I started writing a collection of themed songs for a Rock Opera back in high school. We were studying “Jesus Christ Superstar” in High School at the time. “Tommy” by the Who and “Thick as a Brick” by Jethro Tull had also recently come out and I was thoroughly fascinated by the idea of the concept / rock opera album. I studied and dissected them all, to try to understand them better.
At the same time, I was also a huge fan of Marvel Comics, especially the “Fantastic Four” and their adventures in the “Negative Zone”, “the Watchers” and “Gallacticus”. I decided I would have some fun and write my own Rock Opera by meshing together all of these ideas together. The basic theme of my project was that “God was an Alien”. I wound up writing 35 songs for this project. A number of them I thought were pretty good, but the whole narrative needed way too much pruning and re-writes to make anything out of it, so I put it on the shelf.
“Do you know my Name” is one of the songs I rescued from this project and cleaned up so it could be a stand-alone piece. Pete Townshend had done something similar with his “Lifehouse” project. He never officially released it, but many of his best songs showed up on “Who’s Next”.
For my album, I felt I needed a different type of song and really had always like this one. It focuses on the anti-hero/hero. I had based the character on Lee Marvin’s character “Kid Shelleen" from “Cat Ballou”.
Because we were studying “Jesus Christ Superstar” at the time, the song winds up having a lot of religious metaphors and visuals throughout.
Like many songs on this CD, this is another rocker. At the time I was also a big fan of the James Gang and early Joe Walsh guitar songs. I always try to pay homage to my rock hero’s in my songs and I try to put something in every song to salute them. The song's outro is pure Joe Walsh era style James Gang.
I played majority of guitar throughout, Sarven Manguiat joined in during the outro. Rob Hall was on bass, Stephen Haaker was on drums and Fabian Chavez was on Sax. Harrison and Phoebe Crenshaw along with Diana Ortiz were on backing vocals and harmonies. The song was engineered and produced by Brett Grossman and Stephen Haaker. We recorded everything at Perfect Sound Studio’s in Frogtown and Cosmic Voyager Studio in Los Angeles. Emily Lazar from the Lodge in NYC mastered this song.