This interview was conducted by Philip A. Wickstrand with vocalist Russell Allen at the Hawthorne Theatre in Portland, OR on May 7, 2011.

In a field like Progressive Metal it can sometimes be hard to sort through the bands who just want to rip off DREAM THEATER and the bands who are truly, well, progressive. Fortunately, SYMPHONY X lay in the latter category. Since their inception in 1994 they have released eight studio albums and a live album and toured across Europe and North America many times. Whether headlining or in a support slot, SYMPHONY X have always been given a great reception. Their new album, Iconoclast, is due this June on Nuclear Blast.

Phil:  First of all, how's the tour been so far?

Russell: Great. Really good. We've been having a good time out here.

Phil:  So you don't think attendance has suffered too much because of NEVERMORE and SOILWORK having to drop off?

Russell: No, not at all to be quite honest with you. We've been hitting our what they call "splits" in the business at a lot of shows. That basically means that you have enough attendance to where you've met your contract obligation and now you're making money on top of everything else. We've played all these places before by ourselves. We got downgraded in two cities; one was last night in Seattle because NEVERMORE's from there, so we were supposed to play a larger room, a theatre room, that would have been awesome but we  played El Corazon before and the place was packed. And the other place was LA - we were going to do the Wiltern but they put us in the House of Blues, which we've already sold out before, so for us it's kind of business as usual. That package was the first time in the band's history that we were going to have an opening bill with bands that were reputable and had something going on and we were all going to benefit from it and in the past we've always taken out bands that were just getting started, just like now with these two bands, BLACKGUARD and POWERGLOVE, which are going over great, by the way, the fans really like them. So for us, we really don't notice it other than the fact that we miss having our friends here with us, the NEVERMORE guys specifically. We just did the European tour with them and we'd seen that they were having issues and pretty much the whole band was imploding, so we were pretty much accepting of the fact that we would be out here on our own with POWERGLOVE and BLACKGUARD. SOILWORK, unfortunately… I was looking forward to meeting them, I really like their work, but for whatever reasons they didn't want to do it or they had some guy with a problem.

Phil:  I think it was a hernia.

Russell: Hernia or something and we totally understand. I mean, shit happens. It's just unfortunate that both bands had something go wrong because it was a really strong bill. But we have a really strong album coming out, so we're not really too worried about it; we're just feeling more for them, a little more kind of sad really, for them. This would've been good for them 'cause we're really riding something here - the band's grown here in America exponentially on the last record, so we just miss them, we wish they were here with us 'cause we felt that it would help to rejuvenate and revitalize NEVERMORE and get 'em out here and get 'em in front of all these people again and it kinda sucks, you know? We were looking forward to hanging with them but whatever - life moves on. Wish 'em the best.

Phil:  Tell us a bit about the upcoming album, Iconoclast.

Russell: The new record from SYMPHONY X is not really a departure from what we've done before, it's just the next progression of what we're doing. It has some of the elements of Paradise Lost in terms of strong choruses, good song arrangement, things like this, but it has a lot of the old school stuff going on from the band's earlier days, so there's more intensity in the music, more progressive elements here and there. And it's probably the strongest album in terms of song writing that we've ever put out. It's not trying to be hit song crap or anything like that, it's just really good stuff, you know, so we're very excited about it - the album sounds amazing and we can't wait for people to hear the full body of work. You're only hearing a couple tracks right now.

Phil:  Yeah, the tracks I heard, they sounded good on their own, but I get the feeling just listening to them that they'll be better in the context of the rest of the album.

Russell: Yeah, they will be; it's a whole picture kind of a thing. It's a double album, so we've got roughly ninety minutes of music. There's a CD jewel case version that I think is minus three songs, three or four songs, but we didn't go into it with bonus track intention; we just wrote all these songs. It's the most material the band's ever released at one time and it just turned into being a double record limited edition that they wanna do. So that's new for us, we've never done anything like that and the album is pretty intense I gotta say. When you hear the whole thing, you'll get it.

Phil:  Tell us a little bit about the song writing process for this album.

