There's not much that can be said that hasn't already been discussed with regards to Jon Oliva. As the mastermind behind classic Savatage albums such as Hall Of The Mountain King & Gutter Ballet his songs are not only influential but thought provoking and timeless. Since 2004 he has fronted the equally compelling Jon Oliva's Pain and now they are set to return with their third full length album Global Warning. Darren Brushneen caught up with Jon to discuss the album as well as the past, present and plans for the future.

Your new album, Global Warning, is out soon.  Are you happy with how the album turned out? 

Jon Oliva:  We are really happy with it, it is really versatile, something we wanted, and it shows off the talent of the band.  I mean it is a very versatile band these guys, they play a lot of different styles and we are very very happy with it, the response so far has been really positive, so hopefully this is the one that takes this band to the next step. 

Jon Oliva

Your previous album Maniacal Renderings did get a good reception and was a step up from ‘Tage Mahal. 

JO:  Yes, it’s definitely a step up from that one. You know, it is like a progression, like anything, the first record was kind of just getting to know everybody. I had never played in another band before, I was always just in Savatage, so it took me a year or so to get used to these guys, learn what they could do and their limitations. They really don’t have many, they’re very very versatile, so on this album we pulled out all the stops. I was like, you know, there are a lot of different things I want to try this year and we are going to do it. You know, forget about what anybody else thinks lets make the record we want to make, and that’s what we did. 

So are you all more comfortable with each other now? 

JO:  Yeah, you know I write a lot. It is all I really do, besides record and tour, is write. So I am very comfortable working with these guys now. I have gotten to know them very well and their playing styles, and they are very easy to write for because they play so many different styles that I really am not limited. I can do, kind of, whatever I want, the big instrumental songs like the Global Warning song, and even the little fun songs I like to do like Look At The World, that type of thing, the little Queen type of stuff, which I love to do. That is what is great about the JOP band, there’s really not one style, it is not a heavy metal band, it’s just a band that plays music, and we play all kinds of music; we play heavy metal, we play hard rock, we play progressive, we play pop, we play a little bit of jazz here and there, we play everything.   

You mentioned Queen, do you feel that your influences came out more on this album? 

JO: I think so, yeah. You definitely hear Queen in the two, well actually the first song Look At The World, was actually a song I wrote with my brother back in 1979, which was after seeing Queen in concert on the Jazz Tour, it was kind of my first attempt at writing a, kind of like, a Killer Queen type of campy type of feel, and we just never did anything with it. Going through tapes I found some of the pieces of it and put it together for this record. 

The other one, Open Your Eyes, is a definite, you know, you definitely hear the Queen influence on that song a lot.  They were like one of my favourite bands, I always try to do something on each record that pays homage to those bands that mean a lot to me. You hear a lot of Beatles influence on this record in places, and a little bit of Zeppelin and a little bit of Deep Purple. I actually did a radio show in the UK the other day and the guy was asking me “what are your favourite bands?” and I said, you know, it is funny but all my favourite bands and major influences are all British bands, you know, The Beatles, Queen, The Who, Zeppelin, Black Sabbath it’s all UK, I should have been born in the UK. 

Do you also get influenced by more modern music as well? 

JO: I really haven’t found much new stuff that I really can sink my teeth into. I mean, I hear some great bands out there, I’ve heard some great songs, but what I miss the most is the musicianship and the singers. A lot of the bands that are coming out now the vocals are pretty limited, I haven’t heard a Freddie Mercury since Freddie died, there hasn’t been a guitar player like Jimmy Page, or a hero guitar player or god guitar player like a Jimmy Page or a Brian May or even a Tony Iommi. It’s all these kids now with shorts and baseball hats on and they know four or five chords and they play a lot of open tuning and it’s all like, what I call Pearl Jam vocals, they all pretty much sound the same to me. 

