Orianthi Interview

interview by Bill Palmer

“I’m actually going to have another coffee very soon, so that should lift me up for awhile,” Orianthi says lightheartedly on a day in which she’s been up since four in the morning. If she hasn’t been getting much sleep lately, perhaps it’s because the twenty-four year old guitar virtuoso, whom Carlos Santana has anointed as his successor and Carrie Underwood tapped for her Grammy performance, is not only promoting the release of her new chart-climbing pop album “Believe” but also finds herself as the unwitting co-star of Michael Jackson’s “This Is It” documentary, as she spent months rehearsing with MJ for what would have been his comeback tour. Sounding surprisingly relaxed considering the whirlwind that her life has recently become, the Australian prodigy filled me in on, well, pretty much everything.



“I picked up a guitar when I was six,” Orianthi says of how it all got started. “My dad had guitars around the house, and I started strumming. I think I was singing then too, but then I sort of stopped doing that and just took the guitar more seriously. I really didn’t take up singing again until about fifteen, when I started playing in a cover band and playing out three nights a week in Adelaide, in different pubs and stuff, and singing cover songs every night. I kind of earned pocket money that way.”



“Believe” finds her melding both talents together into a collection of guitar solo-laden pop and rock tunes. “With this new record I’m singing on every song, bar one, which is Highly Strung, which is an instrumental I did with Steve Vai.” If the pairing of virtuosos on the track seems arbitrary, it’s not; they first toured together when she was fifteen.



“I love playing guitar so much that when I first started singing I was really scared,” she says of the transition. “I didn’t want to sing, I didn’t want anyone to hear me. And so I always thought ‘I just want to play guitar.‘ But it gives me something else to do when onstage. And also, you connect with more people when you start adding lyrics to your songs.”



Before finding success with American audiences, Orianthi first had to find her way to America, a trip to Los Angeles that she documented in a song called Feels Like Home. “I’ve got some amazing friends, they’re like my American family. The people that I’m surrounded with now are just great. The experiences I’ve had over the past three years, it’s just been at times really trying, and at other times being awesome. It’s been ups and downs, yin and yang. You just appreciate the great stuff that comes along, getting the opportunity to play with some amazing people.”



“I Skype my parents, that’s how I see them,” she says of the fact that she hasn’t been home to Australia in over a year.



The lead single from the album, According To You, which was just tapped as the iTunes single of the week by Apple, initially sounds as if it’s just going to be yet another broken-hearted tale, but the lyrics are eventually reversed into the story of a woman who knows when to leave. “It’s just a really empowering song. It’s about moving on from a bad situation to a better one and being treated well and not putting up with crap.”



For a pop song, however, According To You has as many scintillating guitar runs as a Santana tune might. “We definitely rockified it with all the guitars that were put in there in the recording. I have a lot of fun playing it, and I hope it connects to a lot of people.”



A decade of performing with some of the most popular and talented musicians in the world didn’t keep Orianthi from feeling her nerves, however, when the King of Pop came calling. “Auditioning for Michael Jackson, I’ve never been that nervous in my life,” she says of landing the gig that had her rehearsing with Jackson for the final three months of his life. “And meeting Carlos for the first time I was so nervous, and when I was fifteen and I opened for Steve Vai I was really nervous, and I also got to jam with Prince and I was really nervous then, and Carrie Underwood playing the Grammy awards, that was crazy. But then for me, I just think well this is what I’m meant to be doing. I love playing guitar, it’s what I chose to do with my life and just never stopped learning. Playing with these people I love so much, I really admire and look up to all of them. So it’s a journey, you know, and you’ve just got to not let nerves get in the way and just believe in yourself.”



Getting hired by legends is one thing, but Carlos Santana is on record as having said that Orianthi would be his “first choice” in terms of who he’d like to pass the Guitar God baton to when he retires. So does such high public praise increase the pressure to raise the bar? “He’s one of my idols. I picked up electric guitar when I was eleven, after seeing him play. He inspired me to pick it up, and so to have him say really supporting things about me, encouraging things, is just amazing. I hope that every time I get to jam with different people and just play, that every year I progress and get better. I never stop learning. When I’m eighty, I want to look back and actually see that I’ve moved forward.”



While her own focus is on her new album, there’s no escaping the fact that Orianthi is currently in the public eye for more than one reason. She can be spotted on television multiple times per day in ads for This Is It, which is currently playing at most movie theaters, and the publicity has already landed her gigs on shows like Good Morning America.



“I really wish that MJ was still around. We were rehearsing for three months to do the show, and it was a dream come true to be part of that and work with such an icon. Just incredible, how much was going into the show, and how much I learned from the amazing musicians that were in the band, with [stage director] Kenny [Ortega] and the choreographers and dancers, everybody just felt like such family. When he passed, everyone was just so devastated, and we didn’t see it coming because we had performed the night before and he was so full of energy and just really wanting to do it. I really wish that he was still around, and the shows would have gone ahead and that all his fans could have seen what we saw and gotten as excited as we were when we saw him for the first time when he danced in front of us. It was just incredible. It just feels like a dream, like a crazy dream from the start. This whole year has just been crazy.”

The Twitter universe has seen Orianthi’s name mentioned as often as multiple times per minute over the past week (she’s replied personally to hundreds of them), and her number of followers has more than doubled since the release of her album and the movie. But her own self-scribed Twitter bio simply reads “I like to play guitar and cook!” So what dishes are her favorite to concoct? “I love making pizzas from scratch,” she says. “I make the base and then I make the topping and everything. And then I love making vegan cakes, you know, just healthier kinds of things. I love cooking. It’s like a meditation for me.”

“Believe” is now available in iTunes. Learn more about Orianthi at Orianthi.com.