Why Orianthi is your favorite rock stars' favorite rock star: 'She is absolutely amazing'

Orianthi was in the studio with Diane Warren, the legendary songwriter, putting the finishing touches on a vocal for "Believe," her first release on Geffen Records, when she found herself distracted by a message on her MySpace page.

“This was when MySpace existed,” she says.

“I got a message going, 'Hey, you're what we're looking for. This is Michael Jackson's musical director. Michael wants to talk to you tonight. Are you free?' I was like, 'What?!' I was literally putting down a vocal. And after I finished, I was, for some reason, checking my MySpace. I said, 'Diane, do you think this is real?' She goes, 'It's really cool if it is.'”

It was, it turns out, both really cool and very real.

She found herself talking to Jackson and his musical director on the phone that night.

“He was like, 'Can you learn “Beat It” and three other songs tonight, come in tomorrow and play them for me with the band? I'd love for you to be my lead guitar player.'” Orianthi recalls.

“And I'm like, 'Oh my God!' I remember rushing home and cranking up my very loud amplifier in my apartment at the time. My Pomeranian was barking and the people next door to me had to be like, 'Oh my God, this crazy guitar player has moved in.’”

Orianthi recalls learning 'Beat It' for Michael Jackson audition

At a certain point, she decided that mastering Eddie Van Halen’s finger-tapping solo note for note was not the way to land the gig.

“I thought, ‘There's no frickin' way I can try to fill Eddie's shoes or Jennifer Batten or anyone before me,’” the Australian guitarist recalls.

“So I'm just gonna do my version of the solo. Because I'm an artist. I kind of looked at it like, 'I am who I am, and they are incredible,' right? I'll do the best as I possibly can at learning the solo note for note, but I'm playing with my own feel and my own take on it. A lot of people would listen going, 'Oh, she didn't do it exactly like Eddie.' Well, no one can play it just like Eddie. I'm not a robot."

That allowed her to go into that audition thinking, "OK, he'll either love it or hate it.”

'I'm very, very grateful that I had that time' with Michael Jackson

Jackson ended up loving it, bringing Orianthi on as his guitarist for a residency at O2 Arena in London that was scheduled to start July 13, 2009, but was canceled in the wake of Jackson’s unexpected death on June 25, 2009.

“It's just really, really sad what happened,” Orianthi says. “But I'm very, very grateful that I had that time with him. What Michael, I think, wanted to do was just have all new people around him and make it this incredible show, which it would have been.”

Although the concerts never happened, the rehearsals were beautifully captured in the documentary “Michael Jackson’s This Is It.”

“I loved working with Michael,” Orianthi says. “He was very particular. But hey, I listened and I learned. I feel like I'm a much better entertainer and musician because of him.

"It definitely lifts you up when you're on the stage with someone like that. He's so dedicated, it makes you give 110%, 120%. I'm already hard on myself. But you get next to someone like that, and you realize that's why they're one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Because they live for it.”

Alice Cooper was 'always, like Michael Jackson, 110% on stage'

Orianthi saw a bit of that same quality in Alice Cooper when she joined his band on lead guitar in 2011, staying on for three years.

“He was always, like Michael Jackson, 110% on stage,” she says. “After working with Michael Jackson and getting to work with Alice Cooper, they're just the ultimate showmen.”

An Alice Cooper concert obviously entails a very different type of showmanship than what she saw with Jackson.

“It's like Rocky Horror celebrating Halloween every night,” she says.

“I had such a good time. I was covered in blood. Not real blood, but the whole makeup thing. My hair got bigger and bigger. We went pretty crazy on that. You've gotta dodge knives. You've gotta dodge Frankenstein. Confetti cannons. Pythons. There's just a lot going on.”

That extends to Alice Cooper's music.

“They're not easy songs to play,” she says. “They're very orchestrated with three guitar players. I had to learn 25 songs in a week before joining that band.”

When school was In: What was Alice Cooper like in high school? Friends and bandmates share their stories

Orianthi and Alice Cooper met on 'American Idol' of all places

She and Cooper had met on the set of “American Idol,” playing “School’s Out.”

It was on the final day of recording an album in Nashville with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics that she got the call from Cooper.

“He's like, 'Hey, it's Alice. We just did 'American Idol' together. My guitar player is going to Thin Lizzy. Would you join my band and be my lead guitar player? I've got a world tour coming up.'”

She was supposed to do her own tour in support of “Heaven in This Hell,” the album she’d just made with Stewart. Instead, she spent the next three years on tour with Cooper.

