What I remember the most about 'I Hate Me' is how effortlessly and quickly it came together. One of those songs that writes itself. I tend to write in blocks. I'll come up with riffs in groups of say two or three at a shot. Now, on a Sunday, it's not uncommon while I'm watching the games to have a guitar set up in the same room and just play most of the day. After a little over one hour, I started playing what's the intro. I didn't have any way to record it, so I played it about 40 times to kinda imprint it as a muscle memory. Sliding and chugging to find the tempo and messing around with the intervals. I'd invert it, slow it down, and then put it back to see what worked the best. It was such a strong riff that it pretty much is what it is.

Fast forward about a week... Cat was at the house and he'd been working on his technique downstairs while I was hearing the previous week's riffs in my head. It's gonna sound strange to most people, yet we just have this connection. There are times when I just pick up a guitar and without saying a word we start playing the exact same song. Even though he couldn't hear me (I wasn't plugged in) he's playing something that works pretty well with what I was hearing in my head. Immediately, the song just had this energy. Completely irresistible and undeniable.

At that time, I hadn't even attempted to record the riff. I hadn't written an actual song, just a riff. I just kept messing with it informally. Another week goes by and I figure I'd better "grab it before it's gone" and I lay it down and the verse falls out while I was tracking it to adjust the original tempo. Generally, I will ALWAYS mess with something on the acoustic guitar before I go too far with it. I find it a great gauge of whether or not you have a song or just a riff. This hit so fast that it never dawned on me that the song was coming together already.

Ok, so I've got it down and then I listen back to it and find out that the first and second verses don't match! It wasn't intentional at all. I just followed the nature of the track! I kept workin' on it and then brought it to the guys. Like we tend to do, we got in a room and started to hash it out. On one of the passes, I believe Ricky and Cat stopped playing and I kept going just cause. There's a hard break and for about the amount of time you hear on the track, I was riding the chord and they both kicked back in and Jason happened to be rolling and caught it. Just like we planned it! Also, there were always two solo sections for the song. I thought of 3-4 approaches but didn't formally write a solo. I probably took a couple of passes at the solo not wanting to smooth it out.

Keep in mind that when we wrote it, Rich wasn't in the band. We kinda mapped out where we thought vocals should go. When he heard the song we discussed what we figured would make sense. He grabbed a copy and called me within a few days, "it's finished". Didn't surprise me at all. When we met up at the studio, he basically walked right into the booth and KILLED it in one take! He captured a pure raw energy in his delivery that matched the tone of the rest of disc and the song.

That's the inside... We just knocked it out one afternoon. By the time the session was over we had the entire song arranged. What could be more appropriate for that track. N-O-T-H-I-N-G!