But sing the blues he does on Sloe Gin [Premier Artists], his second record produced by Kevin Shirley. The album is more vocal in every sense—not just because Bonamassa is singing more, but because there’s an abundance of his killer slide playing, which lends a melodic, lyrical quality to several tunes. He still throws down with his trademark burning—particularly on John Mayall’s “Another Kind of Love,” and his dramatic reading of Charles Brown’s “Black Night.” On the day he was to play his hometown of Utica, New York, Bonamassa talked about the making of Sloe Gin, and why this is a great time to be a bluesman.

You handle all the vocals on this album. How does that affect your guitar playing?
I think it makes me a better musician, because I’m more aware of everything. I’m certainly more aware of leaving space for the vocal. If you’re a guitarist playing behind a vocalist, you tend to fill holes all the time.

The slide solo on “One of These Days” has a real melodic, dreamy quality that picks up where the vocal leaves off. Where does that influence come from?
Ry Cooder and David Lindley are my guys on slide. I’m not really a slide guitar player—I’m more of a regular guitar player. But, to me, it’s about getting the most emotional content out of a solo. Sometimes, that calls for slide, and on this record that happened a lot. My last record had no slide on it.

The main riff of that tune is played without a slide, but there are slide licks interspersed. How did you track those parts?
It’s funny. That song was done, and it was cool, but I had watched the Tom Dowd video the night before, and he was talking about how they recorded “Layla.” I wanted to try something like that—I like the epic nature of it. I used my number one ’59 Historic Reissue Les Paul. I have five of them, and you can tell which one I’ve been playing the most—number one is really beat up, number two is kind of beat up, and so on. They get in better shape as you go up. Number one has real PAFs and bumblebee caps. It’s a good Les Paul—very light, but not chambered. I played through two Marshalls—a Super Lead and a Silver Jubilee. For the slide parts, Gibson gave me a prototype of a Skylark lap-steel, which is basically the guts of a Skylark in a Les Paul form. There’s only one of them. It’s in open E tuning. But the slide stuff was done after the body of the song was recorded.

How do you pull it off live?
I play the bulk of the song with a standard-tuned Les Paul. Because we’re touring with a keyboard player, we sort of do the “Layla” re-intro where the keys, bass, and drums take it for eight bars, and then I switch to my slide guitar for the rest of the song.

Will you dial in a different tone, or use different gear for slide playing?
Not really. For slide, I never use a pick, so I vary the tone that way. I’m a big fan of using my live rig in the studio. I had a lot of tweed amps that sat there and looked really cool, but were unused because my rig was miked up, and it sounded really good. I could get any tone I heard in my head.

My live rig now has a Category 5 Joe Bonamassa Custom amp. It’s basically a ’68 100-watt Super Lead clone with a Dumble mid boost. That mid boost is important, because it really brings the amp forward in the mix. I have a 1987 100-watt Marshall Silver Jubilee. I use a Two-Rock Custom Signature Reverb, and I have a Van Weelden Twinkleland amp—which is a very studied, meticulously recreated Dumble Overdrive Special. My rig has four amps, but only two are on at any one time. I always have the Jubilee running, and then I have three alternates. Each of the other three does something that the Marshall does not, so it’ll either be cleaner or have more midrange or more top, and those two things create one sound. For the heavy tone in the intro to “Dirt in My Pocket,” I used the Two-Rock and the Jubilee with the Gibson slide guitar.

What about your solo tone in “Another Kind of Love”?
That solo was the last one we did on the record, and that was my ’65 Princeton Reverb, and one of my Les Pauls. I cut the solo at the same time I did the vocal, so the amp got picked up by the Telefunken vocal mic.

How do you play the wild lick at 1:14? Is that slide?
That’s Kevin Shirley’s favorite lick on the album. It’s sort of a slide lick without the slide. It’s basically my Danny Gatton influence—all that crazy double-stop stuff. It’s one of those licks that you play off the top of your head, and I don’t know if I could ever play it the same way twice. Recording that tune was like playing a live gig. You’re singing and you go for it. It was just one of those moments of inspiration.

Is the reverb coming from the Princeton?
The Princeton has reverb on it, but we also got reverb from a Lexicon PCM über-dollar unit. We panned the reverb to one side so it has that Peter Green/John Mayall sound.

“Ball Peen Hammer” was written by Chris Whitley. What can you tell me about him?
I knew him a little bit. I opened for him on my first solo tour. I was blown away by the fact that he got up there with a Dobro and just crushed everybody. It was the loudest, heaviest acoustic show I’ve ever witnessed, and it was also the most emotional. I always loved his record Dirt Floor, and that’s where “Ball Peen Hammer” came from.

You work with the Blues in the Schools program. How do kids respond when you talk about the blues roots of popular music?
They generally like it. Some kids could care less, but most of them are really into it. I’ll ask them if they like Led Zeppelin. And they all say, “Yeah,” and I tell them, “Well, if you’ve heard Led Zeppelin, then you’ve heard the blues.” That’s my opening line. I talk about Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. I give them a sense of what the blues is, and maybe they’ll dig into it further as a result. If they buy a B.B. King record, then I’ve done my job. It’s important to bring the blues into the future. My record actually broke the Billboard Top 200 for the first time, and a lot of that was Internet sales. That’s the kind of thing that obviously couldn’t have happened back in the day. I think this could be a really exciting time for the blues.