Brit-Rockin' Yank

To suggest that Joe Bonamassa might be a little hyperactive would be a particularly large understatement. Already something of a veteran at 23, opening for BB King when he was 12 and spending his teen years in a band called Bloodlines that featured the sons of Miles Davis, Robbie Krieger and the Allman Brothers' Berry Oakley, in the dozen years since he released his debut solo album, 2000's A New Day Yesterday, he's released another nine solo albums, a duo album with singer Beth Hart, four live albums, three concert DVDs and two albums with a hard blues supergroup put together by his producer Kevin Shirley, Black Country Communion, that includes drummer Jason Bonham and bass player Glenn Hughes, with a third near ready to release.

Throw in a couple of dozen guest spots on a couple of dozen other people's albums and a pretty solid touring schedule, around 150-plus shows a year, that keeps travelling the planet and you have to wonder where he finds the time. The New Hartford, New York State-born and raised Bonamassa is heading back to Australia to showcase this year's album, Driving Towards The Daylight.

“Eclectic, if nothing else,” he admits. “Kevin Shirley, our producer, had a lot to do with this.” Shirley, born in Johannesburg, came to Australia in 1987 and produced albums for the Hoodoo Gurus, The Angels, Cold Chisel and many more, before relocating to the US after producing Silverchair's debut album, Frogstomp, where he's worked on records by everyone from Aerosmith to Iron Maiden, Dream Theater to Slayer.

“You know, I wrote this song called Dislocated Boy and then I wrote this song called Driving Towards The Daylight, and that kind of got the whole ball rolling. Plus we did a session before in August [last year] – the bulk of the record came in February [this year] – so we had about five or six tunes in the can in August and we just like burned out in the process and said, 'Okay, let's keep it 'til February and we'll be rockin'.

“So cut to February and I had a couple, and Kevin said, 'We need to do a Robert Johnson song, right?' We'd kind of shied away from it because, I mean, everybody does Robert Johnson songs, but he said, 'Let's do Stones In My Passway' – Now there's a song that hasn't been done to death, you know? So we did that and then we had little things that we put together, and the whole concept of the record was do a blues album. And when I say do a blues album, my definition of the blues is a little more liberal than maybe some other people's, especially in the purists crowd. But that was the whole thing – we just kept the mindset of British blues.”

As is obvious when you look at his catalogue, while he's steeped in the blues, Bonamassa is the total Anglophile, taking much of his inspiration from the multiplicity of variations on the blues that the British brought to the quintessentially American form. One of the big bonuses of getting to level he's at has been the chance to play with some of those British musical heroes, from Paul Rodgers of Free/Bad Company to Eric Clapton and more.

The relationship with Shirley over the past seven years has not only taken Bonamassa into new ventures like Black Country Communion but also introduced him to a few Australian musicians that have become a part of his music, either directly, in the form of Australian keyboards player Rick Melick, who was in his touring band for a couple of years and features on his most recent concert DVD, Beacon Theatre – Live From New York, and a certain Jimmy Barnes, who guests on the new album's last track, a rework of the Aussie belter's early solo hit, Too Much Ain't Enough. Another Australian, Leon Zervos, who works out of Studios 301 in Sydney, mastered the new album.

“We were looking for a different kind of direction – you could feel the pull of the vortex around 2003, 2004 and we made a record called Blues Deluxe and followed it up with Had To Cry Today – and we just kind of felt this pull into the abyss, unfortunately, which is the traditional blues kind of career path where it's just like everybody's telling you, 'Well here's the ceiling and this is where it's gonna end and these are the clubs that you're gonna play for the rest of your life and eke out a living and, you know, move to Michigan because that's where the only cheap real estate is left,' you know what I mean? There's gotta be something better.

“So we were looking for a different producer, different sound, and this opportunity comes to work with Kevin, and Kevin was kind of in the same spot. He was moving from New York to LA and looking just to kind of get involved with something that he could take from the ground up, and here I am, you know? Here's the ground,” he laughs. “So I showed up as the ground and the rest is history – we've done nine projects in the scope of seven years. Not to mention three DVDs, and we've just finished our fourth – we did an acoustic show in Vienna, completely different band, and we ended up filming that. We just did a whole tour of that.”

While Bonamassa's reputation is very solidly built upon his incendiary guitar playing, as far as he's concerned it's still really all about the song.

“I'd rather have better songs than solos,” he admits. “I'd rather have shitty solos in a good song, as opposed to a great solo in a bad song. And a lot of it, again, wanders out of the blues pretty readily, you know? Well pretty much, on a regular basis. But we end up having a good time with it, and we've gone from making records that we would call blues records, in the genre, to making records that we just call, well, it's got two guys playin' bouzoukis, one guy with a clarinet, they all speak Greek – none of them speak a word of English – we've got instruments we've never heard of, and a shuffle. I guess it's a Joe record [2010's Black Rock, recorded on the Greek island of Santorini]! But the whole thing seems to work, in a weird way.

“I can only cite my limitations as a singer and my limitations as a musician sometimes back you into an interesting corner where it actually is more interesting than if you just played the stuff with ease, you know?”