New Releases: SatchVai - The Sea Of Emotion (2026)

Today, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai have released their debut collaborative album under the name SatchVai.

The album is called "The Sea Of Emotion".

After more than five decades of friendship, musical exchange, and separate careers that helped redefine what the electric guitar could do, Joe Satriani and Steve Vai have released their first record together.

This all began in 1973, when 13-year-old Steve Vai began taking guitar lessons from his 17-year-old teacher, Joe Satriani, on Long Island.

Neither of them could have known where their shared obsession with the guitar would lead.

More than 50 years later, after establishing themselves as solo artists and sharing stages around the world through the legendary G3 tours, they have brought their musical histories together on one album.

The album came together after a G3 reunion tour created an unexpected opening in their schedules. What began as a suggestion to record a single track quickly expanded when Satriani sent Vai two finished pieces, ‘‘The Sea Of Emotion’, Part 1’ and ‘Part 2.’ Vai knew immediately that the time had come.

The process was anything but predictable. Although the two musicians share a deep musical history, similar influences and a lifelong understanding of the guitar, they discovered that they write very differently. That contrast became one of the defining elements of the record, with ideas moving back and forth until the songs took unexpected turns.

The album brings together two musicians who have spent decades developing unmistakable individual voices, while giving each the freedom to push the other somewhere new. Producer and keyboardist Eric Caudieux helped keep the process honest, while a formidable group of longtime collaborators supplied the rhythm section, including drummers Gregg Bissonette, Jeremy Colson, Kenny Aronoff, Matt Chamberlain and Mike Mangini, and bassists Billy Sheehan, Bryan Beller, Philip Bynoe, Matt Bissonette, Marco Mendoza and Henrik Linder.

Throughout the album, ‘The Sea Of Emotion’, SatchVai move from the raw rock ’n’ roll of ‘Mayhem’ and ‘Bronco Freight Train’ to the darker, cinematic ‘Old Sins Have Long Shadows,’ the unruly swing of ‘Zoot Suit Riot’ and the arena sized ‘I Wanna Play My Guitar,’ featuring legendary singer Glenn Hughes.

At the center of the album is the three-part ‘’The Sea Of Emotion’’ suite, which reaches back to the Carle Place school field where the two teenage musicians once spent time dreaming about music. ‘’The Sea Of Emotion’, Part 3’ even begins with a vintage reel-to-reel recording from one of Vai’s early lessons with Satriani, a glimpse of two young guitarists still searching for their voices.