Joel Hoekstra has never really had a problem being seen as a “guitar guy.” The point of Joel Hoekstra’s 13, though, is that it isn’t supposed to feel like a guitar clinic with a backing band. It’s his rock project, built like a band record, with a band-level cast, and the fourth album, From the Fade (out February 27, 2026 via Frontiers Music SRL), leans harder into that identity.
The lineup helps explain the intent: Vinny Appice on drums, Tony Franklin on bass, Derek Sherinian on keys, and vocalist Girish Pradhan up front—players with enough identity that the record either has to feel like a band or it risks feeling like a collage.
Pre-orders of From the Fade are available here.
Right at the top of his chat with Robert Cavuoto, Hoekstra acknowledges that the naming can trip people up. He explains why he even bothered drawing a line between “Joel Hoekstra” and Joel Hoekstra’s 13 in the first place, because he’s done the other thing already: “I had instrumental albums out when I was younger, just under Joel Hoekstra, and those sounded like a guitar player’s albums, like you would expect.”
Getting into Joel Hoekstra’s 13, he says, was about making “solo music” that didn’t behave like a solo record: “The intention was to create solo music, but have it be a rock, my rock recording project, essentially.”
That distinction matters more on From the Fade because, by his own description, the album is a tighter listen than some of his earlier releases: more cohesive, more metal-leaning, yet still anchored by melody. He’s careful not to oversell it as a dramatic reinvention, because the heaviness wasn’t even fully intentional: “I think it’s a little bit heavier this time… I think it was just that I was… kind of playing more metal, and, like, so when I went to write, it just kind of came out a little heavier, and I think that the melody is still there. I still would define it as melodic hard rock, but there’s definitely more elements of metal at times on the record than there’s been in the past…”
A lot of that sharper edge comes down to what he chose to write for vocalist Girish Pradhan this time around. On Crash of Life, the previous album and Pradhan’s first with the project, Hoekstra says he held back from one of Pradhan’s biggest weapons: the high, aggressive stuff: “I kind of wrote it to not go to his screaming place, the high stuff, and then with this record, I decided, I mean, this is what he does, he does it really well, so I decided to write a little bit more of that into this album, him doing his screaming and whatnot.”
Even when he’s talking about “metal,” he keeps circling back to structure and intent, what he’s aiming for emotionally, and whose voice he’s writing toward. That’s where his reference points show up: a blend of classic hard-rock power and a specific kind of melodic phrasing. He also describes a kind of idealized blend he’s chased across projects, especially when he’s thinking about the chemistry of players like Vinny Appice, Tony Franklin, and Derek Sherinian.
“I was always looking for, like, Dio meets Lou Gramm meets Paul Rodgers. The model for me has always been, like, thinking about Ronnie James Dio at times, like, that powerful, aggressive thing. At times… there’s a lot of, like, Dokken in my childhood. A lot of times, I’ll hear Don Dokken, that is in my DNA. Somebody pointed that out recently. I fail to mention George Lynch as an influence all the time.”
The “more defined sound” angle shows up again when he starts comparing the arc of the earlier albums. He’s blunt about how those records moved around stylistically, and he frames From the Fade as a return to focus: “The first record was Dying to Live, and that was… stylistically, it was diverse… all the way from heavier tracks to kind of lighter tracks, and with Running Games, I went with a more focused sound. And then Crash of Life kind of drifted again… and then this one, I feel like… is, like, back to that more defined sound… but I’d say that it’s more metal.”
And then there’s the part that makes all the “bandleader” talk feel very human: the guide vocals. Because Hoekstra writes the melodies and lyrics, he has to demo them, meaning he has to sing the whole album first, including the higher, more aggressive lines he’s writing specifically to showcase Girish Pradhan: “I give him a guide vocal for the whole record. I sing, I sing the whole record, which is just awful for me to have to do. Also I’m in a New York City apartment, so I always feel like other people can hear me… mortifying to go through the process. They’re only listening to this, their strange neighbor singing, screaming.”
With the band all recording remotely, he emphasized that the goal was always to make the album feel like a unified band performance rather than a pieced-together project. His guitar solos on From the Fade are intentionally song-driven rather than indulgent, and in most cases, he does countless takes to get them perfect.
The interview eventually widens out beyond From the Fade and into the bigger picture of Hoekstra’s recent life in rock: the closing chapter of Whitesnake, David Coverdale stepping back, and what “next” looks like when you’re always juggling multiple lanes. On Coverdale’s retirement, Hoekstra doesn’t dramatize it; he’s supportive, and he frames it as earned.
“It wasn’t a surprise, not really a surprise for those of us in the band. I just wish him nothing but the best… great boss and great guy overall… wonderful, wonderful, wonderful person. And he’s certainly earned the right to do what he wants to do with the rest of his life.”
As for touring, he’s honest: it’s “a little bit of a question mark.” But “question mark” doesn’t mean idle. He talks about finishing another run with Trans-Siberian Orchestra, doing one-offs with Broadway’s Rock Of Ages Band, keeping acoustic duo shows going with Brandon Gibbs, and staying productive in the studio: new Revolution Saints album, new Iconic, and other sessions he can’t get into yet.
The clean takeaway is that From the Fade isn’t being presented as a side quest. It’s the kind of record you make when you’re still thinking like a songwriter and an arranger, not just a player: tightening the sound, writing to your singer’s strengths, and building an album piece by piece until it feels like five people in a room, even when they weren’t.
