Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar

After two serious surgeries that affected his ability to play guitar, Steve Vai could have simply packed it in. Instead, he gave himself some familiar-sounding advice and emerged with his most dazzling new album in years. (And yes, we asked him about that triple-neck guitar!)

- By Joe Bosso. Photography by Larry Dimarzio

ON HIS SPECTACULAR

New album, Inviolate, Steve Vai has created some of the most adventurous, magical and powerful instrumental music of his career. But it wasn’t the record he planned to make at all.

“The way the album came about was a complete surprise to me,” he says. “I was actually working on a solo acoustic album with vocals, something I always wanted to do. I was pretty far into it, but things beyond my control intervened, and I had to switch gears and recalibrate my thinking. I actually had no real choice in the matter.”

Vai isn’t being melodramatic. It was in the fall of 2020 when he noticed that a pain in his right shoulder — one he believes stemmed from years spent hunched over his guitar while growing up, and possibly exacerbated from working out — was becoming progressively worse. He saw doctors and therapists and tried various treatments, but nothing seemed to alleviate the condition. Finally, he was faced with one option: surgery. “Three tendons had torn, and they wouldn’t just heal themselves,” he says. “When the doctor went in, he said it looked like a hand grenade had gone off. The nurse told me that she had never, in her entire career, seen a bicep tendon in that condition.”