Legendary guitarist JOE SATRIANI spoke to Bryan Reesman from Attention Deficit Delirium recently about a number of topics including the sophomore CHICKENFOOT album and his new solo effort. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Attention Deficit Delirium: A couple of months ago SAMMY HAGAR said the you guys were going into the studio in April. Did that happen?

Joe Satriani: "Yes, we have. We spent four or five days together [about a month ago]. It was great. We just have this thing where we get together and instantly start playing, and it sounds just like Chickenfoot without any effort. It’s a four-way thing — four guys in a room. We start playing, Sammy goes up to the mic and starts screaming, and all of a sudden we go, 'Wow! That’s great! What is that? Let’s record it.' Then we’ll jump back in the studio, listen to what did, arrange it and then we’ll finish a song a day. So we walked out of there with four really good songs that we’re hoping to polish up next time we get together. Since we live close to each other, Sammy and I are working on stuff. We’ve got a dialogue going with other song ideas as well. It’s great. It’s good to know that the band is excited as a unit to write another record, and the guys at Best Buy are behind us to accept another record from us, which is great. That relationship has been fantastic."

Attention Deficit Delirium: Are there new ideas on this record that we didn’t hear on the last one?

Joe Satriani: "Yeah. On the last record I wrote a lot of music and threw it out to these guys. Since I didn’t really know them very well, I wanted to see what they would respond to, and I was really surprised. Like Sammy loving 'Avenida Revolution', which was called something else when I sent it to him. I didn’t think he’d actually like it. I thought he’d think it was too dark or something, but he had the whole thing in about five minutes because he was so inspired by it. It taught me to never try to second-guess what any of the guys are going to like. I tend to write sort of stream of consciousness. I write way inside and outside the bounds of what you would think a Chickenfoot song should be, and I see how the guys react to it. It might be something where Michael might say, 'I really like that song, but could we do it in a different style?' Or Chad may want to change the beat around. Or Sam might say that he really has a set of lyrics and is searching for some kind of song, but he doesn’t know what it’s supposed to sound like. He’ll pick a piece of music that I thought was bright and cheerful and say, 'I like that music. Can I write some dark lyrics for it?' I think it works that we all just throw stuff at each other, then we react naturally to it. People say, 'Cool, great idea. I’ll try it your way.' That’s kind of how we do it."

Attention Deficit Delirium: When do you think the next Chickenfoot record is actually going to come out?

Joe Satriani: "Sometime early next year. I’ve got about three or four weeks to finish making demos from a solo record, and then I’m in the studio in June and July. I’ll hand in my record to Sony in August, and in September, Chickenfoot gets together for a month of recording. I go on tour in October, November and part of December. I may do a little bit in January, and I think in February we’re going to do the last Chickenfoot sessions to finish up the album."

Attention Deficit Delirium: Are there any new song titles yet?

Joe Satriani: "I don’t think any of the song titles are the actual song titles. Except for maybe one. I wrote a song around a set of lyrics that Sam had given me called 'Come Closer'. It’s a really great song. A typical story about how things get written - he had given me the lyrics when I went on the EXPERIENCE HENDRIX tour, so I was looking at them every other day for about a month, and I was writing all sorts of different songs. It was a long set of lyrics, unedited. Then we got together, and one morning before we started recording a few weeks ago, I recorded a different version of what I thought the song could be on piano. It was really kind of dark and dreamy sounding, and I just recorded it on my iPhone and e-mailed it to Sam. By the time I got to rehearsal, he was going crazy saying, 'That’s the shit. That’s a song. That’s how we’re going to do it. Show the rest of the guys.' So I sat down on piano and played it for the guys, and they were like, 'Cool, cool, cool.' I picked up the guitar and had to transfer the song to guitar. Then we made a recording of it, and everybody still loves that first recording we did as being a very definitive recording about where that song’s going to go. That’s how things get done with Chickenfoot. Any idea that somebody has gotten that they throw out and is cool and other band members respond to it, we go with it. It can happen just like that, really fast."

Read the entire interview here.

(Photo by Christie Goodwin)