The in-house guitarist for the LA Rams, Nita Strauss is no stranger to showcasing her six-string skills at sports games. So it's no surprise that she knocked the US national anthem out of the park at WWE's recent NXT TakeOver: Stand and Deliver event.
Wielding her Ibanez JIVA10 signature guitar, the Alice Cooper guitarist took to the stage at the wrestling event last night (April 7) – which comes ahead of WrestleMania 37 – to deliver a shred-heavy take on The Star-Spangled Banner. Check out her performance below.
Taking to Twitter last night, Strauss wrote: “Thank you so much WWE [and] WWE NXT for having me. It was an honor to kick of WrestleMania week with you all tonight,” before thanking WWE NXT founder and executive producer Triple H for the opportunity.
In an interview ahead of the performance with Michael Morales Torres of Lucha Libre Online, Strauss revealed that Triple H gave her one simple instruction for her performance, and that was to be loud.
“It’s an exciting time to have WrestleMania because the world has been shut down for the last year,” she said. “We all watched WrestleMania last year at the Performance Center. It’s different. It was great, but it was different.
“They’re going to have fans there this weekend. They’re going to have the stadium feeling for the wrestlers and to be the one to sort of start it off right, I’m just very honored and very happy. We are going to make it nice and loud. Triple H’s instructions were to get it nice and loud; and we are going to get loud.”
During the same conversation, the guitarist was asked whether she'd ever consider wrestling for WWE. “Definitely,” she replied, “I would have fun doing the Hurricanrana from the top rope for sure.”
This, of course, isn't the first time Nita Strauss has lent her guitar talents to WWE. Back in 2018, she teamed up with Halestorm's Lzzy Hale at WrestleMania 34 to perform the entrance theme for Japanese wrestler Shinsuke Nakamura.
In other news, Strauss is currently working on her second solo album, which she says will include vocals.
“I'm not going to do any singing, because I want it to sound good,” she jokes. “But I have people much more talented at singing than me doing a couple of guest spots, and then the rest is going to be instrumental.”
