Have A Blast (5:55)

“This is an idea that I demoed a few years ago,” says Mansoor. “I’ve been working on the riffs for a while. I always get a little intimidated when I have a bunch of cool riffs and I don’t know where they’re going to go because I think that I’m going to run out of ideas. That kind of happened with this song: I have a demo of it, and right around the two-minute mark it ends. I liked where it was going, but I could never breathe any more life into it. At two minutes, it’s incomplete – it’s not a song.

“Mark and Jake come over sometimes to help me work on shit, and because of them, the song came together. They contributed ideas and riffs, and now it’s happening.

“One day, I posted on Facebook that I really wanted Guthrie as a guest soloist. And this dude who works with our management, Jan Hoeglund, he’s pretty sneaky. He e-mailed Guthrie without telling me, and then he forwarded me the e-mail from Guthrie saying, ‘Sure, I’ll do it,’ as a total surprise. It was so cool.

“I e-mailed Guthrie everything he needed, but I kept getting responses from him saying, ‘Sorry I haven’t gotten to this. I’ve been so busy…’ So I thought it wasn’t going to happen. Then I was on the Dream Theater tour, and one day the solo was sent to me. It was awesome! I love his solo so much.”