Over the years, Steve Lukather has built an enormous resume of sessions. He has been asked about them in many interviews:


From an interview in Musikermagasinet (October 1997), translated by Mikael Hagström:

During the 80'es Steve was enormously successful as a session musician. He estimates to have played on 6-700 records, with everything form unknown debutantes to top artists like Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney. If you found Lukather's name on the convolute, you could anticipate vigorous playing and good guitar sound, even if the rest of the production and material were of shifting quality.


Steve: “It wasn't as structured as it could present itself. Usually I came unprepared, stayed for a short while an disappeared as fast as I came. It became a sport in the end - to be number one in the studio world and to make lot's of money in the shortest amount of time possible. I had talent for it, worked hard and became pretty good at what I did after a while. Many of the albums I never heard afterwards, and between the assignments I was mostly high. It was a wild and fun time, but after a while it didn't lead anywhere. I have stopped, with both the drugs and with the session musician lifestyle. The only people I still get together with is people like Michael Landau, those I grew up with.”

In 1998, Steve Lukather was ending his active career as a session guitarist. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times he commented on this:

”I did (sessions) for a long time, and it sucked the life out of my music," he said. Before slacking off on session work over the past few years, he used to insist that playing extensively as a hired gun didn't hurt his spontaneity and creativity. [...] "That was a lie," he said. "It made me take the whole thing for granted. I started thinking that I knew too much, that I knew all about how to make records. I was making money, but that's not the end of the world. To me, there's no future in it."

In another interview with "Guitar" in 1993:

Some were great sessions, some were great records, particularly in the late '70s and early '80s. That was the peak of when I was doing it. I would look forward to being there and then sometimes the artist would be terrible-you didn't understand how these people got record deals!


We'd sit there and make the most of it. This is a time before drum machines and before people had sophisticated home studios. There would be a piano/vocal demo or acoustic guitar demo. Or they would play the song for you. We'd basically rearrange and rewrite the song for them, just because we wanted to get the hell out of there. Most of it was bad; maybe 15 percent of the sessions were great, the rest were forgettable.


That's when it got to the point where I stopped. Some of the more fun records we did were [Don] Henley, Boz Scaggs and Elton John. Those records were really creative.

Related Pages
Steve Lukather