Who knew what the future held for Zak Stevens when he left Savatage after the Wake Of Magellan album.  After a break he came back into the limelight with Circle II Circle and their Watching In Silence album.  With their fourth album, Delusions Of Grandeur, having just been released I managed to catch up with Zak for a chat. 

Having listened to your new album, Delusions Of Grandeur, it has some different elements to it than the bands previous work.  Do you feel that you have progressed? 

Zak Stevens:  I think with each album as we continue to write songs, we use basically the same song writing process from album to album, so it’s just whatever is happening at that time.  I think some of the elements of the song writing are just what kind of inspirations do we have personally at the time we are writing the album, you know, what are some of the things that we wanted to do.  Looking back, when we listened to previous albums what do we personally want to hear.  We basically demo everything in our home studio and then we mess around with it a little bit before we had it completely demoed before we go to the big studio.  Basically it’s the same process so I think it’s just music that’s inside of us just has yet to manifest, and that is what you have on Delusions Of Grandeur. 

Do you think more influences did come through?  You can hear more rock on songs like So Many Reasons, do you think some of these elements come through more than previously? 

ZS:  Yeah probably, that is what we call the element that we discovered as a Southern rock, kind of Southern metal influence that we have, just basically because of where we are from.  You look at the guys in the band and you start to get this Southern rock element coming out because you got the guys from Nashville Tennessee and myself from South Carolina, so we’re from the deep South of the United States, so we were kind of influenced by Southern rock growing up and I think some of that has subliminally got in this time.  So we did notice that new element of almost like a hard Southern rock/metal, whatever you want to call it, creeping out in this album in three or four different songs.  We did notice that early on and we said ‘hey, let’s keep on building on that’, so you’re right that is one element that kind of developed before our eyes I guess in the last couple of years. 

 It also seems to be a bit, riff wise especially, heavier as well. 

ZS:  Yeah a little bit I guess.  We didn’t really discuss that element of it going into it, it just kind of naturally happened.  I think that’s just kind of naturally the way we did that.  So that’s what influenced that.   

Every Last Thing was released as a single.  How was that received?

 ZS:  Good.  You know I think that it is one of the more different songs on the album, so I think that is the reason that they selected that as the single, because, you know, it’s a little bit of a different flavour compared to the overall feel to the rest of the album.  It’s the one song that is kind of different, so I guess it is good in that respect, to suit that purpose. 

The title of the album, Delusions Of Grandeur, is a brave title. 

ZS:  Oh thanks, I came up with that.  It basically sounded pretty good, sometimes you go ‘hey that sounds like a good title’.  Besides that I think it just kind of a play on the music business as a whole, the ego component of the music industry, and in many different industries really.  In business you got that ego kind of component where you just want to leave it all at the door but a lot of people feel that they have to have such large egos, they may wind up having delusions of grandeur because they may wind up being less grand than they even think they are.  So it’s kind of just a play on that.  As well we were kind of joking around saying ‘hey let’s make about 13 songs for the new album and then we will just call them our own delusions of grandeur’, because of course you want to think your songs are great, but it was kind of a joke.  A light hearted kind of a thing ‘lets make all these songs our own delusions of grandeur, we will just have our own delusions and be done with it.’  So it has different little meanings that lead to the one title.

 But it’s not a concept album?

 ZS:  Nope, not a concept album.  We just said ‘hey we did the last one and we lived that story’, and it’s kind of fun putting records together that way, but it’s also fun when you don’t have a set template.  So it was free reign, everybody will do 13 songs and everybody has free reign, you don’t have to really fit within the parameters of any particular thing so go for it. 

Are there any tracks that are more personal to you?  

ZS:  I would say… probably Echoes, it’s one of the ones that’s kind of more of the personal side, coming from things happening really currently in my life.  I think that a lot of the lyrics on this album are just stuff that’s everyday life, stuff that’s happening currently, maybe a little bit of a social commentary, but mostly everyday stuff and the life of everyday people.  So I guess that is one of the ones, and probably… maybe Chase The Lies, even though it is not like a wholehearted ballad of any type, it still has some decent meaning for me. 

