Singled Out: Razer's Do You Want It

The song "Do You Want It" actually was a very weird co-write with the ex-Megadeth guitar god Marty Friedman who I've been friends with for many years and have even played with on an off in his touring band. Originally the song was an instrumental tune called "It's The Unreal Thing" that Marty had been working on for his "Music For Speeding" record while still living in Phoenix where we do (he now resides permanently in Tokyo, Japan). This was around 2005 and I had been up at his house checking out tracks he was working on and he played me a working version of the song. I immediately heard the chorus melody in my head over the tune's kick ass main riff and told him "Dude this should be a vocal song!" where he promptly told me to get to it then haha! he finished up his record and after it came out I kind of went away with the tune and wrote lyrics and melodies, did some rearranging and worked up a version now titled "Do You Want It" with the Razer guys (this before our singer Chris Powers joined the band). It was an odd co-write in that Marty and I never sat together and worked on this, the vibe was kind of like "Here you paint your part of the picture, and then I'll take it away and paint my own thing on top of it" but what it ended up as totally worked! The tune made some Razer demos at the time but ultimately sat on the shelf after we revamped the band with Chris now singing.

Fast forward to late 2010 and our management started talking to us about doing some new tracks and a couple covers with the idea of putting out an expanded version of our "Dark Devotion" album. As a writer I'm never one to give up on a good song (I have plenty of tunes in my own back catalog that are waiting to be used) and I suggested we re-approach "Do You Want It" as it just has this over the top anthemic quality that I thought we could use. So I went back to the demo version we originally did and tightened up the arrangement while working with our guitarist Jeromy Graves on some additional guitar stuff as he's awesome at tasty "icing" guitar parts. Powers pretty much killed vocals (as he always does!) and our producer Chuck Alkazian added some great production elements and made the tune sound enormous so the final piece was actually getting Marty to send me some solos for the it. Given that we had done this weird, off beat co-write I thought it would be really cool to have him on this, and Friedman definitely brought the heat with what he played! Even before we became buddies he was one of my most favorite guitar players; not only is he technically brilliant but even more so in his feel and phrasing, so to have his talents on the track really topped it off.

Lyrically I like using colorful words and this was definitely a tune I could use some cool wording and phrasing. I also purposely left the lyrics somewhat vague because "It" is something different to everyone and I want people to form their own mental movies to the tune. I'm big into sports so it has that "let's go kick some ass" vibe for me...so for whatever "it" is to you go get it already damn it!