Bob Doerschuk

special for USA TODAY

For these past 20 years, Steve Van Zandt has been more than busy.

On Sirius/XM satellite radio he’s been hosting Little Steven’s Underground Garage, a haven for those who love classic, deep-track rock ‘n’ roll. As an actor he helped establish two vital TV platforms, as Silvio Dante on HBO’s The Sopranos and Frank Tagliano on Netflix’s Lilyhammer. He’s also been all over the world, tearing through fiery guitar licks, singing harmony and mugging playfully now and then with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.

There is one place where he’d been MIA since 1999, and that was in the studio, recording his original songs and leading his own band. Luckily for his varied fan base, that changed recently. And on Friday he proves it with Soulfire, whose incendiary impact just about makes up for his long absence.

“I consider it a mistake,” Van Zandt, 66, admits. “I don’t really have a good excuse for it, other than I got into this whole new craft of acting, which led to multiple crafts of writing and producing. At the same time, Bruce put the band back together and we toured. And before you know it, 20 years go by. But I shouldn’t have let that distract me from my life’s work. I should have kept both things -- all things -- going.”

There is an upside to this hiatus, he adds. “The good news is that I was able to do this record with a sense of reintroducing myself -- to me, first of all, but also to the audience. It turned out to be a fairly definitive version of who I am. But I also put in some things that I had never done before -- a doo-wop thing, some jazz, a little bit of hard-core R&B …”

And, most fundamentally, the blues, represented here by Van Zandt’s treatment of the landmark Etta James song The Blues Is My Business. Nothing else on Soulfire so clearly traces his key roots, including an introductory riff that echoes Jimi Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic and a slamming bass and guitar groove grounded in Otis Redding’s and Carla Thomas’ Tramp.

“I like to put my influences on my sleeve,” he explains. “I know I’m not stealing or impersonating anybody. I feel very secure in who I am.”

There’s another reason why Van Zandt loves to acknowledge his heroes. “When I grew up, the greatest music being made was also the most commercial,” he says. “We had the most glorious, amazing, magnificent input in our teenage years: The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson. It was one great artist after another. And we absorbed it all.

“What it all had in common was that their roots came for the most part from the gospel church or from country blues,” he continues. “That music was nothing but 100 percent intense. For the most part, today’s music doesn’t speak to me that way. It’s constructed to almost be disposable. I’m not making a value judgment; I’m just saying that my identity is established, so when I turn on the radio, I don’t get it.”

Cynicism, irony and cultivated hip detachment have taken their toll on rock ‘n’ roll. With Soulfire, Van Zandt aims to blow all that out and lead listeners back to its more passionate essence. “When we played in London, at the first large show I’d played in over 20 years, I realized we were winning the people over song by song. It’s harder to do that in America because things are much more separate here. But,” he says, with a smile, “once they come, we get them.”