Interview: Joe Satriani and Steve Vai

You’d be hard-pressed to find two musicians as intrinsically linked in the rock world as Joe Satriani and Steve Vai. The long-time friends have made significant marks on the music industry via their six-string derring-do, and their relationship dates back to their teen years growing up in Carle Place, Long Island.

It was there that 16-year-old Satriani took a then-12-year-old Vai under his wing to give him his first guitar lessons. The relationship has evolved over the decades since, with the most recent wrinkle seeing the duo get ready to embark on “The Satch-Vai Tour.” And while the twosome has hit the road together as part of G3, a tour featuring the pair appearing onstage alongside a third extremely talented guitarist (Eric Johnson, Yngwie Malmsteen, Robert Fripp, and Billy Gibbons are among those who have filled that role), this will be the first time the native Long Islanders have hit the road as co-headliners.

The idea was further nurtured by the last G3 tour, which served as a backdrop for “Hero,” the documentary on this touring phenomenon being shot by Satriani’s son ZZ and slated for release in September. It’s all culminated in this long-awaited goal of a Satriani-Vai tour that both men acknowledge is long overdue.

“The thing is that we’re so similar in that we have these long-range plans and all these albums we want to make,” Satriani said in an early March interview. “We sort of stay on our own personal schedule. When someone comes up with an idea like, ‘Would you spend a year doing this?,’ it doesn’t fit my plan. For some reason, Steve and I looked at each other and said, ‘Yes, now.’

“We started to bounce around the idea of doing a tour together because we have similar type fan bases,” Vai added in a separate interview. “We’ve always kind of navigated territories based on each person’s touring schedule because you don’t want to tour the same exact time. But sometimes it turns out that there’s really not much other opportunity to tour around the same time. It just made sense to tour together—to create a show that’s the two of us. And it’s something that we always wanted to do, so it was a perfect situation. We started to talk about it, and loved the idea.”

Fans from both camps will be thrilled to know that in addition to playing live together, the two guitarists have been working on new material that will not only get incorporated into the current set list, but will be released either toward the end of this year or early 2025. Satriani, who counts Vai’s “Teeth of the Hydra,” “Little Pretty,” “Building the Church” and “The Love of God” among the favorite compositions of his former student, is excited to see how it will translate to the stage, particularly when both musicians play together at the end of the night after performing mini-sets with their respective bands.

Joe Satriani. Photo by Eduardo Pena Dolhun

“One of the things about G3 is that it’s really hard to get really deep into your set when you’ve only got 45 minutes,” Satriani explained. “Believe it or not, having an extra 15 minutes really does help each performer. We get to put on a more impactful show in each of our sets. Of course, when we go to the jam at the end of the night, we have more room because there are two of us instead of three. I think the fans are going to love this show and love that we’re going to get deeper into what we do.”

Vai, whose favorite Satriani compositions are “Sailing the Seas of Ganymede,” “Wind in the Trees” and “Cryin’,” has been delighted by the interaction he and his old friend have been experiencing while recording the new material.

“It’s almost like the floodgates opened,” Vai said. “We started to exchange files and that is so much fun. I’m doing it now as we’re speaking and I’m so enjoying it. Joe has such a magnificent inner ear and his playing is so off the hook these days—still. For the first time in my whole career, I feel like I have a partner. It’s a different kind of partnership/relationship than I’ve done in the past. It’s like having an additional family member all of a sudden. It kicks my ass, because Joe sends these things and he’s so Joe and it’s so beautiful what he’s doing. It’s really a magnificent exchange, especially with the kind of melodic sensibilities that Joe has. It was so much fun that we thought, ‘Why don’t we just make a whole record?’”

For now, Satriani/Vai fans will get a two-month stretch to experience these six-string savants together before each branches off for his own projects later in the year.

For the former, it’s teaming up with Sammy Hagar, Michael Anthony and Jason Bonham to do “The Best of All Worlds Tour” in the latter part of 2024. The tour will find the Red Rocker playing material from his Van Halen days and also incorporating David Lee Roth Van Halen-era material into the set list.

Vai will throw his lot in with guitarist Adrian Belew, bassist Tony Levin and drummer Danny Carey in Beat, a creative reinterpretation of three iconic ‘80s King Crimson albums—“Discipline,” “Beat” and “Three of a Perfect Pair.”

There’s a chance Satriani and Vai will team up for more touring after their collaborative album arrives.

Having come up together, Satriani, the elder, is grateful for how things have turned out all these decades later.

“We realized that learning music that had been pioneered by musicians over the past few hundred years was something we loved and was a secret to unlocking our creativity,” Satriani said. “It was exciting for us to do that—to start out as young kids—student and teacher separated by age. When you’re 12 and 15, it’s like 20 years when you think about it. But just in the short time of three years, we were really brothers thinking up the same thing and sharing information. As he matured, it was a lot more fun because we could collaborate on how we were going to conquer the world with our weird guitar ideas.”