Let’s face it, you’ve been playing guitar for 10 years and you still can’t play the ‘Sea of Lies‘ solo. We interview the man who has inspired 1000’s of guitarists, aspired them to be the best, and has a library of critically acclaimed albums under his belt – Mr Michael Romeo. With a new opus ‘Underworld‘ on the way, we had to ask a few questions about the album, and what keeps the Symphony X magic alive.
In an engaging interview we ask Michael to explain how Symphony X have managed to produce such brilliant and complex albums that always deliver progressive brilliance, and if anything has changed in that process for the new record ‘Underworld‘.
Read an excerpt from the interview below, and listen to the full interview at the bottom of the page!
With ‘Underworld’, did you write the record around a concept? I know with the album art there is something very Venetian about it, or something kind of related to The Divine Comedy…
Yea…we were talking about what we wanted to do before the writing of the record. It’s the same process as the others, we threw around a couple of ideas and talked about the flow of the record, and doing a little bit of everything we’ve done over the years so there would be some prog, some melodic stuff, and some really heavy stuff. Musically we are looking at those things for the topic, and for the lyrical theme we were looking at Dante, ‘The Inferno’, and Orpheus and the Underworld. You know those kind of things, going ‘To Hell and Back’ for someone, that kind of became the phrase that we were working off of, and it worked.
We talked about the album being more diverse with kind of the heavy stuff and the more melodic stuff, so that whole themed kind of worked because it is hell, and helps some of the darker themes of the album both musically and lyrically. It lends itself well to the darker images, but at the same time [in the story] the guy is going to save his wife, going to hell and back for someone or anything you care about – there’s those emotional ideas too that could come off in the songs that are more melodic. The whole idea with the Underworld and Orpheus kind of worked with the musical direction.
So each song on ‘Underworld’ has a theme related to the topic, but it’s not a concept album per se?
Nah not really. I think with the last couple records we kind of find a topic and we kind of find a flow, not really telling a story or a chronological thing, but more about the ideas. Like going to hell and back for someone, it could be about loss or what you would do, and there’s a little bit of the hell stuff so I guess there’s darker imagery. But in the lyrics it’s not really telling that story, it’s not reciting lines out of a book, it’s a little more personal. Anyone can relate to loss or struggle, but yea, I think it just helps us when we have some kind of theme or topic for the direction, as then the whole album starts to come together. Musically you know what you want to say, and things start pulling into place, it’s worked for us the past couple records!
‘Underworld’ arrives on July 24th via Nuclear Blast Records, and can be preordered here!
