Considering Saliva [ tickets ] has performed a handful of entrance themes for WWE wrestlers, lead singer Josey Scott said it's pretty much a sure bet that he'll attend Wrestlemania 23 in Detroit this April.

"Coming from Memphis, you can't help with being inundated with wrestling growing up," said Scott. "We watched Jerry Lawler as we were kids on the local wrestling [shows] that came on Saturday mornings. We grew up watching wrestling."

"Ladies and Gentleman," the first single from Saliva's new record, "Blood Stained Love Story," is being used this year in promotional clips for the WWE's annual flagship event. Scott admitted he wrote the song knowing it would be used during athletic events, following the success of the single "Click Click Boom," which has been used in movie trailers and sports venues since its 2001 release.

"We saw how 'Click Click Boom' did so well," Scott said. "It lent itself to sports and movies and whatnot. We wrote ["Ladies and Gentleman"] for sports and movies. It's got that real violent dynamic to it. I just pulled it out of the old nugget. It was premeditated. I'm not going to lie."

Along with wrestling, movies are close to Scott's heart. He recently starred as Elroy, the drug-dealing convenience-store worker in "Hustle and Flow," as well as Officer Rodney Gronbeck in the television series "Wanted." Scott explained his only criteria for choosing roles is a good script.

"I want to work with good, solid people, and the good thing about being a musician and choosing to act is you can get in where you fit in. You can sit back and sort of pick from the top shelf of what you want to do. I'm not interested in having, like, a Mark Wahlberg sort of movie career. If I graduate to that, then so be it. I'm just looking to stair-step slowly with my fame and what not. In the future, I'd like to continue to do movies and I'd like to continue to music. Hell, if J. Lo can do it I can do it.

"I get picked to play a lot of heavies," Scott continued. "I either play a bad-looking good guy or a bad-looking bad guy. I played a bad-looking good guy on the show 'Wanted,' and I played just a plain bad guy in 'Hustle and Flow,' a dope dealer who fronts a convenience store. I love acting. I get to pick and choose my roles. I like movies a lot better than television. Television's too much like work. I got in the music industry to sleep until noon. Movies are just in and out. You can go in and it can't last, especially with small parts like I'm picking. If I have a supporting role, it can only last a few months and it's done."

Scott will appear in a supporting role in a forthcoming John Singleton/Craig Brewer flick, but he can't reveal details about that part.

In the meantime, he and his band--guitarist Wayne Swinny, rhythm guitarist Jon Montoya, bassist Dave Novotny and drummer Paul Crosby--are focusing on "Blood Stained Love Story" with a three-month jaunt that includes dates with Buckcherry and Crossfade. Details are listed below.

The album was produced by Bob Marlette (Black Sabbath, Wilson Phillips), who turned the knobs for Saliva's earlier works, "Every Six Seconds" and "Back Into Your System."

"We call him the Obi-Wan Kenobi of rock-n-roll and heavy metal. He gets the best out of us and we get the best out of him. It's a good marriage," Scott explained. "He's not afraid to crack the whip on us. He's not afraid of us. He's not afraid to calm us down and say, 'Look, this is what you need to do. This is what I expect.'"

Although Scott said he feels "Blood Stained Love Story" is a logical progression, he believes it is similar to 2002's "Back Into Your System."

"I think it's more commercial. I don't think we necessarily premeditated that. We just like beautiful music, you know? We think there's two types of music in this world: good music and bad music. There's music that's bad-ass or music that sucks. It doesn't matter if it's classical or R&B or gospel or heavy metal. There's good and there's bad," Scott said.

"We just wanted to make an album that was a pleasure to listen to from front to back. We wanted to give every song the attention it deserved. We took two years off. I went and did the 'Wanted' show I did 13 episodes of that. During that time off, we had weddings and funerals and births and deaths, and a band member (rhythm guitarist Chris D'abaldo) leave, and a new band member come, and betrayal and cheating and lies--everything wonderful and everything horrible about life has happened in the last two years. So I had a lot of stuff to write about. It is a snapshot of where we are now," he added.