Album · Steve Vai
Passion and Warfare by Steve Vai
Passion and Warfare is an album by Steve Vai, released in 1990. 2 songs from it have charted on rock radio countdowns, with 5 countdown appearances in total. The biggest is “The Audience is Listening”, on 4 lists with a best position of #402.
Passion and Warfare, Steve Vai's second solo album, came out on Relativity and Epic in 1990, and it had been a long time coming. Vai first started planning it in 1982, shelved it when he joined David Lee Roth's band, and only picked it up again after he and Roth went their separate ways in 1989. He produced it himself at the Mothership, the home studio where he'd also tracked his guitar for Whitesnake's Slip of the Tongue, and David Coverdale, Adrian Vandenberg and Rudy Sarzo drop in on backing vocals, with Coverdale adding some spoken parts.
The music grew out of dreams Vai had when he was young, and he pitched it as Jimi Hendrix bumping into Jesus Christ at a party Ben Hur threw for Mel Blanc: devotional one minute, cartoonish the next. The video for "The Audience Is Listening" got regular MTV play, the album went gold, and it remains the biggest seller of his career.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Songs from Passion and Warfare on radio countdowns
| # | Song | Strength | Lists | Best | #1s | Years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Audience is Listening | 4 | #402 | – | 1990–1996 | |
| 2 | Erotic Nightmares | 1 | #210 | – | 1990 |
Only songs that appear on at least one countdown are listed. Release data from MusicBrainz.