Zak Stevens

Was Jon Oliva involved with the writing this time round? 

ZS:  Erm, no the last two albums we haven’t had any collaboration, mainly because he’s been doing his album exactly at the time I’ve been doing mine.  So for the last two albums we’ve been in the studio at the exact same time.  So much so that it’s gotten so busy we were recording everything in Morrisound in Tampa and it go so busy for that studio to have me and Jon in there at the same time they just didn’t have enough resources for that. 

We moved onto a different studio for Delusions Of Grandeur because we wanted to just have the run of that house, so we moved over to a studio in Orlando, which is about an hour and fifteen minutes away from Tampa.  It’s at J Stanley productions, it’s actually his home, 5,000 square foot home.  The middle storey is the whole studio.  So that was cool, we saw Sevendust, who live in Orlando, we saw them coming out of the door, so we thought that it might be a good place to record.  So he was just doing Alter Bridge and Sevendust and Creed a few years ago in there.  So all those guys being from Orlando roots, so we said ‘hey it looks like we have ourselves a new production house.’  We went on in there and we were happy because Jay is a real guitar orientated kind of recording, producer, mixer, engineer, so he helped me mix it and this time the producing credit goes to myself and Paul Michael Stewart, Mitch Stewart our bassist, he plays guitar, he sings, he writes most of the songs with me.  He was there from the beginning to the end so I said ‘your only pre requisite to get producing credit on the album is do what I do: be here from the very beginning of the song writing, be here everyday until we mix it’.  So he did that so ‘you earned it this time buddy.’  So we split the producing on this one I was glad to list him, he did a great job.  So he’s moving up in the world, that’s his way of continuing to build up the chain of his own set of goals. 

But we were happy, we met a new friend in Jay, a wonderful guy from Boston who really knows the music industry and had lots of gold and platinum albums of 20 million sales worth on his wall… even more.  He wrote songs for Matchbox Twenty, he co-wrote with Rob Thomas that song 3 a.m. that actually went number one, so he had a number one song on there.  You know just getting to know some new people, some good heavy hitters in our local area, in the music industry, it’s great.  We’ve hooked up with another one here, so we’re happy and we said ‘let’s give you this traditional metal band Circle II Circle and you do what you do with all the modern bands that we just saw go out of the door’, then you have Delusions Of Grandeur so we are pretty happy about that. 

As discussed you’ve produced some of the albums, is that a side to the music industry that you enjoy? 

ZS:  Yeah I really do.  You got your song writing, you got the actual composition, then I think the producing part is bringing it to life.  You know making those calculated decisions in the studio, as far as what’s going down, and making those final judgements, and having an open mind to new techniques.  I was looking forward to working in this new studio, because I wanted to get a little taste of looking at the techniques that other people use after kind of seeing the same, you know, knowing that team that we had over the past three albums.  So we broke out into a, maybe, not so much of a safe zone, having to get outside the box a little bit.  I think you have to be brave enough to do that, you have to be out there willing to stretch your comfort zone a little bit, broaden your horizons, think outside the box when you need to, these are all kind of things we enjoy and looking into a little bit more on this album. 

You have had a solid line up since the second album, it must be good to have that band mentality?   

ZS:  Yeah, that’s really something that we set out as a goal right after the first line up didn’t work out, ‘you know what, I’m not going to go through that again.’  So when we got these guys on the boat, we met them, we had our first band meeting and said ‘here’s the first goal’, and this is before they had even done Middle Of Nowhere, I said ‘three albums with you guys…at least’. 

Well it seems to work as you have done what four albums in five years? 

ZS:  Well I think it’s a little bit more than five years, it’s probably like six and a half, but still that’s a pretty hot pace.  People always ask me ‘how come you’ve been going at such a hot pace making these albums?’  To us it really doesn’t seem like it’s that fast a pace, but I know that most people those waiting period is two years between albums; I don’t think we’ve even had two years between our albums.   

