"Maxi's sort of famous for having his car phone turned off, but finally I got ahold of him like a month [after the party], and I played him some of the ideas I had and he loved them, and went away and wrote the raps for them." So, initially, "Salva Mea" was only intended to be just another Cheeky single, but Maxi's general prescence, personality and how he, Rollo and Sister Bliss got on was the turning point in thier quest to get an album completed. "I thought 'If I'm ever to get my album done, this is the guy I should base it around." He said. Prior to the release of "Salva Mea" Rollo had never previously worked with raps in his songs, and the release of the single turned quite a few heads with folks who came to live for each new Rollo production. Although his choice to work with a rapper caused much chatter with the Rollo faithful, his initial decision to work with one was not as complicated as it might seem.
"I learned how to slow a track down on the computer properly," he stated. "I slowed the track down in the middle, but I didn't want it to be just an instrumental, so a mate of mine told me about Maxi, and told me he was a Buddhist as well and that he was really on point with what he says about things. I got in touch with Maxi and told him what I wanted the song to be about and that I wanted the chorus to be 'inside I'm screaming.' He changed it to 'just beneath my skin, I'm screaming' which was much better, and he just came down with this rap that totally fitted the kind of mood of the song." It wasn't that he wrote the track and wanted to have someone rapping to make the record more palatable to commercial ears, it was because Maxi Jazz's rap worked so well with the track Rollo had written. "If he had come up with something that was awful or didn't work, then it would have never happened, but his rap absolutely expressed what I was trying to get across with the music and I thought to myself, 'this is more than brilliant, this is fate'. Although Rollo himself loved the final outcome, many Rollo trainspotters grumbled and instead programmed the "Carmina Burana"-sampling "Tuff Mix," but he stood by his decision to continue to work with Maxi Jazz. "I would get calls from people such as Paul Oakenfold who said things like 'I love the record, but couldn't you just edit out the rap?' and to be quite honest, I've only heard a few DJ's play that [Epic] mix out, but I believed in it, and I believed in Maxi's talent as a rapper, and that's why we did the album." This decision is something that Maxi Jazz is rather greatful for.
