Tenacious D released The Pick of Destiny in the US on November 14, 2006, through Epic Records. Their second studio album also served as the soundtrack to Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny. Its songs followed Jack Black and Kyle Gass through a deliberately exaggerated origin story, with the search for a magical guitar pick turning their musical ambitions into a literal quest.
Getting that story into shape took years. In a 2005 on-set interview with CHUD, Black described abandoned writing attempts and an outside draft that didn’t feel like their work. The breakthrough came with Liam Lynch, who had already been making short films with the duo. He encouraged them to write it together, and the project settled around a fantastical account of how Tenacious D began. Lynch also directed the film.
Producer John King, who had worked on their debut, returned for the recording. Dave Grohl supplied drums, with John Spiker on bass and John Konesky on electric guitar. Those players expanded the arrangements around Black and Gass’s acoustic guitars. Gass singled out Konesky as the guitarist responsible for “Master Exploder” in that same on-set conversation, putting a name to the electric playing behind the duo’s performance.
The opening song, “Kickapoo,” made its guest singers part of the plot. Meat Loaf played young JB’s father, who opposed his son’s devotion to heavy metal, while Ronnie James Dio appeared as a singing poster offering encouragement. Black had been talking publicly about wanting Meat Loaf for the father role long before filming. In Metal Hammer’s 2023 oral history, Meat Loaf recalled his daughters repeatedly passing along those comments; when Black finally called him directly, he agreed to take the part. The scene sent JB toward Hollywood and the meeting with Gass that would set the rest of the adventure in motion.
Grohl’s vocal appearance came near the other end of the record, on “Beelzeboss (The Final Showdown).” Playing Satan, he faced Black and Gass in the musical confrontation that resolved the film’s adventure. Between those larger set pieces, the soundtrack revisited the duo’s “History” and carried brief dialogue tracks such as “Destiny” and “The Divide.” Those fragments kept the movie’s story present even when the screen was gone.
For all the absurdity, Gass described a straightforward musical ambition when the pair spoke to Rotten Tomatoes during the film’s release campaign: “We try to write the best songs ever and they kinda come out funny.” Black stressed that they wrote original music. They also gave the album’s clean edition its own attention, recording replacement language that Black said would let adults listen with children in the car. Gass thought the altered version could be funnier; Black said making that work required extra effort. Reworking the words gave them another chance to refine the comedy within the songs.
The album entered the Billboard 200 at No. 8 with 81,000 copies sold in its first week, according to Billboard’s contemporary reporting. The Pick of Destiny took Tenacious D into the US top 10, improving on the No. 33 peak of their 2001 self-titled debut.
