Out & About in the Roanoke area: Pete Anderson

Fans of country music's Dwight Yoakam are familiar with the red-hot guitar lines that elevated such numbers as "Little Sister" and "Long White Cadillac." Those flashes of six-string insanity came courtesy of Yoakam's producer, Pete Anderson.

In the decade since Anderson and Yoakam parted ways, Anderson has focused most of his time on his own music. But don't expect to hear the alt-country grooves that made their music famous. Anderson is more into the blues and swing area of Americana.

He brings his trio to Blue 5 Restaurant on Thursday. And while the music might be stylistically different, Anderson could go off at any time on some wild guitar forays. In a phone call in August, he talked about the magic behind some of the guitar solos he played with Yoakam.

"The wilder I got, the better he liked it," Anderson said. "That ['Little Sister'] solo, I'm not sure where all of it came from. There are basic motifs that I had played before, but I don't think I had played them all in one song [laughs]."

Anderson, from the Los Angeles area via Detroit, used a surfing metaphor .

"I think I just caught a wave," he said. "Things start coming to you mentally that are part of your card catalog or your music catalog, and you're like, I'm going there next, or, oh, I see the next logical place to land. And you kind of get connected."

His new record, "Birds Above Guitarland" - released on his own Little Dog Records label - shows plenty of taste and restraint, too. Anderson said his favorite players, starting with Wes Montgomery and including James Burton and Amos Garrett, approached music correctly.

What they played was "really cool ... but they didn't outplay the song," he said.

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