I can remember listening to A Night At The Opera for the first time, and just being so blown away at how they could do a song like Death On Two Legs and then turnaround and do a song like Love Of My Life. It was something I always wanted to try to style myself around, being able to pull all those emotional strings like those bands could do. The Beatles, Queen, Zeppelin, I mean Zeppelin's The Rain Song, to a song like Black Dog, you know, it just shows in the musicianship and the guitar playing and the singing, you know, I don’t hear it nowadays and I miss it. That’s why I think I kind of hark on those classic rock bands because I just don’t think that anyone has approached their level, but who knows maybe one day a new Zeppelin will appear, but I weep for the future. 

Or a reformed Zeppelin? 

JO: You know I saw some of that and it was damn good.  I saw it on the Internet and I was like holy… it was amazing. 

You mentioned earlier about using your brother Criss’ music on Global Warning, and I know that on Maniacal Renderings a lot of the songs came from material he had written that was found on tapes.  How much of this material was used on Global Warning? 

JO: On this album his contributions are more thorough. On the last album I used some riffs that I found, but on this album it was actually bodies of songs that were either demoed up for Savatage that we never did and never finished. Then there were some real old pieces like the Look At The World song and the Firefly song, which were again a couple of pieces that we were working on back in early 1980. They were just things that were just put on tape and we just never…they just were forgotten about over the years, until these tapes surfaced and I started going through them all. 

I still got probably another couple of albums worth of stuff that I can work with, with him. It’s cool because he’s a part of what I am doing and that means a lot to me, and it should mean a lot to Savatage fans. You know, it’s like if I wasn’t doing this now you would never hear this stuff, it would have just been lost and forgotten about. So that makes it special for me, and it’s very emotional doing that, you know, listening to him talk on cassettes, it’s a very difficult thing for me to do, but I do it because I feel obligated to before his career is officially over for real. I’ve got to get the rest of his music out there, the stuff that people haven’t had the chance to hear, because it is some great stuff. 

How does it work with the tapes?  Do you just take bits and pieces from it or do other band members, such as Matt LaPorte, listen to them as well? 

JO: Yeah, I bring the stuff into the guys and I say “OK, well I’ve found this”. A perfect example is the song Before I Hang, which is track number four, that was a song that we had actually demoed up as Savatage back, I think, around the Gutter Ballet period.  But we were never happy with it, we liked parts of it.  So I kept the parts that we liked and then I rewrote other stuff to go with it and used a piece of a song that we had for the Streets album that never made it onto the album, which was called Larry Elbows, I think, was the working title.  That became the verse for the new Before I Hang and the rest of the stuff was stuff that we had from the original demo.  So, yeah, I’ll bring it in and we’ll listen to it and we’ll say “well what can we do with this, well I’ve got this idea”, and the guys will throw in a lot of input as far as the arrangement, and like “let’s try this drum pattern”, “let’s try this bass line”, “let’s see if we can make this work if we change the key here”.  So there is a lot of fiddling around going with it to make it all work.  But it is a lot of fun too, because it is cool, it’s like Criss is a member of the band in a way, though he is not here, his music is here and for some reason it just seems to work.  You know this is the second album now that we’ve been using some of his material, and it just seems right for some reason, like it was meant to be like this. Very strange, but it’s also a lot of fun and it is great having him a part of what I’m doing.   

As most of your fans will be Savatage fans, do you feel constrained in what you can do on an album, or do you just do what you want to? 

JO: I do what I want to do, I felt very restricted in Savatage, especially after Criss passed away, because just dealing with losing him in the first place. I don’t think after Criss passed away that Savatage was ever the same band again. Everything changed after Criss died; the way we worked, the way we wrote, the way we recorded. This band works and functions much more like Savatage did before Criss passed away, the way we work on the music and the way we write the music and put the albums together is a lot of live rehearsals, a lot of jamming. 