“I lived on the bus with them, waking up, having coffee with Alice and Sheryl, just talking and getting a lot of great advice," she says.

The best advice he gave her was to keep her stage persona separate from the person on that tour bus.

“He would always tell me, 'Your day-to-day life is different from when you're on stage. That's a role you play.’ During the day, he plays golf and goes shopping and walks around. He’s just a normal person. Then at nighttime, he becomes Alice Cooper. That for me is, like, a big thing. You've got to separate the two.”

Alice Cooper says there's nobody like Orianthi

Cooper credits his longtime producer Bob Ezrin with suggesting Orianthi for the job.

“He said, 'Have you ever thought about a female guitar player?’” Cooper recalls.

“And I went 'No,' but after I heard her play, I thought, 'She is absolutely amazing.' I always look for a guitar player that's based in the blues. They're always the best guitar players. If you look at Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck and all those guys, they were all blues players."

From what he's heard her play, he figures she could hold her own onstage with Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones or even Eric Clapton.

"She could plug in and play with anybody," Cooper says. "She's really an exceptional guitar player. And a unique personality. There’s nobody like Ori.”

Orianthi's new album explores her blues roots

Her deep roots in the blues are definitely showing on the album she has coming out this year, her first release since 2022’s “Rock Candy.”

It’s a self-produced effort she recorded mostly live at Doors guitarist Robby Krieger’s studio with Joe Bonamassa adding what she calls “blues fire guitar” to the end of the first single, due out Feb. 23, “First Time I Got the Blues.”

“I've just been writing a lot, going back to the music that I listened to when I was younger,” she says.

“This is the record I kind of wanted to make from the beginning, which was, you know, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Stevie Ray, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, that kind of vibe, you know, mixed with a bit of country. Organically, these songs, the way they sound, and everything are not thought out. They’re like, ‘This is how I’m feeling. This is how I want to sound.’

"You’re making music for yourself, in a way, which is kind of selfish. But if you move yourself first, hopefully, other people feel it, too.”

Orianthi was 6 when she learned her first guitar chords

Orianthi was 6 years old when she started playing guitar, drawn to the instrument by the fun her father appeared to be having anytime he played guitar.

“I was like, ‘I want to do that. That’s fun,’” she recalls. “And as soon as he put it in my hands and I learned three chords, I was under the spell of music immediately. Then trying to get vibrato like B.B. King, I would sit there for hours. It was something that I wasn’t forced to do, you know. It was something I wanted to do.”

At a certain point, her parents thought it best to have her study classical guitar.

“I hated it,” she says.

“I think my parents wanted to see if I would take it seriously enough, so they were like, 'You should probably go to university at 10.’ I got accepted, which is wild. I was the youngest there. And I studied classical at 10 years old and learned sight-reading, theory and everything.”

How a Carlos Santana concert changed everything for Orianthi

She dropped out after seeing a Santana concert.

As she recalls, “That was like, 'Oh, hell no, I don't want to play classical anymore with a teacher — you know, studying. It felt like school.

"For me, it's all about freedom. And music represents that. It's a job, at the end of the day. But it's the best job in the world because it's like therapy for yourself and many other people. You can help people, like I was helped as a kid, listening to my favorite records, going through a weird time at school. Music saved me."

By the time she was 18, Orianthi had come to the attention of the man whose concert put her on the track to where she is today, Carlos Santana.

“He’s like my other dad out here,” she says.

“Carlos and I, we talk every other day. And his wife, Cindy. We're all very close. Getting to sit in with him and learn from him, what a teacher to have, right? He’s incredible. As a human. As a player. He hits one note, like B.B. King, and it speaks volumes. And he means it when he plays it. That is something that comes from within. You can't learn that.”

Finding a way to hit that one note that speaks volumes has been Orianthi’s driving force from the beginning.

“When I got my first guitar, my dad didn't say, 'You go practice,’” she says. “It was more like I wanted to get in trouble, so I'd get sent to my room so I could practice. Because I loved it. And when you have that sort of childlike enthusiasm for something in life, you wake up every morning and go, 'This is what I want to do.’ I feel so blessed that I get to do this."

Orianthi concert in Phoenix

When: 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 4.

Where: Celebrity Theatre, 440 N. 32nd St., Phoenix.

Admission: $25-$95.

Details: 602-267-1600, celebritytheatre.com.

Reach the reporter at [email protected] or 602-444-4495. Follow him on X @EdMasley.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Michael Jackson and Alice Cooper's go-to guitarist Orianthi looks back