SHUT UP ’N PLAY YER GUITAR
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.”
While recuperating, Vai was required to keep his right arm in a sling called “the Knappsack,” nicknamed after his surgeon, Dr. Knapp. Playing the guitar was out — or so he thought — until one day he received a prototype of one of his new Ibanez signature guitars, an Onyx Black PIA (named after his wife). “It was the most gorgeous instrument I’d seen,” Vai recalls. “I picked it up and my heart was breaking, because I wanted to play it but couldn’t.” Then the guitarist was seized by a mad idea: Why not simply play it with his left hand? “I always toyed with the idea of writing a song with just one hand. Lo and behold, I was put in a situation where it was either do that or do nothing. So out of this came a new song — ‘Knappsack.’”
Last year, Vai released a video of himself performing the song. It’s an astonishing clip that captures the guitarist — his right shoulder held immobile in the Knappsack — effortlessly playing one-handed over a galloping rhythm, pick.