You know the music continues to flow.  We’ve already gotten some songs for the next one, which is ridiculous.  I told the guys ‘you’re making me laugh’ Mitch would come up like ‘I’ve got three to four I’m sending you’ like ‘can you wait til it releases in America on June 17^th’.  I swear I wasn’t going to look at another song for the next album yet, I think I peeked into one and I went ‘I can’t do this, I just want to hold off a minute’.  But it is a crazy pace that these guys like to pump out music but I’m gonna try to hold them back a little bit now. 

For your Burden Of Truth album there was some kind of hidden message in the cover and on the forum? 

ZS:  Well we didn’t really have a hidden message in there, so to speak.  We just wanted people to read, and someone finally one that contest, out of Florida was the winner.  We just did a poll out there and we collected the responses back at the website as far as ‘can you find the hints to give us the good story we’re looking for, as to what’s going on with the hidden theme in Burden Of Truth?’  What it was really was that you know you have that pentacle that came part of our logo, I even have a tattoo of it on my right arm, now the new one, we don’t have it on there for the first time, but the other three albums have that pentacle thing.  Back in the day I think it was a protective type mechanism,  back in the medieval times, or even long before as far as a protective religious symbol.  The way they built the churches, you know how they built them and you could actually trace the pentacle locations of the churches in many areas.  They were trying to say ‘hey this forms this shape’, you know some of the Da Vinci code type stuff.   

So basically the answer was this was found on all three albums so they must be related in some way through a central theme.  Which is true, if you look at the lyrics to all three albums I was actually carried away with that whole, I guess it was the Da Vinci code type thing, but it was called other things before.  About that whole idea of a person being a direct descendant of Jesus walking the earth, possibly able to do special things to save the planet, that’s a very general explanation of it.  There’s actually lyrics and everything on that whole thing going through all three albums, we just decided to do the Burden Of Truth, the big production, blow it wide open.  But actually the first three could be considered a trilogy, because it has elements of that, and of course it is much more concentrated on, and a story was developed around another character to kind of be a musical extension of the movie, Da Vinci Code, kind of like a story in music to extend on where that movie ended.  Taking that character and going in a much more expansive type story.  So that was when we blew it right open, but really that was the answer.  Trilogy, soon as you said that ‘bingo, you’ve just won a guitar’. 

It was pretty crazy, but after we did the trilogy, now we’re moving on, you don’t even have that symbol on this album.  There was a breaking point where we kind of moved on to a new thing.  What that thing is don't ask me! 

You are going to tour America soon with Jon Oliva, are you looking forward to that? 

ZS:  Yeah, it’s going to be awesome we are putting our heads together on what we’re going to play.  It’s the first time I’m touring and I need to consult with the band as to ‘hey, what Savatage songs should I play?’  So he’ll be doing the same, ‘now let’s just do these, and I’ll do these, and then we’ll get together later and do these.’  So it’s going to be awesome. 

So Jon Oliva does songs like Hall Of The Mountain King, do you touch on stuff from Edge Of Thorns and Dead Winter Dead and that then? 

ZS:  Probably so, I’ll probably just do songs from my era, you know, Edge Of Thorns, Handful Of Rain, Dead Winter Dead, Wake Of Magellan.  That’s my side, then he’ll probably deal with his era, you know all the stuff before, massive, massive amount of music to choose from.  So there’ll be quite a lot to juggle. 

Have you actually done any touring in the UK?  

ZS:  Yes, we played a few shows back when I was in Savatage, I think it was on Edge Of Thorns actually, I think we had a few more on the Handful Of Rain.  But we have from time to time and I think we are going to get back this time too.   

What do we do to get Circle II Circle over here? 

ZS:  We definitely got to do that, I can’t wait to get back.  We got to get back to England, the UK, we’ve got to do the right thing.  That’s where my roots are from.  My family name is British, my family name is Trussell, it’s like Russell with a T.  That’s my real family name, I’m British, and a little bit of American Indian, Sioux Indian, Scotch, Irish, mum side.  So basically we are talking about where my family roots are from.  The last time we were there I felt very comfortable, it just felt strange, it’s like ‘jeez, I really feel comfortable here’, because I know that is where my roots, where hundreds of years of my fore family are from.  When I walked into the pub I felt even more comfortable, I think we have always been brewing Bass ale in my family. 

