Former MEGADETH guitarist Marty Friedman has released "2 Rebeldes (Spanish Vocal)", a new version of a song from his latest solo album Drama, which came out via Frontiers Music in May 2024. The track arrives with an official visualizer.
Friedman calls the song his "love letter to all the Latin countries around the world": each one holds its own memories for him, he explains, but they share a language, so he made a Spanish-vocal song for all of them. Hal-Ca of the Japanese band ASTERISM will sing it with him on the road, and Friedman clearly enjoys the oddity of the setup — a Japanese singer performing a Spanish song written by an American across Latin America is, in his words, "something Marty would do."
The road plans are busy:
- November 2026: South American tour celebrating the 34th anniversary of his album Scenes
- December 2026: Hero rock festival, South Korea
- January 28–29, 2027: two shows in Los Angeles
- April 2027: the "Live Drama" tour comes to Europe
Friedman says the Drama world tour will continue to further territories after that.
He is also writing the follow-up to Drama. In a recent interview with U.K. broadcaster Paul Stephenson of VRP Rocks, he called Drama the album he feels most personally connected to and said the new material is heading in a similar direction, though he won't release anything until he feels he has topped it.
Before his decade in MEGADETH, Friedman made his name alongside Jason Becker in CACOPHONY. He has lived in Tokyo since the early 2000s, where he became a fixture of Japanese television and pop culture alongside his solo career.