'Universal You' was a fun song in the writing process. I've always been a huge fan of reggae and the reggae bass. Besides air drums, I'm always pretending to do air reggae bass. (Laughs). We are not a reggae roots band, and of course many bands like 311 have mixed roots and rock, but we wanted to do this with our sounds on this track, maybe it's because we are from a tropical island?

We decided to have a heavy bass driving the song with this constant groove. You can really hear this in the verse where we used a Gibson Les Paul bass with Bartolini active pickups to get that heavy mahogany low end. Then we added trippy guitar delays. Mixing the right amount of reverb with the right delay can be a challenge. To have that reggae delay we set the time to 1/8 notes. Then we added some chorus. Mixing palm muting picking with tremolo picking with a whole note at the end helped accent the effect of the delay. This was so much fun to record, it never got old. JuanMa [JuanMa Font, drums] puts the icing on top with the ghost notes and rim shots. We also use a lot of open power chords on this track, it gives the song that big wall of sound in it. We tried to keep the song simple except we had to put that little breakdown at the end, it's just so much fun to do live!

The vocals of 'Universal You' are very melodic and have a hurtful sound because of the lyrics. This is probably the 4th track M2V ever recorded. The song is about having a deep regret losing someone close, and not being able to carry that weight on your shoulders. Feeling guilt and blame for this loss inspired this song, lyrically. That's what "this is my execution" means. It's all pretty clear in the verses.

Besides the sadness of the theme, this is a great song to rock out and sounds great on your local jukebox. So crank it loud!