Joe Satriani said the idea of playing a coronavirus lockdown show “kind of offends” him, and he has no plans to follow the current trend.

The guitarist – who just released a new album, Shapeshifting – explained he was doing his best to keep working during the global emergency, but fans would be waiting in vain for a webcam performance.

“I’m a musician because I’m an artist and I can’t help it, but also my job is to lift people’s spirits and to supply them with music to help them celebrate or commiserate,” Satriani told Rolling Stone in a new interview. “So I’m not going to sort of slack off just because times are tough. I still have a job to do. I’m going to get busy working on a new record, and I’m going to promote this album, let people know what it is.”

He said he’s received “funny requests” around the time “the disaster really started to be obvious to people,” but noted that the suggestions were based around “commerce” instead of the idea of staging a performance.

“They’re not really thinking about the logistics,” he explained. “I’ve mentioned to everybody, ‘You know that means that I have to get my band and my crew all together in a room, which first of all violates the shelter-at-home rule?’ And most of us don’t even live in the same city, let alone town or country. So you can forget about that. That would be me from a webcam, holding my guitar. It’s not the same.”

Satriani added that "it kind of offends me that I’m going to lean on all these people out there to help me out from a business point of view. I’m in this phase where I’m giving and I’m sending out. I’m not gonna say, ‘You can’t buy a ticket at the local theater, so I’m gonna make you buy a ticket over the internet for something that is not really what I plan to do.’ It just doesn’t seem right.”