Singled Out: Why Remake Who Let the Dogs Out?

My partner, King James II, and I had just completed our album and sent it out for prerelease reviews and in today's music world, it's really hard to even get noticed. I thought that if we could take a song everybody hated and show them how we could turn that into something cool, maybe we'd turn a few heads. What song is more hated than Who Let the Dogs Out? As an executive producer, I was one of the guys who made the original song popular to start with and after a long drawn out lawsuit over who wrote the song, I had come to despise the song. Despite co-owning it, I never even learned the lyrics. But, when we were considering remaking the song and I dug into it, I quickly learned that it was the original arrangement that really ruined an otherwise cool song.

The song itself is about a somewhat dirty house party where the guys get out of hand and a girl loses her innocence and just wants to get away from it all. But, no one really knows that because in the original version you can't understand the vocals. For the simplicity of the lyrics, the storyline is pretty deep. All of the songs that we write and are on our album, Infected, are kind of narrative in style, including a song called Relax, which is a serial killer's lament. The dark underlying tone of Who Let the Dogs Out? sealed it for us. We had to remake it.

We decided to reimagine the song and loosely follow the melody, but we knew we'd have to keep the signature hook. Our group's sound really isn't like anyone else out there and it was important that this was "our song" not just some pointless remake of a novelty song. It's been really cool because the song is turning some heads and the reactions have been generally positive. Although everyone is initially bewildered that we launched a musical mountain-climbing expedition to the top of what most people figured was nothing but a mound of trash.

Turns out, it was one of the most fun times we've had in the studio. One day King James II can tell you about the time Foxy Brown cussed him out over the keycode to the bathroom.