{"id":6900,"date":"2012-07-23T23:21:18","date_gmt":"2012-07-24T06:21:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=6900"},"modified":"2012-07-23T23:21:18","modified_gmt":"2012-07-24T06:21:18","slug":"joe-bonamassa-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2012\/07\/joe-bonamassa-2\/","title":{"rendered":"JOE BONAMASSA"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h1>\n

JOE BONAMASSA<\/strong><\/h1>\n

A guitar master enjoys an overnight success decades in the making\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Joe Bonamassa nurses a sore neck as he discusses his new album, Driving Towards the Daylight<\/em>\u2014the result of too much headbanging onstage the night before. \u201cWe added a bit of \u2018Still of the Night\u2019 by Whitesnake,\u201d he muses. \u201cMaybe that\u2019s what wrenched out my neck.\u201d Bonamassa, 35, isn\u2019t letting a wrenched-out neck slow him down now. He\u2019s an acknowledged modern guitar hero, burning up stages both on his own and with the supergroup Black Country Communion. Daylight <\/em>features two new Bonamassa originals alongside favorites like Robert Johnson\u2019s\u00a0\u201cStones in My Passway.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why do so many covers?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have any ego about it. A good song is a good song, and it doesn\u2019t matter who writes it. I\u2019m not a prolific writer. I\u2019m not\u00a0Bob Dylan. I think Dylan wrote more verses in one song from his last record than I have on\u00a013 albums. I can come up with good songs, but it takes a long time and it\u2019s frustrating for me. I\u2019m not a confident writer. All my best songs were at risk of not being handed in because they embarrassed me.<\/p>\n

How about \u201cStones in My Passway?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

We approached that one like Led Zeppelin. We messed around with it\u2014took the ones and threes and made them twos and fours. It\u2019s a heavy, stomping swamp thing. That one fought me. I almost walked out of the room, I just wasn\u2019t feeling it. But once I did, it made all kinds of sense. Getting me there, I was like a toddler on Sunday morning before church when they don\u2019t want to go.<\/p>\n

Do you get flack from purists?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every day. They accuse me of trying to hijack the blues, because what we do is a bit popular at the moment. I don\u2019t buy it. I think Zeppelin is as much blues as Robert Johnson. How would you describe Robert Johnson? Well, that would be traditional blues, the way it first started. Then 40 years later that would be Zeppelin. How would you describe the blues I play today? It\u2019s blues updated for 2012. It\u2019s like a car\u2014and cars don\u2019t look the same as they did in 1926.<\/p>\n

Is it odd to be getting buzz?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve been living in a bubble for so long that any mainstream attention is foreign to me. Some of these cats don\u2019t know about these years in the damn van, going out in front of 30 people, hoping you make enough merch money to stay at a Days Inn only to drive\u00a0600 miles for the distinct pleasure of repeating it. They see two tour buses and two semitrucks out back and are programmed to think the only way you can do it is with a Svengali. It would never come into their brains that the cat may have just gone out there and worked hard.<\/p>\n

What else got you here?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a lot of word of mouth. People are selective about the shows they go to, and for some reason they like what we do.\u00a0Ticket sales are on fire. You look at some of these venues and it\u2019s like, \u201cI can\u2019t believe we sold it all the way to the back. I guess we fooled them again.\u201d I\u2019ve got \u00a024 years in the music business, and\u00a0now I\u2019m an overnight success. It\u2019s very\u00a0strange. Somebody just told me that in\u00a0the U.K. we\u2019re on pace to have the\u00a0No. 1 album in the whole country.\u00a0Joe Bonamassa! Crazy talk.<\/p>\n

\u2013Eric R. Danton<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JOE BONAMASSA A guitar master enjoys an overnight success decades in the making\u00a0 Joe Bonamassa nurses a sore neck as he discusses his new album, Driving Towards the Daylight\u2014the result of too much headbanging onstage the night before. \u201cWe added a bit of \u2018Still of the Night\u2019 by Whitesnake,\u201d he muses. \u201cMaybe that\u2019s what wrenched […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[4316,313,4300,4315,970,4314,4317,4318,4313],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6900"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6900"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6903,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6900\/revisions\/6903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}