I can’t wait to get back, that’s a special place for me.  We’ll get back, we are going again in October, we have a bill we are putting together right now to tour Europe, I hope it comes to England. 

So that’s just in the early stages of planning? 

ZS:  Exactly, we are just planning them in, and that is just going to come right after the US tour.  So right after we get off the road in the US I’m probably going to take one week off and be back over to Europe for a tour. 

You are also doing Progpower in America.

 ZS:  We’re playing Progpower, that’s part of the US tour.   

That changed from an acoustic to a full blown live show? 

ZS:  It was going to be acoustic but they decided to open up to go to… we could use a venue with a little bit of a bigger stage, so we decided to go ahead and open it up to a full rock show. 

You are also planning a DVD? 

ZS:  Yes, we’re editing it, we’ve got the guy working on editing it right now.  It will include stuff from that Progpower live show, and we have a few videos out there with some of that stuff.  Put a few more songs on that, plus the making of Delusions Of Grandeur, because we filmed, basically we had a few cameras in there the whole time we were making Delusions Of Grandeur.  So a good portion of it will be the making of the new album. 

Have there been any videos for the new album, did you make one for Every Last Thing? 

ZS:  Not filmed one formally yet.  We may start working on that, because they’re choosing which songs will be appropriate for that now, so there will be more news on that as we move forward, as far as a full blown production video. 

I noticed that you actually played drums on the Watching In Silence album. 

ZS:  Yeah, played on a lot of the earlier stuff.  I played about half of them on Middle Of Nowhere, and that’s because Tom came on, Tom Drennan, then after that he started playing most of the drums, he played every bit of them on Delusions Of Grandeur.  Which takes the burden off me because in the early time we were, not even really with the first line up, I had not solidified everyone in that line up yet before I started going in and cutting some tracks.   

Is it something that you enjoy doing? 

ZS:  Yes, recording with the drums you have to put yourself in this completely percussion mentality, then you’ve got to get all the drum tracks, then it’s time to switch gears, then you’re in the vocal mentality.  I’d rather just stay in the vocal zone myself, and the producing thing, so I like it better now I don’t have to.  I mean I love playing, I don’t like the burden of having to perform on every drum track on an album anymore.  But I really enjoy playing, I play with several bands around here locally, they call me if their drummer can’t make a show, they know who to talk to.  I’ve been playing since I was nine years old, I don’t want to say how many years.  I love it, it’s a great hobby and it’s fantastic, I’m so glad that was my first instrument. 

You were saying about years, I can’t believe Edge Of Thorns was released 15 years ago. 

ZS:  Thanks a lot, no it was, you’re right.  Isn’t that crazy? 

It is.  Was it weird when you joined Savatage, because normally when people come in and replace a vocalist the old one is out of the picture.  However, Jon Oliva was still there in the background doing piano etc… did that make it a bit strange? 

ZS:  Well, no.  I kind of appreciated it, because at least he was always there being supportive.  He was really the backbone, so it was kind of more comfortable to have him there.  I knew the music was going to be great, I was there when he was writing things like Edge Of Thorns, and Criss (Oliva) was there playing the riff along with us for the first time, it just didn’t seem strange at all really.  He was a big part of the decision maker as to who would come in and sing.  So with all that going on it seems a little strange on the outside but on the inside it probably made me feel that little bit more secure.  To have his support there the whole time going ‘hey, good job, alright… we’ll get started on this other thing… you’ve got a little bit of work to do here’, just giving feedback, just take that feedback and go ‘oh, ok, cool’ just try to make the adjustments.  So it really wasn’t that bad. 

You then left after Wake Of Magellan and I have seen different reasons mentioned for this, can you please set the record straight? 

