Savatage: Workaholic Madmen! Page 3
by Martin Popoff

"It's weird, musically, I look at the album in four parts," Jon explains, ultimately saying very little, except for that bit about the synthesizers. "It kind of touches on the early Savatage sound for three or four tracks, Mountain King and before. And there are another two or three songs which are along the lines of what we've been doing with the big back-up vocals. Then there are a lot of weird things. I'm using a lot of weird synthesizers that I never used before. So I've developed a lot of strange synth sounds. So a quarter of the record is very experimental, this weird type of new heavy approach. I mean, it's just a good balance of everything we do."

How might have roles changed within the band. "Well, the only change is Al. Al Pitrelli is with Megadeth now. We're looking to replace him but I don't think we're going to do anything until after the record is done. Chris Caffery is doing the lead work and I'm playing some guitar on the record which is a lot of fun."

And how does the idea of "Poets And Madmen" enter into things? "Well, we wanted to incorporate the fact that we have two guys that can sing. And Poets And Madmen is kind of like me and Zakk. Zakk is supposedly cast as the poet and me the madman, meaning that my voice is a lot harsher and a lot more screamy and Zakk's is much more melodic. And it's more of an even split vocally down the middle, so you have that split personality type of a vibe. So we're running with that and seeing how that goes. The thing with Savatage is Paul will change things all the way up until we're mixing. We'll have a whole new set of lyrics two days before we go into mix the song (laughs), so everything can change..."