“It told me its name”: The Steve Vai song that demanded to be written
One of the downsides of being among the lionised guitar gods of your generation is that all those impossible phalange acrobatics on the fretboard start to look pre-ordained—like the spirit of rock and roll is simply passing through you when you’re on stage.
Nobody thinks of Steve Vai, for example, and imagines a guy jotting down reams of notes for loose song ideas or recording shitty half-demos in his basement. Rest assured, though, even the mightiest, rhinestone-covered axe-wielders go through fits and starts.
In a 2015 interview with Songfacts, Vai estimated that during his teen years in the 1970s, he probably recorded a random lick or segment of a song idea at least “one to five times a day”.
“Even before cassettes,” he said, “I was composing constantly. And then whenever I was on tour, I’d be composing on airplanes or hotel rooms with written ideas. And then through the years, maybe a week will go by where I don’t record something, but that’s very rare. Most of the time, it’s between one and three times a day.”
Why bother being that vigilant about getting every random little nugget of an idea on tape? Well, because experience had taught him that there could eventually be gold to be mined there, even if it was buried from view on a first analysis.
By “capturing a moment,” Vai explained, “When I go back and listen to it in the future, it takes me back to the original inspiration and I see the song unfold.”
One example of a Vai song with this sort of long gestation period was ‘Tender Surrender’, the popular closing track from his 1995 EP Alien Love Secrets. While Steve wasn’t at his best when it came to naming his albums at that particular point in time, he was in a songwriting groove, and decided to revisit some dusty tapes from his idea jar to see if they’d speak to him.
“So then I had this cassette with me singing just the first verse melody and the chord changes,” Vai said of the ‘Tender Surrender’ origin recording, “and I knew that it had some energy to it. There was a presence to it.”
Even so, the bare bones of ‘Tender Surrender’ had remained “on the shelf,” as Vai put it, for a very long time, although it wouldn’t be accurate to say he forgot all about it.
“It was yelling at me for about ten years,” Vai said. “Finally when I listened back to it, I said, ‘I know there’s a beautiful song in there,’ so I completed it, and then when it was done, I listened to it, and it told me its name.”
Conveniently, it was a fun, rhyming name, too, and one admittedly fitting of the mood of the instrumental track—one which has remained one of the finest showcases of Steve Vai’s mesmerising technical ability.
As a composition, ‘Tender Surrender’ has been compared to Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Vanilla Junction’, and there are certainly some Jimi elements in there, as well as some ridiculous shredding and a bit of tickled “guitar talking” that sounds sort of like Donald Duck quacking sarcastically. The combination of all these elements didn’t come together in one fell swoop, though. Sometimes, you need to sleep on an idea for a night, or a decade.
