Mike Bax at Fazer Magazine recently caught up with guitarist Joe Satriani for an in-depth interview covering several aspects of his career. An excerpt is available below.

Mike: When you recently formed up with CHICKENFOOT I thought the most interesting aspect about that project was that you were going to participate as an active member of a band contributing as a songwriter with other musicians. How was that experience for you?

Joe: "Fantastic! I told you a little about me in the younger years having only experience in rock bands. So when this started up it was so natural. I mean, it felt so familiar to me; it was almost like I was 14 years old and in my first rock band playing, you know the ROLLING STONES and LED ZEPPELIN. The only difference is I could actually play guitar (because when I was 14 and I could barely play). So it was like this explosion of all this stuff I have been storing up for decades of this kind of music and finally I was in a band where every other player in the band was sort of complementing with the way they play with the stuff, I was playing and it was sort of mutual. We sort of synced up together and at the same time we were looking at each other going, 'How is it possible that a group of guys from different places in the music industry are somehow coming together and it's clicking like that, you know?' It was so exciting and always fun, I mean the vibe is very much fun. I should point out that this record was really a do-it-yourself project, we had no record playing involvement. It was Sam, Chad and Mike jamming at Sam's club in Cabo San Lucas, for just a couple of months. Then they draw me into it and we are all thinking, 'Oh, we know there's the Chili Peppers, there's Sam's solo career with Mike and there's my solo career, this probably won't work, so let's just do it for fun.' Months go by and were meeting together, 2 or 3 days at a time, separated by a few months of work, with us going off with our separate project. It's starting to come together and everyone says, you know we really want this to be a band so we paid for the whole thing ourselves and didn't get into the industry until the record was done. Then we sought out the most independent deal we could which was with Gary Arnold at Best Buy, which was great because he became an extension of the band because he really knew what we were about. So the whole thing ……if you could ever conceive of doing it the right way, in every way, this was it."

Go to this location for the complete interview.