The Kirk Hammett solo Joe Satriani gets “a special thrill out of playing” when covering Metallica with Steve Vai

Hot off the back of their first-ever single as a pair, Steve Vai and Joe Satriani are currently on a joint tour of the US. Both their setlists are loaded with classics from their respective catalogues, with Satch taking on the likes of Surfing With the Alien, Satch Boogie and Always With Me, Always With You, and Vai delivering Tender Surrender, Teeth of the Hydra and For the Love of God, among others.

Each date culminates in the duo hitting the stage together, first delivering their collaborative track, The Sea of Emotion, Pt. 1, before playing covers of The Kinks’ You Really Got Me and Metallica’s Enter Sandman.

• READ MORE: “There’s this 12-year-old kid, a stringless guitar in one hand, a pack of strings in the other”: Joe Satriani recalls the first time he met Steve Vai

And in a new interview with Ultimate Classic Rock, Satch speaks about how they landed on including Metallica’s Black Album classic on their current setlist.

“I was bouncing ideas off of my keyboardist, Rai Thistlethwayte, who has an amazing voice,” he recalls. “You know, we just finished a G3 tour where he was singing some really old ‘60s stuff. We were thinking, ‘Well, let’s move on from there and play a better mixture of songs.’

“We knew we were going to be doing The Sea of Emotion, Pt. 1. We were texting the craziest ideas for songs back and forth. At one point, I just threw out Enter Sandman. I didn’t really think he’d want to do it, but right away, he’s like ‘We’re doing that one. I want to sing that one.’ I was pretty shocked, because he doesn’t sing like James [Hetfield]. But wow, he hits it out of the park every night. It’s really a lot of fun doing that.”

And when Vai notes that the main riff of Enter Sandman is a “great riff to play”, Satch adds that he gets a “special thrill out of playing Kirk [Hammett’s] solo”.

Elsewhere in the interview, Satriani discusses the full collaborative album the pair have in the works.

“Yeah, the threads – you know, our lives intertwined the way they are – is the theme. We’ve got maybe three songs that are pretty much finished,” he says. “We’ve got four or five that we’re floating back and forth between each other that are in quarter-stages or half-stages of being finished on the composing side. 

“Then we’ve got some other crazy ideas that are going back and forth that we’ll get to, let’s say, in a couple of months. We both have some insane tours coming up that we have to tend to as well. But I think we’ll get it finished by the end of the year or a little bit after that.”

You can see a full list of upcoming Vai/Satriani dates at either Steve Vai or Joe Satriani’s website.