People always ask me what’s behind a song. How I captured the instruments. Why I arranged it that way. For "Don’t Dude Me," the answer starts in my home studio here on the “Island of Magic,” Florianópolis, Brazil. I recorded the whole track from Nerthus at home. It opens with a gritty blues acoustic. I used open tuning and a slide. But underneath that guitar, I buried a whole hidden world, like strings I thought sounded cinematic at 3 a.m. I wanted the listener to feel like they were stepping into something dark before I even sang a word. Here’s the dumb part: I had never played a Floyd Rose guitar before this song. Hard to believe, I know. Somehow I fumbled through it fast because the song demanded it. The solo doesn’t play notes. It kinda screams. Or squeals. Whatever a Floyd does when you don’t know what you’re doing. Every detail was intentional. Ish.
The drums were a mess. My interface only has two inputs and I wanted no bleed for mixing, so I tracked the whole kit piece by piece. I built the groove in my head, then recorded kick, then snare, then hats. To kill the bleed, I threw pillows over the drums I wasn’t hitting. It looked stupid but it worked. The room sounded dead, but I got total control later. The snare? I mixed the real snare with an old aluminum pizza pan I threw on the floor. I needed industrial weight. Something that sounded like metal hitting concrete. The pan kept sliding off the snare stand, so I gaff-taped it. That's the take we used. For me, rock means every instrument has to act out the lyrics. And on "Don’t Dude Me," the story needed blood and rust. In 2021, my wife Tutti and I started writing my third novel. It’s a dystopian thing where mankind gets a chance to start over, but we fall right back into the same trap: power. The lyrics came from that world. They’re about a ruler who drives a nation to ruin.
The chorus flips on itself. It starts with a boundary: “don’t dude me.” I’m drawing a line. But by the end, that confidence collapses into submission: “do me, do me, do me.” That’s the point. We fight, but we lose strength. We surrender to authority even when we swore we wouldn’t. I built the song like a feature film in under four minutes. You get the world-building, the mystery, the call to adventure, the challenges, the ecstasy of the final battle, and an ending that leaves you hanging. Musically, it starts with the raspy blues of a resonator, walks into classic rock, and at its peak it tips its hat to heavy metal. Then, out of nowhere, jazzy piano solos wander through, like light breaking into this place.
So yeah, that’s how I made it. With a Floyd Rose I’d never touched, a pizza pan I gaff-taped to a snare stand, and pillows over my drums. The story wouldn’t leave me alone. Anyway, the song's out there now. The pizza pan is back in the kitchen. Now I get asked, "What’s the story behind the story? When does the novel come out? Is Nerthus connected to the book?" I’m working on it. But first, turn it up and listen for the pizza pan.
