Joe Satriani Lets His Imagination and Fingers Run Wild on New Album, 'Unstoppable Momentum'...

A large painting by Metallica bassist Jason Newsted hangs prominently in the front room of Joe Satriani’s San Francisco townhouse, just above the black, upright piano where Satch composed some of the music for his newest album, Unstoppable Momentum.

The painting, titled Live to Kill Another Day, is an abstract depiction of a human figure viewed from the side and slumped forward in an state of weariness. The white figure is set against a bold red background, and there’s a vivid splatter of red paint, heavily suggestive of blood, in the region of the heart.




“For some reason, this painting really speaks to me,” Satriani says. “It always reminds me of how you feel when you’re walking offstage at the end of a show. You don’t have one ounce of anything left to give, but you need to save one ounce of blood for tomorrow’s show. Jason was nice enough to let me buy the painting, and my wife and I were thinking, Where do you put a blood-red painting? My wife said, ‘Just put it over there now.’ I’m in this room every day, so I see it all the time.”

When it comes to giving every last drop of blood, sweat, tears and soul to your music, Satriani has few equals. He is relentlessly hardworking. Over the past year, he’s undertaken three jaunts with G3, his long-running guitar tour, and three with Chickenfoot, his side band with vocalist Sammy Hagar, ex–Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith. Satch also released a book, Joe’s Art 2013—available with Unstoppable Momentum as a part of a limited-edition bundle—which he describes as a “wildly colorful portfolio” of bizarre creatures he’s sketched over the years.

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