Joe Satriani recalled two twists of fate that turned the title track of his 1989 album Flying in a Blue Dream into one of his favorite pieces of all time. In a recent interview with Guitar.com he said he’d been working on another track, titled “Big Bad Moon,’ but realized it wasn’t working at that point. That’s when another thought occurred to him.
“I had a memory of when I was a kid, having these flying dreams as I was trying to go to sleep,” he said. “It just filled me with a kind of musical inspiration… I suddenly picked up this acoustic guitar and I heard these chords. I tuned the guitar to an open F for some reason — maybe because I kept thinking a low C was the note I was hearing in my head — and I started playing these chords that sounded right to me.”
Once he’d mapped out the piece, he told himself: “That’s really interesting. You’ve never done that before.” He added: “This was all happening minute by minute. I got so excited that I completely forgot about ‘Big Bad Moon’ and just focused on this. I had my Tascam four-track cassette recorder — a great, fun little deck — and I was busy recording bits of it as I was writing.”
He was still wondering about the music’s direction as he listened back.
“The funniest thing came to my mind: Frank Sinatra,” he said. “Very often, Frank would start a song and tell you a story in a colloquial, American spoken way of singing. By the end of his melody, not only would the register move up and up, but he’d finally say the word that is the chorus at the very end.
“I thought, ‘That’s my model. That’s what I have to do here, because I’m telling a story, but it’s about flying.’ As I get to the height of the story, I need to be high up in the sky flying around. I started to think, ‘Just pace it the way that Frank Sinatra would have paced it. Go slowly, go way behind the beat, just go late, late, late, and then move your way up.’”
When it came to recording the full track, fate intervened once again, this time in the form of a radio broadcast that introduces the music. Satriani said he’d been encountering constant interference issues at the Coast Recorders studio in San Francisco because the room wasn’t set up for high-gain guitars at high volume.
“We were sitting there laughing, like, ‘How are we going to record this part if it’s so noisy?’ Every time I turned the volume knob from two to three, I’d get a different radio station. At one point, we heard this kid’s voice coming through, talking about something… it sounded like an old 1950s Art Linkletter radio show or TV show from when we were kids.”
Producer John Cuniberti decided to try recording the voice onto the leader tape ahead of Blue Dream. Satch — who recently listed the “small realities” that every player needs to know — remembered:
“As soon as the kid says, ‘And sometimes afterwards they like each other, and sometimes they don’t,’ the leader ended, the magnetic tape hit the heads, and the guitar chords came pounding in. We were like, ‘Damn!’ The timing was just too good to be true for a song written about being a kid having flying dreams.”
