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You have play in respect to the music that you’re playing. If it’s a Billie Holiday song they’ll bring in a Marshall amp and a Les Paul and put rock tones on a Billie Holiday song. In other words, there’s some guitars players that really will force their will on everything. You have to play the kind of music that you’re playing to. Some people who picked up those records, though, might have done so to hear you shred, which was not what that music was about. We actually ended up doing “Nutbush City Limits” by Ike and Tina on the last record. If you listen to something like (the Rolling Stones’) Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out, with Ike and Tina Turner doing the opening set, they’re doing Beatles covers, CCR…so the only theory of Beth and I working together was never to write together, it was about finding a great songbook and doing those songs with a killer band and letting Beth do her thing. Some great songs, of course, written by people like Tom Waits and Brook Benton, but what was the thinking behind this? You and Beth Hart are both writers, but on the two albums you’ve done together you chose to record strictly covers. I tend to write on the guitars that I intend to use on the song.

I have a bunch of guitars, too many to list. I hadn’t realized you were such a collector. On the new record you use a lot of vintage guitars and you list them all in the CD liner notes. Moreso than L.A., where I meet a lot of ’80s throwback poser types pretending they’re rock stars when they aren’t. There are a lot of good musicians running around there. But Nashville has called my name for many years. I like Vegas, and it’s easy to get my gear there. So since you wrote in Nashville, and bluesmen like James Cotton and Joe Louis Walker have been cutting in Nashville, why did you decide to track in Las Vegas? I was in Nashville five separate times last year. How long did it take to write these songs? Like my solo on “Oh Beautiful!” (from the new album).ĭid you do all this writing face to face, or did you do some Skyping? Yeah, and sometimes my guitar solos are three minutes and 10 seconds. I could sense this relief on everybody’s face, because they didn’t have to worry about these songs sounding like the other stuff on the radio.īecause these guys are best known for songs that are three minutes and 10 seconds. But I could sense the relief when I walked into the rooms with these writers and they said, “Whaddaya wanna do?” and I said, “Let’s write some blues, I don’t care if it’s six minutes long,” because I don’t do the hit-driven model. He’s a funky cat, a really deep, soulful writer. Clearly this guy has the knack for the hit song. I was unfamiliar with Jeffrey Steele’s work until I walked into his writing room and saw like a gazillion gold records.

I knew Jonathan Cain, I knew Jerry Flowers, I’d met James House…I didn’t know Jeffrey Steele or Gary Nicholson until I got there. Did you already know these guys, or did you just decide to hook up with some full-time writers and see what you could come up with? Your new album has collaborations with Nashville writers like Jeffrey Steele and James House. Nashville-based writer Rick Moore caught up with Bonamassa by phone from his Los Angeles home on the rare occasion that the legendary road dog wasn’t on a tour bus somewhere. Working with Nashville songwriters Jeffrey Steele (Rascal Flatts, Miley Cyrus), Gary Nicholson (Toby Keith, Dierks Bentley), James House (Dwight Yoakam, the Mavericks), Jerry Flowers (Lady Antebellum, Carrie Underwood) and Jonathan Cain (of Journey, who lives in Nashville), and recording in Las Vegas and Malibu, Bonamassa used nearly 20 guitars and more than a dozen amps in his pursuit of the tone needed for each song. But on his new album, Different Shades of Blue, which drops in mid-September, Bonamassa returns to his blues/rock roots in an unexpected way, collaborating with Nashville songwriters and giving them a chance to stretch beyond the boundaries of what they do for a living in the modern country music industry.

Openly acknowledging the influence of such 1960s British blues icons as Rory Gallagher and Paul Kossoff, Bonamassa has occasionally strayed from his roots, most notably with now-defunct rockers Black Country Communion and with vocalist Beth Hart. For nearly two decades, Joe Bonamassa has been one of the top blues guitarist/vocalists of Generation Y, but also a favorite of preceding generations that just love a guitar hero.