I've always been a huge fan of the southern rock songs that feature swagger, bravado, and braggadocio as a major storytelling element. I love songs like The Black Crowes' version of "Hard to Handle," "Street Fighting Man" or "Sympathy for the Devil" by the Rolling Stones, the Elvis version of "Steamroller Blues," "Pick‐Up Truck" by Kings of Leon, any number of Johnny Cash songs, "Rumble in Brighton" by the Stray Cats... In my song, "Don't Mind," It's obviously the voice of a trash talking fighter challenging an opponent to a duel and using some colorful insults to egg him on. Muhammad Ali and Reggie Miller were expert at this in the sports world and the scene that's set in the song also kind of reminds me of the Tybalt/Mercutio fight scene in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The insults the fighter in Don't Mind is hurling at his opponent are almost Shakespearean in nature, or Yiddish even, in that they're not of common vernacular. I've never heard anyone call someone a foggy ulcer before but that's the phrase that is used in "Don't Mind."

The song of course, is not set in Elizabethan England but in the Wild West. It's gunslinger sh*t. It's about taking the law into your own hands when the authorities are corrupt and not working on the side of the just. The song is talking about vigilante justice. In an old frontier town if the sheriff wasn't enforcing the rule of law or worse, if he was complicit in criminality, you often had no choice but to deal with matters yourself, and you better be a crack shot. The international system today is exactly like the Wild West, there is no real enforcer, the only law making body, the UN, is a largely corrupt and dysfunctional body, and there are rogue villains aplenty out there.

"Don't Mind" took me a while to get to the point where I felt like I had a finished song. After I came up with the opening riff the verse flew out of my mouth, but I was having a difficult time building a bridge between the verses and the chorus. Thankfully, I've spent a good amount of time learning the rhythm guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix, and when I transitioned from an E to an E9 chord during the pre-chorus the rest of the song came right into view, I could hear the whole thing at that point, beginning to end. Most of the song was written right here in my living room on the east coast, but the finishing touches were actually put on it at a friend's house in Topanga Canyon, California where I was staying for a few weeks in the summer of 2014. The song was recorded at the end of 2015 at Virtue and Vice studios in Brooklyn, NY with producer/engineer Anthony Gallo, and we chose to release it as the lead single off of our upcoming King of the League album due out in March/April of 2016.