After Criss died Savatage wasn’t like that, Paul (O’Neill) and I would work on the songs at his house and then we never even did, like, pre-production and rehearsals, we just wrote the songs and then brought the band in the studio and taught them the songs and said “okay, here we go”.  Paul wrote all the lyrics and most of it was concept records and everything changed, so to me this band feels a lot like Savatage did in the Mountain King, Gutter Ballet periods, the way we do everything and the fact that there is no box. We are not in a box, I told everybody that I’m going to do different things and I don’t want to be just playing heavy metal songs. We play heavy metal songs on the records, but there’s also a lot of other types of styles of music on there and that fulfils that thing in you, where you want to show people that you’re more than one dimensional, you know, and this band is very very dimensional, there’s a lot of versatility there. 

So Jon Oliva’s Pain is the direction that you wanted to take Savatage in? 

JO: Basically yes, that’s true. You know, that’s what Savatage was heading for up until Criss passed away, getting into those different things, with songs like Believe and Crowds Are Gone and stuff like that, where we were starting to explore our influences and Paul definitely did encourage us to try and do songs like that. Before that everyone was like “oh, you’re a heavy metal band and all that you can play is heavy metal”, you know, death, destruction and the anti-Christ. I was like, alright we’ve done five or six albums like that already and it’s like, you know, I’m bored with that already, lets move on and try some different things. I don’t want to make the same album for 25 years. 

On Maniacal Renderings there were quite a few family guest appearances, is there more of that on Global Warning? 

JO:  No, on this one no, the family wasn’t really around on this one, except obviously for Criss, musically. 

No on this one we ran into a real big bump in the road when our co-producer and engineer passed away, his name was Greg. He passed away the week before we were going in to cut tracks, and he was the guy who engineered and co-produced the first two records, so we had a system working with him that we were used to and comfortable with, and all of a sudden boom, he passed away suddenly from a stroke. We were left there, we cancelled the studio time and it kind of pushed everything back a couple of months because we had to change our whole way of working because he wasn’t there.  We had to come up with a new formula basically, and to do that I relied on two very good friends of mine, Tom and Jim Morris from Watersound Studios. 

I went to them after Greg passed away and I explained the situation, and they really helped us a lot, they really came to the party. They were like look, you know, we’ll help you guys out. They came to our house on their own time, and worked with us a little bit in pre-production and they made sure everything was right, and without them we couldn’t have done it. They were an incredible big help on this record, so the family thing, I probably would have done something like that again, but because we were all of a sudden faced with that situation we had to push things back a bit, I really didn’t have the freedom of time to mess around that much. We had to really buckle down and get the album done, so, you know, we kind of just went from there. I played a lot more on this album, instrument wise, than I have on the last two albums, I played a lot of guitar on this album, I play all the acoustic guitars on the album, all the clean electric guitars on the album were me. So I got to play a lot more because we were just under the gun and some of the guys had a really hard time dealing with Greg’s passing. Our bass player, Kevin, for example, he had a really rough time. We were all, besides working together, we were very good friends, so it was kind of like losing a brother all over again, which brings back a lot of bad feelings, just like “oh my God”. Here we finally had something running really great, and then boom, now again I lose another partner, you know. But we joined, you know there was a camaraderie that formed there, where everyone put their heads down and we said, “you know what, we’re going to do this, I know it’s hard and I know no-one feels like playing music right now, but we owe it to him, and we owe it to the fans and stuff to get this thing done, so lets get our shit together and do it”.  That’s basically what we did, everybody just really came to work and busted their arses, and I think did a really fine CD. 

For Maniacal Renderings you did two special editions, the digipack and the metal tin.  Are there going to be any special editions for Global Warning? 

JO: You know I’m not sure, I mean I did do a couple of bonus tracks for them, I don’t know what they’re planning on doing as far as packaging goes.  I don’t think as much as the last one, because some people complained about that because there were so many versions of it, you know, it was crazy.  So I think on this one maybe, they’re going to have the one bonus track for Europe and another bonus track for Asia, and I think everything else is going to be the same, which is less confusing. 

