Marty Friedman says his theme for Netflix‘s “B: The Beginning” took a year, with the studio briefing him on plot changes month by month.
Marty Friedman has written for anime under both extremes of the job. On one project he turned up, played a solo and left without knowing the plot. On another, the studio kept him in production meetings for twelve months and made sure he had watched the finished series before he cut a note.
The former Megadeth guitarist described both experiences during an anime round table on “Side Jams With Bryan Reesman“, alongside singer and harpist Lindsay Schoolcraft and Crown Lands drummer and singer Cody Bowles.
The straightforward job came first.
“Each case is completely different,” Friedman began (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “When I played the ‘Sailor Moon‘ theme song, I was just playing guitar and I was working with a songwriter named Revo who has a band called Sound Horizon. He does a lot of anime stuff and he’s really quite intelligent, a great songwriter. I just came in and played the guitars on that, so he just wanted my sound on that which is fine. I didn’t have to know anything about ‘Sailor Moon‘. I had no idea what the story was. I just came in and played.”
That session produced “Moon Pride“, released on July 30, 2014 as Momoiro Clover Z‘s twelfth single and used as the opening theme for “Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Crystal“. Revo of Sound Horizon wrote, composed and arranged it, and Friedman supplied the solos. It was not their first meeting either, as he had already played guitar on a Momoiro Clover Z single three years earlier.
The Netflix job ran on entirely different terms.
“I did the theme for that, which is called ‘The Perfect World‘, and that literally took an entire year of when they were in development for the anime series,” Friedman said. He was sent new episodes and scenes as the studio built them, and by the time he tracked the song he had already seen the whole thing.
“By the time I was actually recording the song, I had seen the entire finished series before it had even come out,” he continued. “They were in the loop with me month after month to say, ‘We’re going to change this character. He’s going to become a little bit more of a good guy, and this character is going to be like this.’ I had to keep up with the most minute details, and to be honest with you, I didn’t really care. I got the vibe, and I know what to do to make the song work for this. But I respect them for this — it was so important to them for me to understand the depth of the story in great detail and really get behind the characters and really put that feeling into the song. I was in the loop in the production stages of everything for a year. That’s one extreme, and sometimes the guy creating the anime is a fan of mine. ‘Dude, play anything you want.’ It goes from zero to 100, and either way I’m just honored to be a part of it. It’s always different. Sometimes more challenging than others, but it’s always exciting.”
“The Perfect World” arrived in 2018 as the main theme for “B: The Beginning“, the crime thriller series Netflix premiered that March. Friedman built the track around Jean-Ken Johnny of Man With A Mission on vocals, with bassist KenKen also featured. He returned to it two years later, cutting a new version with Japanese singer Alfakyun for his covers album Tokyo Jukebox 3, released in Japan on October 21, 2020.
Friedman played on five Megadeth albums between 1990 and 2000, starting with Rust In Peace, before leaving the band and relocating to Japan, where he has spent the past two decades working across J-pop, television and film alongside his solo catalogue.
