Rick Florino from ARTISTdirect.com spoke with guitar legend JOE SATRIANI recently about a number of topics including the upcoming CHICKENFOOT III album due out next week. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

ARTISTdirect.com: Your riffs and leads really entwine with Sammy's vocals. Do you feel like you two have a special interplay?

Satriani: "It was something that I was specifically trying to achieve on the record. I'm happy that you noticed it. I don't like when I hear other kinds of music and there seems to be a disconnect between the vocals and what the band is playing-even if the songs are ultimately good. It gives you the impression that someone simply wrote a track and didn't think of what the song is about and somebody came in later and sang whatever they wanted to sing without thinking of the instrumentation. A lot of pop music is like that because of the nature of how it gets put together, who writes it, and who sings it. Chickenfoot is a band. We write and record all together. All of the recordings are done without click tracks or sequences. We're basically making live recordings and overdubbing on top of that. Chickenfoot is an organic thing, and it's so important we make that a hallmark of the recordings. That chemistry is always a part of what people hear. As I was writing for this second record, I wanted to take advantage of that as much as I could and write things that make me meld into the drums and bass and be part of a bigger unit rather than just play big guitar riffs and tell the guys to play a straight rhythm behind me. I never wanted to do that! I thought Sam and I should get together on our parts so sometimes we're singing and playing the same thing. It's all in the effort to make a big unified sound.

I think Jimmy Page in LED ZEPPELIN was really good at that. JIMI HENDRIX was as well. He brought his vocal lines, melody, and rhythm playing together on those early recordings. That added a very unique quality to that music. They didn't know they were creating classic rock, but that's what they were doing [Laughs]. It's something which comes natural to everybody in the band."

ARTISTdirect.com: If you were to compare Chickenfoot III to a movie or a combination of movies, what would you compare it to?

Satriani: "Wow! Well, I'm guessing the imagery that goes through my mind is just as crazy as what's going through everybody else's mind. To me, every song is cathartic. It's almost too intense to transfer to film. It'd be too crazy. You know how crazy Chad and Sam are [Laughs]. I'm not too sure about Mike. He's a little more reserved. I don't know if I'd want to see a movie reflecting what's going through Chad's head [Laughs]. It's probably crazier than mine!

It's funny. I'll tell you a movie that grew on me. I always loved Inception, but every time I see it again it's more intense because of the levels of reality. It deals with the human experience and how deep the layers upon layers of our inner lives are. That's what Inception is really about. Those deep, dark, and twisted levels affect the reality we all walk around in. Making a record is a very much like that. When you're dealing with songs that you want to open your heart to people about, it's a cathartic process. You've got to peal out layers. You may not eventually put that stuff on the recording consciously, but maybe in a few weeks when you sit back and listen to what you've done, you realize you've been baring your heart to the world in ways you'd never planned. This record was very much like that. It wasn't only because we wanted to make a great record, but we were also dealing with the loss of John Carter. He was Sam's personal manager and one of Chickenfoot's two managers. He got diagnosed with cancer as we started the record, and then in a few months before the record was finished, he passed away. It was a very intense to deal with while making the record. We can feel it when we hear the record now that we've stepped away from it."

Read the entire interview here.

(Photo above by Christie Goodwin)