On the album many of your songs appear to be about big issues.  

JO: Yeah, I touched on a lot of things on this record, definitely things behind the album are based on the title, you know, Global Warning. Once the title came, the whole first three songs made the concept right there with Global Warning, Look At The World and Adding The Cost. 

Then the album progresses from there, where it touches. Before I Hang is about a terrorist and the verse part of the song is kind of like the narrator “What’s this I found lying on the street” and it kicks into the real heavy part, that’s actually the terrorist singing, you know, “My eyes have seen the glory, we’re coming to the fall”, all the wicked things he’s done, you know, all these things like that, so it kind of goes like that.  

Firefly is about soldiers on the battlefield, so I kind of touched a little bit on all those things. Life, death, the global situation, it’s just things that influenced me at the time, I mean, once you got the Global Warning idea I started going through the newspapers and stuff, just looking for things to write about, rather than writing about dungeons and dragons. It’s like you can only try to kill the dragon so many times, so I wanted to do something that just had a little bit more meaning and substance to it, and that was kind of the theme behind the album.  Certain songs deal with the global situation and certain songs deal with life situations. 

The name, Jon Oliva’s Pain, was that just so that people knew who the band was? 

JO: I wanted to call the band ‘Tage Mahal, and of course when I went to file the legal things for the name, I had a problem with the guy whose name is Taj Mahal, this old blues guitar player guy.  So it was going to be a problem again, it happened to me with Savatage too, with Avatar, and I was faced with that again and at the last second I said, you know, at first I did not know that this was going to turn into a band, at first it was just going to be an album, maybe a couple of albums and I was like “let’s just call it Jon Oliva’s Pain”, and it doesn’t matter, people know who I am, blah, blah, blah.  Then all of a sudden everything started to work out and I was like “this is what I want to do”.  So now we just call it JOP ‘cause it is so much easier, we’re JOP, it’s a lot quicker than Jon Oliva’s Pain.  We came up with a nice logo for it this year and we’re just gonna go down that road because I don’t want to change the name again.

People were saying why don’t you just call it Jon Oliva’s Savatage, and I was like because it is not Savatage, it’s different people and out of respect to those guys I wouldn’t do that ‘cause then everyone would be…you know, you can’t make everybody happy.  I’d be hearing people bitching “Oh, he’s using the name Savatage for the money, to get bigger money for his shows”, and I would never do that because money doesn’t matter to me anymore. I make enough money off of Trans Siberian Orchestra, I don’t have to work another day in my life if I don’t want to.  But I do this because I want to do it, and I love doing it and it is my way of giving back something to the Savatage fans who supported the band for 20 some odd years, I just can’t call it Savatage, it seems that they are starting to catch onto that. They’re hearing about Trans Siberian Orchestra and how big it’s become here in America, selling out Madison Square Garden and places like that, you know, out grossing, we’re the sixth biggest grossing concert tour of the year and we only tour six to seven weeks. We’re beating out bands that are out there on the road for six months in six or seven weeks. You know we did 80,000 people in Cleveland, Ohio, this year, four sold out shows in a 22,000 seat arena, and the joke about it is that it is really Savatage with different singers.   

I know that on The Christmas Attic it was basically Savatage, but now there is a long list of members. 

JO: What’s funny is that for so many years the radio people and the record company people would say “Oh Savatage, you know, they’re just a heavy metal band from the 80s and they will never sell in America, they will never sell on the radio, they will never do this, and that…”.  So all we did was change the name and now (laughs), if I was to have said Savatage was going to play in front of 80,000 people in Cleveland you would have jumped off of a bridge, you know.  But the fact that it actually happens and the only difference is the name, and it’s funny because to me, when I go out and see these shows, and I travel with the band and I go to a place like Madison Square Garden, and every time I go to a show they introduce me and everything.  I get introduced and I get a standing ovation, and I am looking around and it is people from 12 years old to 80 years old in the audience and I am laughing inside ‘cause I am going like this is Savatage, Hall Of The Mountain King, so we actually got the last laugh.  Which is good, for a change the underdog came out on top. 

