By Martin Popoff
"Well... (laughs), I don't know man (laughs). I never talked to him when he was in the band and I haven't talked to him since. That's part of the problem: I never talked to him while he was in the band. We had a discussion like, where the band should be going. What is everybody's concept of the band? Let's get down to the conceptual level here and talk about everything so we can plot our direction more fully. Well, after a year, none of the ex-members had anything to say about the whole thing, what their concept was. And to me, that's a very big thing. If we can't have a meeting of the minds on something like that, it's like, we're not going anywhere. It just seemed like it never clicked. I've been doing this too long to just treat it like a job. I want to feel like I know the guys I'm playing with and respect them as people, rather than just musicians. I had the utmost respect for Jim as a guitar player, and Rick's singing abilities."
I'm confused. I had read that three guys had left. "Well you know, Rick decided he wasn't getting enough drama out of the whole thing and decided he had to talk to some other people and spread some ideas that aren't exactly true."
Wait! You somehow got a new record out of all this. What's up with that? "Most of the material on this album is hung on a melody line. The consideration was given to the song. Can we produce a great song here? Regardless of whether it fits in with somebody's conception of what power metal is, which doesn't express us. At the moment, power metal seems to be about Helloween clones with constant double kick 16th note drums, and that's not us. So we just went with, 'Can we make a great song here?' And let's not worry about whether it fits the genre. So we went back to our influences, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, the psychedelic period of the '60s and heavy shit like Metallica and death metal. It's strange, I was reading an interview with Down the other day. And the way they were describing their album was exactly the way we would describe our album".
