After more than 50 years of friendship, the two giants of guitar Joe Satriani and Steve Vai have announced their long-awaited debut studio album, Sea Of Emotion – and they’ve shared another single from it.
You can check out Mayhem below. This isn’t one of the tracks the pair have been performing on their Surfing With The Hydra Tour, but you will invariably recognise all the hallmarks of two players whose histories have been entwined since they were teenagers, cutting their teeth in Long Island.
Satriani was a little older. He was 17. He was just getting started as a guitar teacher but he had a burgeoning reputation. Vai was just 13. He was coming to electric guitar from, of all things, the accordion, but that musicality stood him in good stead.
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“We’ve been planning this since 1973,” says Vai. “Just unconsciously.”
But he’s only half-joking. The title-track is delivered in three acts, and actually features a an old reel-to-reel recording from one of their earliest teenage sessions together. Vai wrote the track from that.
“It illustrates just how far we’ve come,” says Satriani. “We’re these two kids who haven’t found our sound yet, but we’ve got enthusiasm. We’re chasing something, and we’re determined.”
The pair have routinely shared stages together over the years. They are two of the original G3, alongside the Texan virtuoso Eric Johnson. It was not so long ago that the three of them got back out on the road together, releasing a live album to commemorate the occasion.
It was during breaks between G3 Tour dates that Satriani and Vai got together and made this record. Mayhem is further evidence that that kind of tour with elite peers really does sharpen your chops nicely – not to mention all these past months of touring with the Satch/Vai Band, which sees the pair backed by Pete Thorn on third guitar.
This album is very much a two-hander. Most of the tracks are instrumental. But there was the occasion to invite the quote/unquote Voice of Rock, Glenn Hughes, into the studio for I Wanna Play My Guitar. If you’ve got any of those Satch/Vai dates you’ll know that one. It’s one of three tracks from the forthcoming album that the pair have been playing in the set.
What did Vai learn from Satriani? Many things. But he told MusicRadar in 2022 that Satriani’s unerring ear for on-point intonation was something that got drummed into him as a teenager.
“Joe Satriani has an ear like none other,” said Vai. “When I was a kid, he would say, ‘No, don’t vibrate it out of tune! You’ll sound like an idiot!’ When I was 13 years old! And I said, ‘Okay, I will never vibrate a note ever out of tune for the rest of my life.’”
Satriani says the weird thing about the pair is that they have completely different approaches to songwriting.
“The biggest surprise was that we write in completely different ways,” he says. “And that’s what made the project so fun and interesting.”
When we spoke to Vai in 2022, he was talking about how he and Satriani were always trying to work out how they could do tours together. Now they’ve been touring. Now they have actually made an album.
“What’s similar between Joe and I is that we were fortunate to discover something we really love when were young, and we just never stopped focusing on it,” said Vai. “And you expand on it. We have a bit of a different voice, very different, but we have supported each other so much. I wouldn’t be anything, what I am today without Joe just being there… and it is just so nice that over the years we have been able to work together and we’re still like brothers.”
Sea Of Emotion is out on November 6 via earMUSIC. See Satch/Vai Band for more.
