Steve Vai interview

Having just returned home from tour, and not long after the release his “Where The Wild Things Are” concert DVD, Steve was happy to broach any topic that came up – but the vibe of the room we were sitting in dictated that we start with Apple, a topic which has been a part of Steve’s life for three decades…

When did you first find your way into the Apple stuff?

The very, very beginning. I’ve had every version of Apple desktop, from the first one. Before that I bought Commodore computers. It was very thrilling. You know it’s kind of funny, just for nostalgia it would have been nice to have kept at least one permeation of each generation, but then again, I’d have to build another house to hold them all. But I’ve always taken information and moved it forward.

Were you an early adopter with the iPod and iPhone?

Absolutely. I was late to use a cellphone in general. But as soon as iPods were available, my only problem was getting past the inferior sound quality of the audio. It’s improved quite a bit once the lossless came out, and now you can buy much better resolution. If I had to go find a CD player right now, I wouldn’t know where to look.

But I was very unhappy with using cellphones. I avoided them my whole life. And I’ve had them, you know, the cellphones where you’ve got to open them and then type the three letters before you get to the letter you want, and they were just so user unfriendly and unintuitive and such a pain in the ass to navigate through that it was like a nightmare every time I would open up my cellphone. So I never used it. And the reason why I finally got a cellphone was because Apple came out with one that I knew would be intuitive and user friendly, but still I was very apprehensive. But my kids live in a new generation. If I call them and leave a message they don’t return the call. If I email them they don’t even return emails. The only way that I was able to communicate with my kids was to start texting them. So I had to get something that I could text with, cause I wasn’t gonna go through it with these idiotic cellphones. And as soon as I got the iPhone I realized that the texting was a great way to communicate, but forget it man, now the iPhone has got everything. It’s like a conduit for me, and a lot of people, to my everyday activities.

It looks like you’re enjoying it. I see you on there with Tweetie, posting on Twitter.

I tweet, I keep track of exercise routes and bike rides. I just got the Starbucks app, there’s so many apps that I use constantly. The flashlight app is just priceless.

I have these apps that when I travel they’re priceless. When I travel, I wake up in a city, I don’t even know where I am sometimes. The first thing I do is turn on my iPhone, I see where I am, I see what time it is in that location, I hit “Map” and I find out exactly where I am, and I can look at the surroundings to see where I can go jogging. I just type in “Starbucks” and it gives me everything I need to know about that. I see where the venue is. I see what the temperature is. And I have a complete lay of the land before I leave the bus. This is valuable.

I see you’ve got Guitar Toolkit on there.

I’ve got Guitar Toolkit, if I’m in Europe I have language converters, I have money converters, feet and inch converters, everything. Dictionaries that I use constantly. I have this fitness program that I really like. I’m constantly using G-Park. I’d be doomed without it. I’m losing my spot constantly. And there’s all these great music programs for ear training and composing. One of my favorites is a Woody Allen quote book. I’m always looking for films.

For recording song ideas it’s absolutely priceless. That’s how I write songs. I take my iPhone and I just sing a melody, or I play a melody, and I have hundreds of them in there right now. And then I have notes for song ideas constantly. I never did this before. Before, whenever I would come up with an idea, I would have to scramble to try to find something. It’s really a wonderful tool. And the really great thing about it is if you lose it, no problems. You just buy another one, they’re cheap, and you’ve got everything backed up on your computer.

I have my quibbles, you know. When is the Flash coming out? What up with that? Come on.

You’re on both sides of the whole iTunes platform, though, because you make a living selling your music, and you were doing that for quite awhile before the iTunes Store came out. Did you have to be convinced to put your music into the store when it was first coming out?

No, not at all. I was waiting a long time for this to happen, and I’m looking forward to the future generations of the development of music delivery, for higher quality, quicker delivery, and more secure financial transactions for intellectual property. And I know it’ll happen. I’m sure it’ll happen, because there’s too many people who make a living creating music, and if they don’t get paid for what they do, they can’t do it. And it’s not as bad as a lot of people think, you know? People still buy music online.

But I was very excited when it became available, because I saw it before it even came out as an evolution into the future.

We’re kind of at a crossroads here because we’ve got the iTunes Store and it’s got video and everything, and yet here you’re releasing a DVD, which you’re still putting out as a physical medium. They’re still very popular.

Yeah they’re still very popular, there’s still a big market and there always will be some kind of a market for physical product because it satisfies a certain tactile kind of need that a lot of people have. I love physical product. But I just don’t get it these days unless it’s something special. There’s a few artists that when they release something I go out and I get the physical product. If Tom Waits releases anything, I always have the physical product because I want this book in my hand. I don’t care about that idea for a lot of other artists, but there’s a handful.

How do go about saying “I’m going to make a DVD of this show”? How do you decide it’s going to be this show and this town and this date?

Well the first thing that I do is I come up with an idea that I can pretty much put into a sentence or a few sentences. And when I decided to do this DVD, I had just finished a double live orchestra project that took two years of intensive work, and I wanted to get out on tour but I didn’t have any new product. So the idea was to put a band together that was unique instrumentation, so that I could go out and do a relatively short tour and just kind of satiate the playing thing, and bring a little bit of a different dimension to some of the tracks. So I hired two violinists, and it turned out phenomenally well. And I always like to capture a tour or a band at their peak. So the idea is to do a tour with a unique band and get a DVD and a CD out of it that’s… I put a string of adjectives together: uplifting, musically interesting, unique to my catalog, and it just happens. You have to have the picture first, and then everything else falls into place.

