Last year, when Joe Satriani and Steve Vai issued their incandescent collaborative track, “The Sea of Emotion, Part 1,” millions of fans across the globe celebrated the news they’d been waiting decades to hear, that the two electric guitar virtuosos were finally — finally — recording together.
As it turns out, that’s partially true. During a Zoom chat with Guitar Player, streaming below, Satch and Vai revealed that, yes, they are working on an official album project, due sometime next year, but their first dual recording occurred when they were teenagers in the 1970s, when Satriani, then the hotshot neighborhood axe-slinger, taught guitar newbie Vai lessons — for five bucks an hour.
Vai recalls that Satriani recently sent him a reel-to-reel tape of a jam they’d recorded called “Reflections of a Year and a Half.” “It was just Joe playing some chords and me struggling through this riff,” he says. “I transferred it to digital and thought, Wow, this is great to have. It's like, eight minutes, 10 minutes long, and we're just jamming.”
The two had already recorded “The Sea of Emotion, Part 2,” but Vai was intrigued by this early recording. “I thought, What would a Part Three sound like?’ So I went back to the tape and took a little snippet of it, the riff, and we use that on the record… We took elements of that and wrote another piece of music around it.”
Satriani laughs.
“We peaked at 16 years old!” Vai adds, “It's so great. Everytime I hear it, I'm that teenager again, just being totally fascinated with everything that was happening.”
In advance of the full album, Satriani and Vai — or SatchVai, as they’re billing themselves — have just issued the rousing new song “I Wanna Play My Guitar,” featuring Glenn Hughes (Deep Purple, Black Country Communion) on vocals. As fist-in-the-air rock anthems go, it’s hooky and full of swagger. And — no surprise — it’s packed with bravura guitar work.
Explaining the inspiration for the song, Satriani says, “How did we feel as kids? Steve and I growing up on Long Island, dreaming about being rock and roll superstar guitar players… Silly teenage dreams, but what did that really mean?
“Now that I'm an adult and I have a stronger handle on how to express myself, how can I bring some of those memories of what we experience to life in a mature way? And although this isn't very mature, I’m saying, ‘I want to turn it up loud. I want to drive you crazy and all that kind of stuff.’
“Meanwhile, I'm thinking, Glenn and Steve are going to hear this, and they're never going to let me forget how bad it is. But it was finished and it's a collaboration, so I'm like, ‘Guys, you got to help me do this. I know the song's going to be great, but there are bits that really suck right now.’
“And they came to the party when we finally had that vocal session. It was great to get Steve and Glenn to come in and help bring the song together and add some great elements to it to make it really take off.
“But at the heart of it is just a teenage kid who wants to go to the garage, plug in and turn really loud and just annoy everybody.”
This June, the SatchVai Band (which also includes drummer Kenny Aronoff, bassist Marco Mendoza and guitarist Pete Thorn) heads to Europe for the debut of their Surfing With the Hydra tour. To hear Satch and Vai tell it, the idea of joining forces to form their own group was something they had always planned on — one day. “It just kind of showed up,” Vai says. “It was a plan sort of in the background our whole lives, but it did just kind of happen all of a sudden. ‘Hey, we're doing this now! Look around — we're doing it!’”
“Like Steve said, we always knew it would happen,” Satriani says. “We just hadn't really worked out the details.”
He recounts how everything started to come together following the conclusion of the 2024 G3 reunion tour in which the two were joined by Eric Johnson. Satch and Vai were gung-ho for a 2025 run of dates, but Johnson was already booked.
“Steve and I decided, ‘Well, we'll just keep going,’ but we didn't want to make it a G2,” Satriani says. “Somebody from either one of our camps said, “Oh, wouldn't it be great if you had a track to sort of announce the fact that it's just the two of you going out?’ And we thought, ‘Oh, yeah, great.’
“Then all of a sudden we just start writing and recording, and there you go. It just sort of snowballed from, ‘Wouldn't it be great if you had a second track? How about an album?’ And we thought, Wow, I guess it's here. It has arrived.”
