Nita Strauss on working with Marty Friedman: “He’s a perfectionist – he likes things the way he likes them”

Nita Strauss tapped a sizeable chunk of metal’s elite for her brand-new album, The Call of the Void. Guest appearances come from the likes of Alissa White-Gluz, Chris Motionless, David Draiman, and even her old employer, Alice Cooper. But a collaboration with one musician held special significance for Strauss.

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For an album packed with fretboard fireworks, its final track needed to go out with a bang. So she enlisted the help of former Megadeth man Marty Friedman to get the job done.

And speaking about their collaboration in a new interview with Jorge Botas, she has nothing but praises to offer Friedman and his music-making process.

“Marty Friedman is a perfectionist,” Strauss says. “He likes things the way he likes them. This song Surfacing with Marty Friedman was a combination of a couple of different songs that I had. I had some riffs and I’d sent him some ideas. He took some of these ideas and some of his own ideas and [we] made a collaborative song out of it, which was insane, incredible. Especially because he’s in Japan, and I’m working and recording in Nashville.”

“I played the bass on it, and then he said, ‘No, you need to get a different bass player’, because the bass needs to groove in a certain way for it to fit his vision of the song. So it was really interesting. The rest of the record is my vision, and really, that song was like mine and Marty Friedman’s vision, which is a crazy sentence to say, Me and Marty Friedman in our song.”

Strauss adds that it was a wonderful opportunity to get feedback “from the master himself”, saying “What an honour for me as a musician and as a music fan. It’s not every day that you have an opportunity to have feedback and critique from somebody you respect so much.”

“The first heavy metal song I ever heard was Marty Friedman playing guitar on a Megadeth song, you know, so it was just a wonderful opportunity for me to learn from somebody so great.”

Check out the full interview below.