Then I have to put the repertoire together, and I just went through the catalog and picked songs that I knew would work with this instrumentation, and then we scheduled a month, thirty days, of fifteen hour a day practices, six days a week. And then we rehearsed, then I booked a month in Europe, a month in America, and we went to South America. And usually, you can rehearse til you’re blue in the face, but going out on tour and actually being in an environment where people are there and the lights are out is a while different world. So it takes probably about a week or two weeks of being on tour for the band to blow out the bugs, you know, and really start getting ripe. Usually the six week mark is when they’re at their peak performance. And so that was during the American leg, and so I thought where is a really great place to film it and record it? And the State Theatre in Minneapolis was the pick because I love Minneapolis, the State Theatre is gorgeous, it’s historical. It’s got a big wooden stage, which is really nice.

Everybody likes to talk about you taking lessons from Satriani back in the day, and the baton being passed and such. When you come across someone like Orianthi, do you feel like there’s almost an obligation, because of the position you’re in, to help foster the next one?

You can’t really help but to feel somewhat nurturing to a young artist that has potential, and finds you one of their inspirations. It’s very nice to be able to give them some advice or to help them out in some way if you can. You never know what they’re going to turn into. I mean, I’ve worked with very young artists that had a lot of potential but just didn’t know how to cultivate it. Being a great musician isn’t about how well you play. That’s about being a good player. Being a great musician is how well your intellect can turn your imagination into reality in the world.

When I saw Orianthi she was fifteen, and she was opening for me in Adelaide, Australia, and she showed tremendous potential. She played really well. It was obvious. You can’t play an instrument like that unless you love the instrument, and that’s always really nice to see. So through the years I just stayed in touch with her. She had a lot of potential to be a pop goddess, pop rock goddess, if she wanted to, and that’s what she’s chosen. And I think she wears that badge very proudly. And actually for my taste she brings a new dimension to that whole kind of thing. But she also had a lot of great guitar finesse and ability. And how that’s going to be displayed in the future is going to be up to her. But she can play. She can really play.

Now that we’ve got these new tools like Twitter and Facebook, do you find that that’s adding to your ability to relate to your fans?

Absolutely. It’s like you’re stalking them, because if they’re interested they can know what you want them to know, and you can let them into a particular part of your life. And you can do anything, you can fabricate a whole different kind of a character. If I want, I could lie to my fans and create fantastic things. I’m not comfortable doing that. But frankly, when I look at all my posts that I’ve tweeted, they’re very interesting. I don’t tweet things like “Well I’m gonna go to the store now and get some food.” I know there’s a sector of people that would be interested in hearing all that, but I just don’t want to take the time to do it. It’s kind of narcissistic too in a way, you know? So I try to give them things that I believe they would find interesting, something that can relate to their life or just peering into a little portion of my life. I’m relatively private though. There’s things I just don’t discuss.

One thing I saw you mention on Twitter was something about renting a warehouse and going underground for four months. Is that a project you can talk about?

Yeah, it’s my next project. And I basically approached it like I approach all my projects, I set up some parameters, and I’ve just started to put the parameters together. One of them was you have to do something unique that you’ve never done before, and perhaps something that no one has ever done. I don’t know what that is, but I started to get excited about the idea of it. And what happens is it just unfolds. And it did. And it requires a warehouse. But unfortunately I really don’t want to discuss the particulars of it yet. But my goal is to make it very musical, very uplifting, melodic, accessible, entertaining, and my goal is to evolve my potential into areas that I’m not even aware that I’m capable of. And that’s very important for an innovator. You have to be conscious of going to places that you’re ignorant of.

Can you say whether or not it’s guitar oriented?

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that’s in my prerequisite is guitar up front on a silver platter through the entire thing. So I’m not going to be doing a lot of overdubs. Very intimate guitar.

You’re coming up on fifty. Is that causing you to rethink or reevaluate, professionally or personally, or is it just another number to you?

Well, both, you know? I’m very satisfied and content with all I’ve achieved. I never thought I’d ever achieve so much. And I’m very happy where I am. I don’t have any burning desires or regrets for things that I should have accomplished and I didn’t. Sure, I wish I had ten more records, it would be nice, but I don’t really care. I’m one of those people who feel that everything is evolving as it should. Having said that, one of the things that I’ve realized is that it’s great to have tons and tons of ideas, but in reality, a small percentage of them are going to be made real because it’s impossible with the amount of time that’s left. So what it’s caused me to do is prioritize. I like the idea of being fifty. I don’t mind growing old. I don’t want to be forty-nine again, or thirty-five again, or twenty-one or none of that shit. But I do understand that I’ve come face to face with the reality that you have this many ideas, and when I was twenty-five that was great. But really, from the time I was twenty-five to now, maybe I’ve only accomplished three percent of these ideas. So it’s a very rejuvenating process to take that list of ideas and try to burn it, and just pick the handful of the most important ones, cut out all the fat. So that’s what I’ve been in the process of doing. And turning fifty next year has helped me to come to grips with letting go of nonsensical projects.

Are you going to keep the long hair?

I grow it and then I cut it, then I grow it, then I cut it.

I always do that, and every time I grow it out I say it’s the last time.

I do too. Then I cut it and I go “Man, you look like such a dork. Grow your hair.”