Sugar Ray recently had a chance to live out their dreams – or at least their dream videos – when the pop-rockers shot a clip for the single “When It’s Over.”
“Each guy has their dream sequence – like if they had the video of their choice, what would it be?” drummer Stan Frazier explained on the set of the video shoot over the weekend.
Guitarist Rodney Sheppard steps into Bruce Lee’s shoes and kung-fu fights basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; DJ Homicide chills in a strip club featuring imagery pulled from his favorite hip-hop videos; bassist Murphy Karges rocks out in an early ’80s punk-rock club; drummer Stan Frazier grabs the spotlight for the day; and singer Mark McGrath goes new-wave in a Duran Duran-esque scene.
“It really truly is a fantasy come true,” Sheppard said of his sequence, a spoof of Lee’s film “Enter the Dragon.” “I never in a million years thought I’d be face-to-face with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.”
“When It’s Over” is the lead single from Sugar Ray’s eponymous fourth album, due June 12. “To me, it’s a little bit more R&B and hip-hop than some of the other tracks,” Homicide said of the song. “It’s more progressive for us.”
While McGrath compared the tune to previous acoustic pop singles like “Fly” and “Every Morning,” he said the album as a whole marks a return to rock and roll basics. “[Producer Don Gilmore] was really instrumental in getting an organic bass-drum-guitar sound out of us. It was good to get back to that,” he said. Gilmore’s credits include Lit, Eve 6 and Linkin Park.
311 singer/guitarist Nick Hexum appears on the song “Stay On” – a collaboration that grew out of a long friendship between the two bands and made easier by the fact that Hexum and Frazier are neighbors.
“We had this track and were like, ‘This kind of has a 311 flavor,'” McGrath said. “Stan dropped it off to Nick, and Nick added a chorus to it. It was amazing.”
When the time came to record the song, Hexum and 311 happened to be in a studio near where Sugar Ray were working, so he stopped by to sing on the track.
Sugar Ray will hit the road with Uncle Kracker this summer.