Twenty years after Satellite helped define a generation of rock radio listeners, Sonny Sandoval still sounds like a guy who can’t quite believe it all worked out. “We were just an underground band,” he says, as if Alive didn’t rule TRL and every gym playlist from coast to coast.
When Satellite dropped on September 11, 2001, the irony was as heavy as the riffs. “It didn’t matter at that time,” Sandoval recalls. “Our hearts were with the country. But it just happened that we were a band of hope, of faith—and that’s what people needed.” Somehow, a song about waking up grateful to be alive became an anthem for a country trying to figure out how to keep going.
The other side of that record was Youth of the Nation, which now plays like a bleak prophecy on loop. “It’s just as, if not more, relevant today,” he says. “We were writing two blocks away from Santana High School when the shooting happened. We came outside and saw helicopters, ambulances—we turned on the news, and it was all happening in real time. We didn’t even want to write music anymore.”
But they did. “We thought: we have to talk about the young people. We were young ourselves. And that heartbreak, that sadness, it turned into the song.” To this day, Sandoval says his heart is still with the kids—he does ministry, outreach, speaks at schools. “We know the state of mind they’re in. It’s sad. It hasn’t gotten better.”
And then there’s Without Jah, Nothin’, a punk detonation that saw HR from Bad Brains enter the studio with a headdress and… two parakeets. “He walked straight past us, put the birds on the table, and said, ‘What do you guys want me to do?’” Sandoval grins. “It was like waiting for royalty.”
Satellite’s reissue includes demos like Armageddon and Don’t Try to Play Me Out, as well as B-sides that veer into Sabbath-esque sludge and unhinged weirdness. “We were just having fun,” Sandoval says. “We’ve always mixed it all together—punk, reggae, hip-hop—it’s in every album.”
And what’s next? “We’re still the guinea pigs out here,” he laughs, referencing COVID-era tour logistics. “We’re writing, we’re playing, we’re figuring it out. I’m just ready to do it all over again.”
In the end, Sandoval is still looking for a way to channel the chaos into something useful. “We wanted to be a band that inspires,” he says. Mission still very much in progress.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
