MARTY FRIEDMAN TRIVIA
Trivia
Friedman's explanation of why he moved to Japan is that he became so taken with Japanese music that he stopped listening to anything else. The way in was Tsunku's productions and the J-pop of the late nineties. What he noticed on arriving was that nobody around him was listening to Western music at all — Japanese music was the more popular thing wherever he went. So he tried it, and was caught on the spot as if by a spell. What held him was the swing in it between sad-but-happy and happy-but-sad, the sense of melody, the way things are interpreted, and the way singers are used. None of it, he says, resembled the rock and heavy metal sensibility he grew up in.
Foreigners cannot write Japanese songs — that is Friedman's view. There are exceptions, but very few foreigners write Japanese pop, because the writing, the sense of melody, the arranging and the playing are all different. For a while, in his own words, he thought of himself as a foreigner who reeked of butter. There is a moment when that changed. When he finished 'Kirei na Senritsu' for KOTOKO in 2007, he says, he could finally accept that he had become entirely Japanese: anyone hearing it would assume a Japanese writer, and he was proud that the music had soaked that far into him.
The tour on Friedman's official site as of 10 September 2026 is the Scenes 34th Anniversary Live In Concert Tour, named for the thirty-fourth year of the 1992 album Scenes. The dates listed run from 11 to 24 November across South and Central America: São Paulo and Curitiba in Brazil, Valparaíso and Santiago in Chile, Montevideo in Uruguay, Buenos Aires in Argentina, Bogotá in Colombia, and Guadalajara, Monterrey and Mexico City in Mexico.
The first Cacophony album began life as a Marty Friedman solo record. By his own account the songs were about ninety per cent finished and the studio was already booked. Then, just before recording, the head of the label asked him to meet a guy called Jason. Friedman's reaction was: why, I'm not interested. The other man was still a teenager, and he had no time to be meeting other guitarists.
Marty Friedman does not listen to his own records. He has heard them more than enough during production, and playing one back brings nothing to mind but the work. He is a thorough perfectionist, so his signing off on a record means it is finished, and that is the end of it. He enjoyed hearing them at mastering, in a studio of the highest quality — but the music he can enjoy without thinking, he says, is somebody else's.
The reunion with Megadeth was not confined to the Budokan. On 4 August 2023, at Wacken Open Air in Germany, Megadeth brought Friedman back on stage again. In Tokyo that February they had played three songs together — 'Countdown To Extinction', 'Tornado Of Souls' and 'Symphony Of Destruction'. At Wacken the first of those was replaced by 'Trust', with 'Tornado Of Souls' and 'Symphony Of Destruction' following, and Friedman came back out for the encore to join 'Holy Wars… The Punishment Due' as well. He had himself been announced for the festival on 5 August, a different day, so few had expected the two to share a stage.
In 2025 Friedman gave a pair of concerts built around the music of Astor Piazzolla, billed as Marty Friedman Plays Piazzolla And More Concert Hall 2025: 22 August at the Phoenix Hall in Osaka and 5 September at Oji Hall in Ginza. He played with Kazuma Miura on bandoneon, Mao Sone on piano and Ami Inoi on classical guitar. The idea of the shows was to set out, in his own understanding and his own playing, a respect for the man who pushed Argentine tango into modern music.
Friedman has explained why 1992's Scenes turned out the quiet, dramatic record it is. At the time he was touring like a maniac with Megadeth, playing extremely heavy material every single night — so what he wrote himself came out as the exact opposite. The same thing happened again in 2023. Out as support to Queensrÿche, playing his most aggressive music with his most aggressive band night after night, he said that was the perfect frame of mind for writing something like Scenes — and he was indeed writing his next album at the time.
The television programme Hebimeta-san and its spin-off Rock Fujiyama ran for six seasons between them. Since those two put him into Japanese living rooms, Friedman has appeared in more than eight hundred television shows, films and commercials — among them a two-year campaign for Coca-Cola's Fanta.
Friedman gave an interview in late October 2014, a few days after playing Loud Park 14. What he singled out as having pleased him was that so many people had come to watch despite the slot being early in the morning.
Friedman keeps a Japanese-language official site separate from the English one. The English site's menu carries an item reading 'japanese website', and where it goes is martyfan.com.
What changed his mind was Jason Becker's hands. By Friedman's account the playing was a given and the personality was better still — close to falling in love, as he puts it — but the decisive thing was something else. Friedman plays phrases he cheerfully calls perverse, and Becker could reproduce each one on the spot, moments after watching it. He had never met anyone who could do that. Normally, taking a second guitarist into a band means drilling them at length, which he hates. Becker could play it from watching. So Friedman reworked what he had written as a solo record, forced in places where Becker's qualities would show, and finished it as a band album.
By the second Cacophony album the two of them were an even split. Both had released solo records in the gap between the albums, and by Friedman's account Becker had grown out of all proportion in the year or so since they met — not only in dexterity but in the musical substance of what he played. He says he has never seen another musician improve that much in a single year.
