Highly Strung (featuring Steve Vai)

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on a cut that still makes the hair on your arms stand up, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any stretch of time you already know why. Highly Strung, featuring Steve Vai, comes off Orianthi's album Believe, and it is the kind of instrumental that belongs on a freeform rock station like THE ZOO. No chorus to lean on, no lyric to hide behind, just two guitar players trading lines like they have been waiting years to get in the same room. Orianthi Panagaris wrote it with Vai, and the track runs a little over four minutes of riff, answer, and grin. She has said the whole thing carries an eighties feel, simple on purpose, built so the playing stays in the spotlight. That is exactly how it lands when the Crew spins it: lean, fast, and a little wild around the edges.

The story behind the song goes back to a club in Adelaide, not a stadium. Orianthi was about fifteen, and her first real support slot was opening for Steve Vai. She has told it more than once, including to Spinner, that she was nervous out of her mind because it was her first support and she was opening for one of the best guitar players on the planet. In a later Guitar World chat she filled in the picture. The room was a nightclub called Heaven. There was no band. She played to a track, and a row of guys in the crowd stood there with their arms folded, waiting to see what a kid with a guitar was going to do. Vai was off to the side, actually watching. She has called that night daunting and a little awkward, and she has also said that once she felt the energy of the stage she had a blast. Vai stuck. He became a mentor, the sort of player she has compared to an uncle in the guitar world, and one of two favorites alongside Carlos Santana. She would send him demos. He would listen and write back, pointing at a part he liked and a chord or a key he thought she ought to change. Getting a note like that from Steve Vai, when you are still finding your feet, is the kind of story rock radio was built to tell.

Years later the two of them finally cut a tune together for Believe. She has said she was flying with him when she floated the idea, and he told her to come over the following week and write something. At his place he had a riff in mind and suggested they just go back and forth. In the Guitar World interview she laid it out plain. The guitar parts you hear on Highly Strung were recorded at his house. They did a demo there, it had the energy, and they kept it. Those are demo guitars. The whole thing was improvised: she had an idea, they played the riff together, he did something, she did something, then they played the riff again. Just figuring it out. She later told Australian Musician that they spent a small fortune trying to re-record those parts in proper studios, and it never sounded right, because they were no longer in the room together. Sometimes the first pass is the one that holds the vibe, and this was one of those times. She has called it a real honor, and she has called him an innovator who can shred and still stop you cold with a melody.

They shot a video for the track too, and she has said that was just as cool as cutting the song. The clip keeps that same simple eighties frame and puts the playing front and center. Folks who saw the behind-the-scenes footage noticed the two of them smiling and goofing instead of pulling the usual stone-faced shredder poses. Mutual admiration, not a duel with a scoreboard. Believe itself landed in late October 2009 on Geffen, her major-label debut after an earlier independent record, and the release was pushed so it would line up with the attention around Michael Jackson's This Is It film, where she had been tapped as his guitarist. The album reached number 77 on the Billboard 200. AllMusic heard a friendly guitar showdown in Highly Strung. A Sputnikmusic write-up called it a fun, old-school duel and one of the tracks worth keeping. On the record she is credited alongside Vai as a writer, and he is right there on guitar. For a station that still believes an instrumental can carry a whole set, this one earns the slot.

How she got to that room starts in Adelaide, in a Greek family, with a piano at age three. Her father put an acoustic guitar in her hands at six, and she took to it like she had been waiting. She dug through his records, Hendrix, Clapton, Santana, B.B. King, and the songwriters who could also play. At eleven he took her to see Carlos Santana, and that show changed the map. She has said she asked for a Paul Reed Smith so she could sound like Carlos, and the acoustic went back on the stand. She wore out Santana tapes learning solos note for note. By fourteen she was in cover bands around Adelaide. At fifteen she started home schooling so the guitar could take the days, and that first Vai support happened in the same stretch. She opened for ZZ Top at the Adelaide Entertainment Centre and stayed in touch with Billy Gibbons. Around fourteen she cut a home record called Under the Influence and got a copy to Santana. When she was eighteen and he played Memorial Drive, he brought her to soundcheck, then asked her onstage that night in front of her own town. He sent the footage to Paul Reed Smith, and in 2004 she flew to California for the first time to play NAMM. By twenty, with Vai still writing back about her demos and Australian songwriters in the mix, she was done being only a cover-band guitarist.

In 2005 she made Violet Journey at home, playing guitar, keys, bass, and drums on most of it, and producing the thing herself. A Universal A&R caught her at NAMM in 2006, Geffen signed her, and she moved to Los Angeles that November, with management through 19 Entertainment. The turn that put her in front of the wider rock crowd came at the 2009 Grammys, playing guitar with Carrie Underwood. Michael Jackson saw the footage, his musical director reached out, she auditioned, and she landed in the This Is It band alongside names like Eddie Van Halen, Slash, and Jennifer Batten. The London run never happened. She has called the rehearsals a life-changing stretch and said she learned more than she could sort in one sitting. Believe followed that fall, with According to You becoming the platinum single that carried the record around the world, and Highly Strung sitting on it as the guitar piece for the players in the room. Alice Cooper later brought her into his band and said she killed it every night. The through-line is the same one Vai spotted in that Adelaide club: she was into it, it was the passion, and it was not an accessory.

If you want the long version of that road, her official site lays the story out at orianthi.me, including the Believe chapter and the players who shaped it. Her official Facebook page is Orianthi on Facebook, the place she has pointed fans when she wants them on the real page and not a lookalike. Instagram is iamorianthi, and her official X account is orianthi. For the folks who keep the flame between records, the Orianthi Fan Club group lives at Orianthi Fan Club, and the community page Fans of Orianthi Worldwide is at Fans of Orianthi Worldwide. Spin Highly Strung again when the set needs a little electricity. The Zoo Crew will be right here with the next deep cut.