May 12, 2005 - Boston based punk outfit The Explosion recently took a slight detour from their normal modus operandi when they agreed to participate in the innovative musical approach to Activision's Fantastic Four videogame. The group, along with fellow musicians Go Betty Go, Jurassic 5, and Taking Back Sunday, were assigned the task of creating a song tailored specifically for one member of the famous Marvel superhero quartet. Perhaps in a move to keep in tune with their incendiary name, the group was given the task of writing and recording a song for the character of Johnny Storm, better known as The Human Torch. We caught up with Explosions' member Dave Walsh, who revealed what went into the making of the appropriately titled track "I'm On Fire."

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IGN Music: To get straight to the heart of the matter, how did you guys come to get involved with the Fantastic Four videogame project?

Dave Walsh: Well our involvement with Activision came about with the Tony Hawk games. We've been in the last couple of Tony Hawk games. In Tony Hawk 4 we had our song "No Revolution" in it and then in Tony Hawk Underground they chose our song "Here I Am." So we've known Tim Reilly at Activision for awhile. He contacted our manager and told him about the Fantastic Four game and what the idea of the characters were and that he was looking for a song from The Explosion to match one of the characters. The character of Johnny Storm was the one that they picked for us, so I then went ahead and wrote a song for it.

IGN Music: With the Tony Hawk games they had just picked songs that you guys had already released, yet here you were asked to write a song from scratch specifically for the game. That obviously presented a whole new challenge for you, right?

Dave Walsh: Yeah, absolutely. As a songwriter I've never done anything like that before. It's almost like someone commissioning an artist to do a painting. I just kind of took it on like that kind of thing. I had never done anything like that before, so I took it like a challenge. I wasn't even really familiar with the character, either. I didn't read Fantastic Four as a kid or anything like that. Tim gave me background on the character and then I actually did a little bit of research about the character myself. So yeah, it was a challenge. But the song came about pretty easily after I kind of put my mind around it.

IGN Music: When you say it came about pretty easily, what are we talking about in terms of how long it took you to write and record the track?

Dave Walsh:Well after I did the research I think the song lyrics came out maybe in 10-minutes and then I kind of had the idea of having this kind of like '50s Sun Records styled song with kind of a Black Flag thing going on, too. So it's real fast, but it's got this kind of jangly '50s pop thing going on in it…

IGN Music: Oh yeah, especially with the hook.

Dave Walsh: Yeah, yeah. I'd been listening to a lot of that kind of music and I thought it would be good for his character because he's kind of like a cool, wiseass type character. So I think after I did wrap my mind around it, it took me about an hour to write the song, you know? And then I brought it to the guys in the band and we messed with it a little bit and got it just right. Then we went in and tracked it in one day and that was it.

IGN Music: Damn!

Dave Walsh: Yeah, we just went into the studio and in one day busted the song out. It turned out to be a very painless, very easy to do project.