Friedman appears repeatedly as a witness in the Jason Becker documentary Not Dead Yet, which went on general release in Japan on 8 November 2014. What he stressed in interview was that the important thing is not that Becker is ill but that the music he makes is good. He had worried beforehand — a film is a big undertaking and can come out strangely, and a subject that needs care can be handled merely sensationally — but says the finished thing was attended to in every detail and that there is not one second of it he would object to. It is not so sad that it leaves you low, nor is it too happy; it draws laughter and tears alike, and comes as close to the real Becker as a film can.
The one thing Friedman does not want said about him is that the early work was better. He believes he improves as a guitarist every week; it is both necessary and what he is aiming at, and he will not have it said that the early records were the good ones. He made the same point at an event in Los Angeles in 2023, adding that he used to say exactly that, regretfully, about guitarists he admired — which is why he never wanted it said of himself.
There was an aim behind Tokyo Jukebox 3. By Friedman's account the record was made towards the Olympics, meant to carry a ground-shifting sense of let's do this together. Something that lifts you when you hear it; something an athlete might play — a song to run to, say. If it could give someone that, he says, he would be glad.
There were about thirty songs Friedman wanted to do for Tokyo Jukebox 3, and the list came down to twelve. His method for sequencing is definite. The opener has to be whatever raises the most goosebumps — he plays towards his own goosebumps — and after that the joins have to feel good and make you expect the next thing. Since an order can only be judged by hearing it through, every rearrangement meant another hour of listening to the whole record.
The pandemic, Friedman has said, was actually good for the making of Tokyo Jukebox 3. Musicians' work had vanished, so excellent players were all free. One phone call and they said yes; the ideal people all helped; replies came fast and so did the work. He was living in the studio anyway, and everyone could concentrate. The upshot was more time than usual to fix things and to think again about them, so he was able to work until he was completely satisfied — and no regrets were left.
Friedman's standard for the guitar instrumental is a clear one. The form has no lyrics to work with, so if a listener is to stay interested the guitar has to carry the presence a singer would. When he first fell for Japanese songs he could not understand a word of them and enjoyed them anyway; that experience is the bar he set himself — a high one, as he adds.
The voice on 'The Perfect World' on Tokyo Jukebox 3 is +α/Alfakyun. Friedman had written the song with Jean-Ken Johnny, and wanted a self-cover with both the singing and the playing read differently. What surprised him in the studio was her range. Asked where her voice sat best she could not settle on an answer, so they tried keys one at a time — A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp — and she sang every one of them without wavering. They ended up about four and a half tones above the original, which made the guitar part considerably harder. The final choice of key was left to the people around them: the staff, the record company and the engineer.
As a child Friedman listened to hard rock and punk, and the names he gives are Kiss and the Ramones. He liked things that were loud and looked like rebellion but whose melodic sense was bubblegum and pop — not, he says, the heavy, dark, gloomy goth end of it. At the same time, he adds, he loved Black Sabbath.
On New Year's Eve 2025 Friedman put on Rock Fujiyama Countdown 2025-2026 at the Cotton Club in Tokyo. It ran as two shows, the second of which carried a countdown ceremony into the new year. At the centre of it were Friedman himself and the instrumental band Asterism; the host was Ken Ayugai, his old colleague from the television programme Rock Fujiyama, and the guests were Anna Tsuchiya and Kotaro Oshio.
On 2 January 2026 Friedman played New Year Live 2026 at the same Cotton Club in Tokyo, and gave a show under the same name at Billboard Osaka on 7 January. The band was Naoki Morioka on guitar, CHARGEEEEEE… on drums and Mika Maruki on keyboards, with the bass changing between the two: Wakazaemon in Tokyo and shioRi in Osaka.
Before Drama was finished, Friedman was describing it as a grown-up version of Scenes. By April 2023 he had been at it for a year and a half: he had gone to Italy the previous summer and recorded about half of it, and was working on demos for the rest. It was in the same vein as Scenes but far more modern, he said, and carried everything that had since been added to his musical palette.
The recording of Drama was split between two countries. On 10 December 2023 Friedman posted a photograph of himself laying down a solo in a studio in Italy, with the news that all the tracking for the new album was done. His guitar recording had been made in Japan as usual, he explained, and then he had gone to Italy for two weeks to record with nothing but vintage guitars and amps.
At Metalmania III, a Rock 'N' Roll Fantasy Camp event in Los Angeles in November 2023, Friedman said he had fifteen solo albums behind him and that each time he tries to do something he has never done. Of the record he was then making, he said the closest thing to it was Scenes — dramatic and orchestral, with violins, cellos and other instruments through it. Everything he had learned since had grown exponentially, he said, so this one was on a much larger scale.
At the end of 2023 Friedman was editing his autobiography for publication the following year. The other thing he was finishing at the time was a set of instructional videos for TrueFire. By his description it was the most exhaustive series TrueFire had ever done and by far the most exhaustive he had ever done — the deepest dive into how he sees music, which, he says, is apparently not how other people see it: not better or worse, just completely different. He made it at the end of that year's American tour.
Friedman was the first foreigner ever appointed an ambassador of Japan Heritage. He has also performed at the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Marathon, in four separate years: 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2022.
Friedman's work with Japanese artists has put him repeatedly near the top of the charts. The examples the Blabbermouth profile gives are a number one with SMAP, two number twos with Momoiro Clover, and a number two with Sound Horizon.