really a mixture of what was happening in the mid-late 60’s — I was still a little kid, I hadn’t really come of age yet. I was heavily influenced by what my older siblings were listening to. I’m the youngest of five kids, so my older siblings really lived late 50’s rock n’ roll, all the music that happened in the 60’s and when they all went off to college I wound up with all the old records, so I sort of inherited as my musical background, my foundation, all that they had experienced. And it became my roots, really.

So during that process of discovering that, I reached out to my fellow Chickenfoot bandmate [Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer / Will Ferrel lookalike] Chad Smith, and I said, “Hey, let’s do a record, this is my idea, do you think you’d want to do it with [Deep Purple bassist] Glenn Hughes?” And I got the idea with Glenn Hughes because I was thinking to myself, all the years when I was a big fan of his, if I was ever not a guitarist but a bassist, I’d want to play like Glenn Hughes. I just always thought he was the rockingest bass player. And I knew they had a bit of a history together, they had recorded quite a bit, so it just turned out to be the charm, the two of them together, you just can’t imagine the amount of energy that they generate in the studio. So it was so much fun to get in the room with them and it gave me exactly what I was looking for, that reckless rock n’ roll with a lot of soul and emotion underneath it.

Do you think that element of soul is missing from a lot of guitar-based music these days? 

I suppose I have an unusual background because of how I grew up, so I can’t get away from that. I play the way I naturally play, and everything to me is emotion. I don’t see myself as having the technical facility of a lot of my peers, you know? They always seem to have a much easier time playing guitar than I do [laughs] because for me it’s all feeling and emotion and I struggle to clean it up and to make it impressive on the technical side. So I always think that it’s just because of my background that maybe I always learn to put the soul and the feeling and the groove into everything, rather than make a beeline for the technical.

You recognize these things when you’re on G3 tours, because your friends that you invite out on the tour obviously have different backgrounds. If somebody grew up playing country music, you can hear it. If they grew up learning guitar when Metallica put their first record out then you can hear that too. So everybody bears the stamp of when they grew up, and the sound and groove of their generation. That’s just natural. What they do with it, of course, is completely up to them, but we are a product of our times, you know what I mean? You would hope that artists would just let that shine.

What are your opinions on rock music these days? You keep reading think pieces when these festival lineups come out that “Rock is Dead” — have you noticed a larger sea change? Or is that just clickbait?

I think it’s a combination of both, depending on the time of day [laughs] I suppose. I think there are things that are in motion today that are somehow opposed to each other. Like, yes, we are at the tail-end of the hip hop generation, and at some point people will start bemoaning the end of hip hop, maybe they already have, I don’t know. And they will with EDM. Every style has its day, and every time there’s a new generation they come along and by nature, they insist on their own groove, their own sound and their own style. That will never change, so I never try to fight that tide.

So yes, there is going to be, by very design, the natural decline of styles that have preceded the present day. However, what’s happening since I guess, the mid-90’s, or more tangible, at the turn of the century, is that the internet kind of democratized the spreading of music. When I put out my very first record, I couldn’t get to my fans [laughs]. I literally put out an EP and I drove the records around to record stores in my car, and gave them to stores and said, “They’re for free, just put it in the rack.” And the next record was licensed by Relativity out of New York, and that was even a harder sell because they had to convince rack jobbers around the US to stock it, and I had no radio-friendly music on there. So it never hit the radio.

The third record was Surfing with the Alien, and for some reason everybody liked that one, so that one I got lucky with. But today of course, you put out a record and it is available everywhere on the planet that has access to the internet, and there’s no real competition between Taylor Swift, Aerosmith, or one of my records. In other words, they’re just there. And it’s very different from Joe driving around in his ’64 Corvair with the records on the seat, trying to find a store that’ll take ’em. In that way, someone like me who plays kind of non-commercial music can have fans in India, in Canada, in Russia, in greater North and South America and everywhere, and we tour, our album cycles are two years because it takes that long to get everywhere and then come back home. That really couldn’t have happened unless there was the internet.

As the style of rock shrinks, because it’s getting really old, the ability to reach the audience who still wants to hear it has just grown exponentially. It’s just remarkable. I don’t know what to make of it other than to keep making music [laughs]. I try to draw no conclusions. Luckily I’m signed to Sony Legacy, and they are some of the smartest, most experienced record people ever. They’re super talented in all different ways that I am not [laughs]. So they help me out with this, and when I come to them and I say, “Hey, I’ve got this crazy idea for an album,” they go, “Go do it, we’ll figure out how to get it to everybody.”

That’s all you really need, is that kind of support. 

I really do. A big label, I know it’s contrary to what a lot of people think, but big labels can attract very talented people and the people at Legacy have been a team for like 20 years or more. I mean they have so much experience in dealing with weird artists like myself, and for some reason they like helping us out. It’s something I really enjoy, that collaboration.

Surfing with the Alien just celebrated its 30th anniversary — that album was released at such a pivotal era for hard rock and metal, did you feel like you fit in musically with what was happening at that time? Or did you have to wedge your way in?

[Laughs] When we finally delivered that record to Relativity, my producer John Cuniberti and myself were really convinced that they were going to take it and run us out-of-town. It was like the last record they would ever let me make. I really did feel that way, because I had no band, I had never toured or performed as the head of an instrumental rock band. It wasn’t a genre that actually existed anymore. So we just handed it over. And slowly, they kept calling and saying, “You know what, we’re getting good reviews.” And then all of a sudden, they said, “You know what, you’re going to be 186 on the Billboard charts,” that’s where we entered. And I was just, I mean, my head nearly exploded. I thought, “How could we have landed on the chart?” And we spent, what were we, 26 or something like that for I don’t know how many weeks or months on the chart. It was ridiculous how that record just stayed on the Billboard charts for so long. Even during my whole period of ’88 where I was playing with Mick Jagger, that record stayed on the charts and out-performed his solo record, which was kind of embarrassing at the moment. [Laughs]

Was that an awkward backstage conversation? 

He was the greatest guy ever. You know what he said to me? He would go, every week that Surfing would get higher, he’d come and congratulate me and say, “Anything you need from me and my staff to help promote this record, you just let me know. You need a room, you need a press person, you need a car, you need more time, whatever you need. This is your moment, and I’ll help.” And that’s what he did. He just helped me in every way he could. Including letting me have a solo spot in the middle of his show, which was really great. That was very generous of him.

I know the new album just came out, but can you let us in on anything you have planned coming up?

Well you know, oddly enough, Chickenfoot just did a little acoustic reunion at Sammy [Hagar’s] Acoustic-4-A-Cure benefit for the UCSF Children’s Hospital here in San Francisco. We were at the Fillmore, and we had Taj Mahal and Bob Weir and Kevin Cronin on-stage, it was just great. And we had such a good time that everybody’s talking about getting in the studio sometime this year to record another Chickenfoot album. So I’m excited about that. Being in Chickenfoot, for everybody in the band, has meant having this dual life, because everybody has a real job and then there’s Chickenfoot. [Laughs] But I’m used to it now, and I’ve had ten years to get used to thinking in two different worlds.

Joe Satriani performs at MTelus on Friday, May 25th at 8:00 pm. Tickets are $60 in advance, available here. For all upcoming tour dates, visit the official Joe Satriani site.