Isn’t there a new TSO album coming out soon, a non-Christmas album? 

JO:  Yeah, actually I was working, I was in the studio last night. We have got Jeff Scott Soto on some tracks, he’s a brilliant guy, he’s a sweet guy.  He’s in with us and we were doing some vocal work last night and we are finishing that record up, hopefully that’s going to be finished by, I think May 1^st is the deadline. We’re working hard (laughs) believe me.    

So what is your involvement with TSO, do you just solely write music?

JO:  Yeah, my involvement with Trans Siberian Orchestra is as a music writer, a melody writer and as a musician in the studio. I don’t tour with them on the Christmas tour, but I will tour with them when they do the non-Christmas tour. This album we are finishing up is a non-Christmas album called Nightcastle, which is, in my opinion, the best Trans Siberian Orchestra record yet. It’s taken two years to do, but the material on it, the songs are very, very strong. I can’t wait until it finally gets finished. But you know, Trans Siberian Orchestra is Paul O’Neill’s baby; he writes the concepts, the stories and the lyrics and I’m his right hand man. He comes to me and says “Jon, you know, I’ve got these lyrics, I need a song kind of like this, or like in this style” and it’s my job to go and run off and come up with something that’s what he’s looking for. We work very well together, Paul and I, you know, we’ve got, there’s definitely chemistry when we work together, and hopefully that will continue. I mean I love the stuff but it’s not enough to satisfy me, I have this JOP thing to because that’s my outlet to say what I want to say and do some of the things that I want to do. It basically helps everything because it makes me work better with Trans Siberian Orchestra because I don’t feel boxed in, I know I have my outlet that I can do whatever I want with on the side. So it’s a good system. 

JOP is touring soon with Circle II Circle. 

JO:  Yes, yes, Zak. (Stevens, CIIC singer and former Savatage member) 

Is that going to be interesting given that your band was CIIC for the first album? 

JO:  Yeah, although they didn’t play on it, they were the band in the picture. It was kind of like the Handful Of Rain thing, because no-one in Savatage played on Handful Of Rain but me, that was really like a Jon Oliva solo album with my good friend Alex Skolnick on the solos. I mean, everything is cool with everybody, you know, we’re all friends and stuff. Things didn’t work out for them with Zak at that time, Zak had a really screwed up manager guy, that really did a lot of damage to Zak. Thankfully he was able to get rid of him and continue on. His new record I actually heard it yesterday and there are some good tracks on there. So we are going to do something special, you know, Zak is going to come out and do a few songs with me at the end of the night, which will make it kind of fun.  So we are looking forward to that too. 

Live, now that JOP have a new album out, will you remove some of the old Savatage songs in favour of the new? 

JO: What I’m going to do, I decided that I’m gonna do the few staple songs that I have to do, which to me are Mountain King and Gutter Ballet, those are the two songs that if I don’t do those people bitch at me (laughs) and I hate that. What I’m going to try and do as another little surprise for everybody, I’m gonna pull out some obscure Savatage songs that haven’t been done on stage ever or haven’t been done on stage for many, many years. I’m going to fill the set out with some of those instead of doing the same Savatage songs I always do. Like, for instance, I always do Believe but this tour I’m not going to do Believe, I’m gonna do Crowds Are Gone instead, which is a song I haven’t done live on stage since Criss was alive, in it’s entirety, I’ve done pieces here and there. I’m gonna pull out some stuff from the first album, I’m going to do Twisted Little Sister, which is a fun song to do but I haven’t done on stage in many, many years. So, I figured that would be more interesting then, and some stuff from Power Of The Night. We are learning a lot of them so I can alternate them every night, so it’s not the same show every night.  I figured that it would be a little more interesting and we’ll see what people think about that, you know that’s a big part of my life and I’m not going to turn my, I would never turn my back on it. I know that people that come and see me want to hear Savatage songs and we don’t have any problem with playing them, we love them. So that way everyone will get the best of both worlds.   

