The world has waited a long time to hear Joe Satriani and Steve Vai collaborate on an all-original studio album together. We have seen them on tour, individually as part of the G3, together as Satch/Vai.
But on record, making music together? The pair just couldn’t get around to it.
Until now. The Sea of Emotion is released today (November 6) and finds the two virtuosos driving each other forward, pushing each other’s playing to the limit. There is a catch, though. They had to make the album remotely, recording song ideas then sending them to each other email.
There were a couple of notable exceptions. In a recent interview with Guitarist, Satriani and Vai explained why the two moments they did record together were pretty special.
Firstly, this is an album that references their times growing up in Long Island, looking out to the fields across from Carle Place school that inspired the title of the album. They called it the Sea of Emotion. It was real Dazed and Confused stuff, formative years, learning guitar, Satriani teaching Vai, listening to Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Jimmy Hendrix and Kiss, long summers and goofing around. So it was a pretty big deal to get Deep Purple’s frontman to guest on the record.
“The only time we were together was when we recorded Glenn Hughes singing I Wanna Play My Guitar at Steve’s house,” says Satriani. “The rest of the time we were engineering on our own in our separate pods, separated by 400 miles.”
For the remainder of the time, Satriani was in San Francisco, Vai in LA. Their schedules were brutal. Satriani had to prepare for the ultimate guitar test, playing Eddie Van Halen songs with Sammy Hagar on the Best of All Worlds Tour. Vai had his own Herculean endeavors – he was playing Robert Fripp’s King Crimson guitar parts alongside Adrian Belew in Beat.
The time flew by, as did the deadlines. The label kept asking when the record was coming.
But they had already got together in a room to record for the record. They just didn’t know it at the time. When they were teenagers, fooling around with the guitar during a lesson, they made a recording, and that found its way onto the album.
“There is actually one little snippet we did play together because the technology to record remotely didn’t exist. That’s the intro to The Sea of Emotion Part 3: Reflections on a Year and a Half,” says Vai.
“That was recorded during one of my guitar lessons with Joe when I was, like, 13. We still don’t even know who played what, but it’s eight minutes of these teenage kids having total freedom. So I took a little snippet of that. That’s the only time on the record we’re sitting in the same room playing together. And it was over 50 years ago.”
The Sea of Emotion might be a celebration of an analog era but it was a 21st-century production, put together via email, and the pair left their tube amps on standby, relying instead on guitar plugins. Vai admits that this was a crossing the Rubicon moment for him.
“I had a very snobbish attitude,” says Vai. “‘Oh, you have to have microphones.’ So I started fooling around with SansAmp and realized how easy it is.”
You can read this Satch/Vai interview in full in the latest issue of Guitarist – better still, save and subscribe.
The Sea of Emotion is out now via earMUSIC.