ZS:  Yeah sure.  I mean really the only reason I took some time off was to work on some family issues that I was having at the time, I had a baby, my first newborn at the time, Cassidy, who is now 10.  I have another daughter, four years old, since then.  So you know it was just getting used to being a parent for the first time when you have your first child it does take that little bit of adjustment, when you’re travelling all the time.  If you are not around it can cause a burden to the other half of the relationship, the spouse, so I was like ‘ok, I’m just going to take some time to be here everyday’, it was a change to my life from the five years up to that point.  Just tried that for a change, worked on the house some, we were moving at the time, I wanted to get that done, a lot of work to be done, probably three to four months of stuff where I just needed to be there everyday.  So I did.  That way I wouldn’t have to worry about missing a show or ‘hey, you didn’t come up to New York to record this one part’. 

It was a kind of bold thing to do but I thought it was a good decision to make for the family.  You see it from time to time even in different industries, people take time off to get back and get everything straight with the homestead.  So that’s basically all it was, I pretty much had everything sorted out within five to six months.  Then there wasn’t really that much Savatage activity going on so I thought ‘hey I better think about keeping my voice going’, so that is when the Circle II Circle idea started sprouting and that’s how we started all that in 2001.   

There was going to be another Savatage album pretty soon, I was just going to miss the one.  That was my plan, just to bow out for the one, take care of my issues and come on back.  But there never was another one.  So there you go, I had to stick with Circle II Circle. 

Well fans are spoilt now with yourselves and Jon Oliva, there’s no Savatage but we have you and him at least. 

ZS:  You know we all here talk of the reunion and the possible thing to come back, and believe me we’re all interested in doing it.  It just has to be the right thing the right timing.  My opinion is the timing thing, we’re just kind of waiting for the right timing.  I don’t think we should go out and say ‘it will never happen’.  Never say never about anything, that’s kind of my rule.  The good thing is that everybody is willing when the time comes to, I think we can have some luck on that in the future.  Take it one day at a time because the powers that be have to make those decisions.  But it’s always something we talk about, I mean I was talking to Chris Caffery on the phone the other day and it came up again, ‘don’t you think that would be neat?’ , ‘yeah it sure would’.

He has an album coming out soon. 

ZS:  Yeah, I think I’m going to sing something on it.  He was talking about sending me something.  Hopefully he will send it soon and we’ll get working on it.   

So you started Circle II Circle, any reason for the band’s name? 

ZS:  Well the name just came from coming out of the one music circle of Savatage.  That circle of characters and friends and the whole shebang, and then kind of forming a new circle yet having still elements of the previous circle, given that I was still writing songs with Jon Oliva and Chris Caffery at the time.  So it was kind of a way to conserve the inner ring of the original circle while still forming a new outer ring.  Then over time it got real busy and they couldn’t really collaborate with me too much anymore on Circle II Circle, but that’s just the old evolution of the band.  That’s the way the name started, so we went one circle to circle, so that’s how the name came about. 

It must be good to not only be a success with Savatage but to also create a new band and have success with that? 

ZS:  Yes, it’s good.  I think that I owe a lot of it to the fans.  They’ve supported me the whole time, they were willing to accept that kind of a thing, willing to stay behind and say ‘hey we might not have Savatage and all that but we’ve got Zak, we’ve got Chris and Jon doing their thing’.  Accepting that I was going to have my band, and really supporting it.  So it is as much to the fans for their support as it is for me wanting to have a job singing, so it’s a combination of the two that makes it all work. 

That brings us nicely onto the final question on whether there is anything else you would like to say?

ZS:  We’re going to get over there (UK) as soon as we can, I certainly enjoy it.  We should have been over there more.  We want everybody to stay patient, we will do it, this is a great album, we want to go ahead and support it in as many places as we can and I want to get back to my roots in the streets of London.  We certainly miss everybody but we really appreciate it and we thank all you guys, we’ll see you soon UK, hang in there, rock out and we thank you very much.

Phone call over it only remains to be said that, both fans of Savatage and Circle II Circle, can only hope that the band do make it over to the UK this time around. In the meantime there is the small matter of the excellent new album, Delusions Of Grandeur, out now via AFM, to enjoy

Darren Brushneen