Ever tempted to touch on Doctor Butcher as well? 

JO: We’re going to do a Doctor Butcher song this year.  I’m going to do Don’t Talk To Me. 

I was at Progpower UK last year when you played the Streets album, which was amazing. My wife wanted me to thank you for doing If I Go Away, which is one of her favourite Savatage songs. 

JO: Yeah, that’s a deep song, and it’s…that’s a tough song to do live ‘cause it bring up a lot of emotions, but I love that track. I liked doing that Streets thing, you know, because people are always “why don’t you do it, why don’t you do it”, and I finally got to do it and it was fun. This tour we are going to concentrate a little bit more on some of the obscure stuff, you know, some of the stuff the fans have been writing into the website asking, we put a thing “what songs would you like to hear?”, and so I am picking some of those. So you know it’s gonna be a lot of fun, it’s like stuff I haven’t done for a long time. 

So are we likely to see you back in the UK on this tour? 

JO: Probably in October. Two European runs we’re doing, the first one, April, May, and we may come over and do a couple of things in the summer, and then October, November, we’re putting together a more extensive run that will probably include the UK and places like that. So we will get to you on this tour at some point I can promise that.   

I actually went to Vienna to see you a couple of years back when you were there with Doro and Sonata Arctica, which was a great gig. 

JO: Yeah, thank you, we’re playing Vienna on this first run in April. I’m looking forward to it, I haven’t played for a few months now so we’re itching, we’re ready to go and we start rehearsals on Sunday for the tour. So everyone’s really excited. 

We have obviously touched on the subject of Savatage, can I ask whether it is finally over? 

JO: Well we never actually said that the band is broken up, but in actuality the band is Trans Siberian Orchestra. We’ve kept the door open in case something comes out where we have the time and we want to do a one final project, a record or a live show or whatever, but I released a press release basically saying, you know, that there isn’t any plans to do anything in the near future. Trans Siberian Orchestra has three years worth of work on right now, you know it’s a very busy thing and it’s like what I say to everybody: if you are a Savatage fan from the beginning up to Edge Of Thorns, before Criss died, you should be buying JOP records. If you are a fan of the Dead Winter Dead’s and The Wake Of Magellan’s then you should be buying Trans Siberian Orchestra and you get the best of both.   

When you play live are you finding that it is just old Savatage fans in the audience or are you picking up new fans along the way? 

JO: Yeah, every time I’ve come back it’s gotten better and better. So hopefully this record … I figured it was going to take three or four albums before I got the point across to everybody that this was not just a solo fling thing that I was just doing, you know this is actually a serious band and is something that I am going to try to keep doing. So every tour I’ve come back since the first album has gotten better and better, so hopefully that will continue to happen, I’m hoping that this is the album that takes this band to the next level. 

So you are enjoying being back in the cycle of doing albums and touring? 

JO: I’m having a ball, I’m loving it, I’m really loving it and it’s great, it’s a lot of fun. I love meeting the people and I love playing and just having a good time, watching people smile and laugh and having a good time, it’s all good for me. 

Lastly, is there anything you would like to add? 

JO: What I would like to say is just enjoy life, take care of each other, you know, and have a good time because life is short. Hopefully when you come and see me play, if I come close here, just come up and say hi, I’m not an asshole, I’ll sign whatever you’ve got, talk, have a beer and have some good times. So enjoy the shows and enjoy the album and God bless you all.

Jon Oliva's Pain's new album Global Warning is out now via AFM Records. You can check out the HRH review via this link and, to find out more about Jon, the band and his career you can can out Jon's website @ www.jonoliva.net