Sometimes inspiration comes from unlikely places.

Take, for example, Joe Satriani, the renowned guitar virtuoso, who found it in his mouth.

Satriani's new record, "Shockwave Supernova," out July 24, is a concept album about a struggle between two characters, the showy rock star album title namesake and Little Joe, who convinces Shockwave that he needs to evolve.

"It had a lot to do with playing with my teeth a lot more while I was on tour," Satriani tells HNGN from Cambria, Calif., where he was leading the G4 Experience guitar retreat. "I started to say my teeth are beginning to feel funny, I've been playing with my teeth way too much instead of like once every two weeks it's like six times during a show now. So I walked out of the last show in Singapore thinking I don't want to do that anymore, I've got to somehow rise above a cheap showbiz trick.

"And then it was dawning on me that it's almost like you've got someone else inside of you, and when you step on stage that other person takes over. Certainly that's happened a lot to me where people that know me as a shy, retiring, serious musician have to come to grips with who I become when I walk out on stage, and so I thought that's my concept. My concept is there's an internal struggle between this character, Shockwave Supernova, who'll do anything to keep his rock 'n' roll going onstage, and Little Joe, so they can find each other, and in the end Joe convinces Shockwave that he has to evolve into something better, and the album represents all of the sort of artistic arguments that Shockwave uses as defense, like 'But look what I've done all these years.'"

Satriani says he was, at first, resistant to the idea of recording a concept album.

"I think the concept was something that kind of frightened me a little bit and it may have been brewing inside of me and I kind of resisted it, always thinking that, first of all, concept albums are kind of goofy anyway, and then the fact that there are no lyrics makes it even harder, more of a novelty," he says. "I think that as I started to recognize that I had this bulk of material that was representing a particular direction, it wasn't until a funny moment on stage that I realized that I have to embrace this as the concept, the hidden concept that I had been resisting because I thought it would be crazy to do an instrumental, rock-guitar concept album."

Born in Long Island, N.Y., Satriani's profile began to rise after he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. As a guitar instructor, his students included several future stars, including Steve Vai and Metallica's Kirk Hammett. His second album, 1987's "Surfing With The Alien," was his breakthrough moment, the rare Billboard-charting instrumental rock album that yielded Grammy nominations and radio play. The follow-up, 1989's "Flying In A Blue Dream," charted even higher. In recent years, he might be most known for forming Chickenfoot, the supergroup that featured Sammy Hagar, Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers and original Van Halen bassist Michael Anthony.

"Shockwave Supernova" is not the only major project Satriani is working on at the moment, as Satriani, a lifelong sic-fi fan, along with his friend Ned Evett is putting the finishing touches on a new animated series, "Crystal Planet." Satriani explains that when Evett volunteered to make videos for Satriani's live show, he used images from Satriani's 2013 art book, and "he kind of stumbled upon something that made me think that there was a real heart and soul to what he had thrown up." That is, Evett placed the characters from Satriani's book on a foreign planet.

The duo realized they "could make something like 'Clone Wars,' something heavy and deep, the struggle between good and evil, love and sex and rock 'n' roll and guitars, and we basically convinced each other that even though we had no idea what we were doing that we could do this," the guitarist says.

"So we embarked down this path of becoming writers and animators and it clearly focused on our hero, Satchel Walker, who is caught between present-day earth and earth 600 million years in the future, which by then is called Crystal Planet, and he of course, with a guitar, a crazy guitar that changes color and is basically a time shredder device, which was all started when his father and his father's buddy, who turned out to be quite an evil guy who runs an energy company in present-day Earth, they get basically caught and tossed between the two worlds and there's just the craziest bunch of characters on that future world that are all taken from the book, not human-like at all."

In the next few months, decisions will be made regarding how the series will be streamed. Regardless of whether he and Evett end up partnering with Netflix or another on-demand platform, the goal is to have the entire first season available for viewing in November, he says.

Satriani's affinity for all things sci-fi has wormed its way into his musical career, too. Like he has done for several previous albums, he recorded "Shockwave Supernova" at Skywalker Sound, George Lucas' sprawling studio where the sound effects for the "Star Wars" movies are created.

"It is a wonderful place," says Satriani. "I remind myself of it all the time even though I've done quite a few records there and it's only about 45 minutes outside of San Francisco, the city where I live. It's beautiful. Just the drive, getting up in the morning, going over the Golden Gate Bridge, driving into the countryside which happens pretty quick, and all of a sudden you're in these rolling hills, and when you pull through the Skywalker gates, it's like you're in a little village that George has built for the purpose of creativity. Once you go through the gates, you drive through organic vegetable gardens, you drive past sheep and cows and llamas and horses and vineyards and a baseball field. It really is like a dream world and a little wonderful village town unto itself."

Lucas, Satriani says, is sometimes on the premises and stops in to say hello.

"I know it sounds crazy, but every time I go there I bring my lightsaber," Satriani shares. "I have an officially licensed lightsaber that somebody gifted me many years ago and just for fun I always bring it. I haven't taken it out in front of George yet, I figured that'd be too tacky."

Another A-lister whom Satriani has rubbed shoulders with is Mick Jagger, who tapped him for the lead guitar slot on his own first solo tour and Satriani calls "funny," "generous" and " a serious, hard-working musician."

"He certainly far exceeded my expectations about what the lead singer of The Rolling Stones is going to be like," he says. "My experience of doing the shows with him, also mind-blowing how dedicated he was to giving the audience the best show possible. He just worked so hard all the way to the end and really was concerned about anything that didn't go right but never came down on anybody.

"He was a good bandleader. ... That had a big impact on me, because that happened just as I was starting my solo career and I had no experience playing instrumentals on stage as the lead guy. I had no idea what I was doing. So the first two weeks of the 'Surfing With The Alien' tour, I'm sort of figuring out exactly how I'm going to do it, and then all of a sudden there's this Mick Jagger gig, and it gave me a break to step back from myself, and then all of a sudden I was next to a true master of entertainment in terms of rock 'n' roll and I learned a lot about how to project myself and to make sure that the audience felt that there was somebody leading the show, because I was thinking you just go up there and like play, how does the audience where the thing's going? Someone's got to actually take the reins, who's driving the bus?"

While that responsibility usually rests with Satriani as the leader of his own band, he also had a recent parallel career in Chickenfoot, where his job was to just play guitar while Hagar commanded center stage. Recent reports seem to spell the end of the band, however.

"That's how I grew up, that's the music I listened to," Satriani says of the traditional rock band lineup fronted by a vocalist. "My formative years in high school was playing in rock bands where we made believe we were The Stones and Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and The Who, so I just fall right into that, it's so comfortable to me. I love working with people who really are dedicated to delivering strong, outrageous statements, and Sammy [Hagar] and Mick are like cut from the same cloth; lead singers, they're like born, they're unique people.

"So my experience in Chickenfoot was fantastic because it was like being 14 years old and in my high school band again. I could hang out with the drummer and the bass player and let the singer run around and be crazy, I didn't have to be the focus of the show. I want to keep that going. If Chickenfoot can't do another record I'm seeking another vocal-oriented band that I can work with, because I do feel that I got a lot more to say in that genre."