Jay and Greg had planned on The New America being the 20th anniversary album, so Jay proposed: "We have to call Brett!" If we're going to do this anniversary thing, he has to be part of it."[1]
Brett Gurewitz: "It had been a number of years since I left the band and it had been a tough period for me, because I had slipped up and started using again. During that whole time, Greg and I had not spoken at all. Greg is the one that broke the ice and asked if I would be interested in contributing a song, so I wrote “Believe It,” which became an icebreaker."[2]
Brett was producing Rancid (in 2000) and Bad Religion and Todd Rundgren were recording in Hawaii. They sent a CD of the track to Westbeach Recorders. During some down time of recording the Rancid record, they flew the track to a Studer 827 and Brett played the solo. He played a Les Paul through a combination of Marshall Plexi, 900, and 800. Then they recorded the track hard left and the solo hard right back to CD. Then it was sent back to Todd Rundgren.[3]
At the time, Brett wasn’t exactly thrilled with the way things turned out. "Todd Rundgren was producing, and I don’t think his spin on it was what I would have done. I like a lot of stuff on that record, I just don’t like what happened with my song."
| 08/01 | fixed spelling of Todd - By Stinger66 |