Blues guitar phenom returns to Rialto

It’s been just over six months since Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s last album, “Lay It On Down,” dropped, and he’s already thinking about the follow-up.

“We’re trying to get ahead of the curve,” the namesake of the Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band said last week from a concert stop in San Juan Capistrano, California, as he made his way across that state and into Arizona for a show this weekend at the Rialto Theatre.

Yes, he acknowledged, that’s a pretty fast turnaround for him; “Lay It On Down” came three years after his 2014 studio record, “Goin’ Home.”

“It’s unusual, but what I’m trying to do is keep it going,” said the 40-year-old blues guitar phenom whose career dates to the mid-1990s when he was still a teen. “I wrote a bunch of songs for the last record and had some new collaborations, new songwriters that I was working with and enjoyed working with them. ... All of the creative processes, playing live, recording, all that stuff, I’m trying to keep it going.”

Shepherd will likely go into the studio sometime before his heavy-duty touring season kicks off in late spring/early summer. We get him as part of his annual winter West Coast run through his home state of California and Arizona, where he also will play a concert at Scottsdale’s Talking Stick Resort on Friday, March 9, before his Rialto show on Saturday, March 10.

“It’s nice because I’ve been living in Los Angeles so it’s all relatively short travel and that makes it convenient,” said the father of five. “My family gets to come out to some of the shows. We always look forward to this time of year.“

Shepherd and the band — he’s on guitar, Noah Hunt on vocals, Chris Layton on drums and Joe Krown on keyboards — will draw heavily from “Lay It On Down” as well as his seven other studio albums that started with the first, his 1995 “Ledbetter Heights,” recorded when Shepherd was 18 years old.

“It’s still fun for me to perform that stuff,” the veteran bluesman said. “When you’re doing newer stuff it can be entertaining and sometimes, especially when it’s really new, you’re waiting to see how it’s going to turn out.”

“Lay It On Down,” released in August, is arguably one of Shepherd’s most commercially accessible records, and that was by design in some ways. Shepherd described the album as “a contemporary record” of all new material with no covers.

“We kind of took the blues and pushed it in a couple different directions,” he said. “We took some other genres and tried to meld them together and create some new songs and some interesting things.”

Those interesting things include straying a bit from the core of his blues roots. He adds a little country vibe on the title song and the deeply soulful “Hard Lesson Learned,” and veers into Top 40 pop radio territory with “Nothing But the Night.” The album has plenty to satisfy Shepherd’s diehard blues fans including the straight-up blues rocker “She’s $$$,” but he seems to be having a lot of fun dipping his toes into a broader genre pool including adding a little Southern rock twist to “Baby Got Gone.”

“We focused heavily on songwriting quality and melodies and lyrics and things like that,” he explained. “I think the end result is a very diverse album that’s been well received by the fanbase and also by the press. It’s been doing pretty good for us.”

Shepherd has been a regular to Tucson since his debut here opening for Bob Dylan at Centennial Hall in 1996. He returned the following year to play a sold-out headlining show at Rialto Theatre.

“We have a solid fan base there that supports us. … That’s why we come back,” he said.