Joe SATRIANI

On SUPER COLOSSAL: "Sound carries its own message, so I was fooling around with some unusual foot pedals and trying to get a sound that would allow me to play slowly, from the vantage point of being very small and seeing a fifty-foot person walking down the street playing a guitar. I was writing down all these words: 'large,' 'big,' 'scary,' and also 'unyielding,' 'purposeful' ... I went crazy for pages and pages, like I'd been studying a thesaurus. I wanted to think of the guitarist on this track as being like the Colossus of Rhodes. As I narrowed in on the title, I was also narrowing in on the melody. It really came from that: a mental riff on bigness. A gyrating tone-poem, with the solo revealing a different, more vulnerable side to the giant."

On JUST LIKE LIGHTNIN': "I was thinking I'd 'Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee' and 'Come at ya like a bolt of lightnin'.' But isn't this a love song of sorts too? You can feel it in the groove and the tone. It's sassy and greasy, yet elegant and sexy. It's saying, 'Come on over here and let me show you what I got!' Laying down those rhythm guiiars was so much fun. The whole recording turned out to be some kind of neo-funk-delta-blues-rock thing, with that bubbling guitar figure on top, acting like some deranged vocal performance."

On IT'S SO GOOD: "It was exciting to craft this one because there are layers of guitar -rhythm, melody, and solo - but it's built around a simple chord pattern. It just felt so right. The groove was so deep. Some Bob Marley songs are like that: They're so powerful, yet when you look at them you go, 'Oh, my God, everyone is playing so little!' Then, once the lyric is added, it becomes a really strong statement. But, since this is an instrumental, I tried to find unique, fun sounds for all the guitars that would pull it all together in that same way."

On REDSHIFT RIDERS: "In the future could time/space travelers take advantage of the cos-. mological redshift effect to sling themselves through the universe at ungodly speeds? I'm fascinated by stuff like this. This song may have the most rhythm guitar overdubs on the entire CD, twelve in a!l I think! For the bridge and solo section's rhythms I put a mic in front of a JSX cabinet, put it in the middle of my studio and covered it w-ith a blanket. Six tracks later, I had my wall of sound with a space traveling melody on top!"

On TEN WORDS: "This is the only song on the album that goes back a ways. I wrote it on piano, the day after the 9/11 attacks. It wound up in a pile of old manuscripts. I hid it there on purpose I think, it was too heartbreaking to work on. As I was preparing music for this album, I found it and played it, and it resonated with me. I could finally hear the sound of hope in the melody. I had to record it. I was driven to learn to play the melody straight, unaffected and true. It's become a wonderful journey for me to come back to this one."

On A COOL NEW WAY: "I used a very small amp in its first stages of construction, a prototype, to write and record this piece about finding a new way to live, and play. The melody's arrangement is quite different than anything I've done before. The solo, performed one rainy night in Vancouver, is almost jazz-like. But, in the end, reveals it wants to rock. It tells a story I didn't know I had in me until I played it, in a cool new way."

On THE MEANING OF LOVE: "I started with the rhythm part on guitar. Then I thought, 'Boy, if a bunch of guitars are playing this 7/4 rhythm, and there's a bass pumping in, that's a lot of stuff.' So I played the rhythm on piano and that sounded kind of nice. I started looking for some softer sound, and I came up with this pizzicato string section. Now the groove was deep and the rhythms wide. This allowed the guitar to come in and really sing with these long beautiful notes. The melody was a first take performance."

On MADE OF TEARS: "The title comes from a line in my favorite Velvet Underground song 'Venus In Furs'. A mix of joy and sadness this one is. It is a complicated rhythmic interplay of straight and swing. It has its own groove and mystery. The bluesy solo in the middle has a grounding effect that surprised me when I played it. I thought I was going to play something more ethereal, but the moment brought up other desires, ones that turned out to be much more powerful in the end."

On THEME FOR A STRANGE WORLD: "This song is about feeling detached from reality, but going right along with it anyway, or, all of a sudden finding yourself in a strange world, for real. There may be no difference I suppose! The melody/solo is a first take/one take performance that I decided to keep because it reflected the subject matter of the song with its spontaneity and scope. The 12-String sliding notes were so much fun to put on top of the heavy groove. They reminded me of something the late Brian Jones would have done on an early Stones record."

On MOVIN' ON: "Focused on tone and forward movement, ( recorded this song to capture the feeling taking off, starting over, driving fast and not thinking about 'tomorrow'. It's arranged more like a vocal track really, with my JS1200's neck pick-up taking center stage for the whole piece. It's all about feeling the wind in your face as you move on to better days. The scratching part at the end was just a bit of spontaneous fun that seemed to make sense to me somehow."

On A LOVE ETERNAL: "This is like 'Ten Words' in that we had lots of guitars that turned into cauldrons of undulating notes. We didn't want the picking itself to be too audible, so we piled a lot in there: four distorted rhythm guitars, two on each stereo side, plus two clean ones, with maybe a phase shifter on one side and a chorus on the other. In the center is an acoustic guitar, with a little bit of synthesizer and string action coming and going in the middle and off to the left. And then you've got the melody, which is what it's all about. This was the hardest song to play, for nothing could be out of place. It had to be honest, powerful and heartfelt, but also a little restrained, just for good measure.

On CROWD CHANT: "This one is really in your face, without too much melody. Ninety-seven percent of the album was recorded at home in San Francisco, but for 'Crowd Chant' we were in Vancouver, ΒΡ. After Jeff laid down his drum part, we brought 35 people into the studio. Some of them were singers but most of them were friends - there were a few kids too. We told them, 'Don't sound like a choir. Make believe you're in a bar. Instead of singing, try yelling. Act like you don't care.' We did ten passes with the crowd in different formations. We ended up with 350 voices! The song borrows a slice of melody from Faure's "Pavane" written in 1887. It comes in so randomly, it really makes the whole piece move into another space, and adds a new dimension to the call and response arrangement. This song is going to be so much fun live!"

On all the Songs of SUPER COLOSSAL: "With every song there's a story, a lot of love, a little neurosis, little glimpses behind the curtain, where you see the madman pushing the buttons and making it all happen. All of it comes under the umbrella of rock & roll - but that's a big umbrella."

- Joe Satriani, San Francisco, January, 2006

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