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Authors: Ben K. <benk@tilde.team>
Date: 2021-01-16
When I was a teen I taught myself to play the electric guitar, and that was something I was rather proud of in spite of it never really going anywhere beyond self-amusement. I was so into music, especially rock music, and the older I got the more sophisticated my tastes became.
It just so happened that the first rock concert I ever went to was to see Joe Satriani. I liked Joe, but actually it was my uncle who introduced me to his music, and I'm pretty sure it was his idea to go to the concert. Like, it wasn't that Satriani was my favorite musician ever, but slowly he grow on me over time. As someone familiar with electric guitar and music in general, I could understand what Satriani does and appreciate it for what it is.
Nowadays I listen to music a lot less than I used to, but I still do. However, now I'm more focused on a few things that I like, which evolves gradually over the years. In spite of it all, I still keep in touch with Satriani and follow his career. I admire the fact that he still produces music professionally, after all these years.
Owing to the fact that he even managed to come out with an album in 2020, I went ahead and got out his full discography and went through it. I even started with his first album, which I had actually never heard before. It was surprisingly "avant-garde" for a mainstream musician. (It's great.) Aside from Surfing With the Alien, I mainly listened to Joe's albums from the 90's and early 2000's.
I actually haven't listened to all of his music carefully, so this is just going to be a biased selection of what I feel are his best albums. This is pretty much based on the time I spent listening to these albums in the car in the past 20 years. My biased opinion is also that his music isn't as good as it used to be, but he still does a decent job. His newest albums still have a couple of songs on them that I love, but I'm trying to view the albums as a whole.
Without further ado, these are my top picks:
As you can see, starting with Crystal Planet, there is a consecutive run of albums until Is There Love in Space, where I felt his work was very strong. It could also just be those are the years I was most actively listening to him anyway, but I kept listening to his new albums as they came out and was more or less generally disappointed on the first hearing. (Perhaps my opinion would change if I spent more time with them.)
Shockwave Supernova, which came out in 2016, stands out for me. To me that was kind of a nice comeback; it seemed like the best thing he put out in years.
What I'm going to try to do is listen to his entire discography carefully. (That's going to take a while.) After that, I might revise my opinion and come up with a new list of favorites. Some albums probably didn't make the list because I didn't listen to them, or barely did.