Russell: Nothing really changed. I mean, me and Mike get together and after he's worked on the music for quite awhile I start to put these songs together. I start to work with the lyrics that we have, his and mine or whoever had a song, and then we start piecing the songs together. The Iconoclast title track is the first track on the record and Mike didn't really want it to be the first song. I had heard it, the first time he had played it for me and my first reaction was "A) Don't change anything," 'cause he's infamous for that, he'll show me something and then it'll be different a week later. He's just one of these guys that keeps reworking his ideas. "Please don't change anything - this is great and please, let's go with this Iconoclast thing." It's something he'd been talking about. He goes "Yeah, yeah." I'm like, "Yeah, that's it, man - that's the record, that's the first song, put it first." And at first he wasn't into the idea and then over time, when the song was done, it really sort of led the way for the whole record and then we were off to the races. So we tried to do Children of the Faceless God first - that was a big clusterfuck. It was just two and a half weeks of hell. And just nothing was working and we were trying to force something, you know. We had done Serpent's Kiss on the last record, so the idea was "Let's do this thing, let's do what you did on that song" or whatever, this TOOL kind of vibe or whatever. And as soon as you start saying stuff like "That's what we do, man, that's what it's got to be," you've already fucked up, you know what I mean? When you start locking yourself into this small little frame. You're screwed, you know? You can't get out of it. So we worked to death inside this little tiny box and it just sucked. It was horrible. And the first thoughts that we had was "If this is the way the whole album's going to be, we're fucked." So the gods shine their light and then BOOM! We come back after taking a break from it and go back to some other original melody ideas that I think I had, I don't remember… it was very different and started working on that and then Mike was "Wow, that song came together, that sounds really cool." Then it starts to take shape and then the song came out phenomenal. So that was the first thing we did a it was a real, real scary moment 'cause we'd never had that moment of time to really get it rolling, with finalizing songs. So out of the gate it's rough and then once we got going, all the songs started to take shape and I'm the one guilty of always getting the hook or the catchphrase thing, like "dehumanize," you know, something that was scribbled down on a piece of paper somewhere, like, "This is it, this is what I want to say right - this the chorus thing" and at the time I was really, really feeling all of my DIO influences on this record because he had just passed away weeks before I started singing. So it was a big deal for me, I kind of like withdrew from everybody for a little while and I had to do this work, so I was just going for broke. If he was coming out of me then so be it; I was happy about it. So the writing process after that first song smoothed out and it was a lot of fun after that. But that first song, Children, was just… it was the hump. Once we got over that, we started going down the road the right way.

Phil:  What was the studio time like?

Russell: The studio time meaning…?

Phil:  Recording, production, the whole bit.

Russell: It was a lot of unforeseen things that delayed the album. We should've had it out back in November… well, not had it out, but delivered before the end of the year and it would be out the first quarter of this year- that's why all these tours were initially set up at this time. But because the band's been off the road for awhile and Paradise Lost was 2007… I mean, as it started to become a reality that the album was not going to be delivered in time for the window… that we still needed to go and do this because we just gotta get back out and reintroduce everybody to us again 'cause we had a little hiatus there of a couple years. So the process in the studio was a bit lengthy at times. Like I mentioned before, that first song, getting it going was a bit of a pain in the ass, but over time the sessions started to get a good flow to them and then we hit another snag and then Mike was starting to re-track guitars on songs that I'd changed, not because I wanted to; just because that's what happened, I didn't mean for them to go that way. But a lot of times when you record all the music first and then you kind of leave the singing for later… we had good ideas of what it was going to be, but until I get in there and really do it, you don't really quite know what you have 'til the singing's on there. So sometimes I'll work with Mike and we'll create these parts and they change the dynamic and the direction of a song pretty seriously and then all of a sudden certain chords aren't working anymore and you know, melody starting in the chord structure, so we work the chord structure around that melody or whatever, so shit like that was kind of happening here and there on a few songs and that started to make some noise and then even the mixing process took longer that we anticipated. Everything took a little longer than we thought. We just thought we were going to get in there and bang out this thing but it's like, "Hey, it's a double album." It's the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room and nobody wanted to look at was, that this was lot of material from the band and we've never done this before, so we were all kind of blindly optimistic that we were going to get it out in the timeframe that we first started with. So there was pressure. There was a lot of pressure and tension during the sessions because of time constraints, financial constraints as well, but all in all, looking back it was a good experience. It's just that I would love to do things a little differently. In every record we kind of progress and get a little better at what we're doing in terms of working in the studio, so this time around was another step in the right direction, but again, we had to take two steps back to take three steps forward, you know what I'm saying? So that's kind of what happened.

Phil:  What do you feel are the overall strongest points of the album?

Russell: Strong points of the record… definitely the playing and the performance aspects of the songs. The performances from everyone in the band are phenomenal. Everybody. From Jason to Mike to Pinnella to Lepond and myself; everybody really is on point on this one and the presentation of the songs is probably the best I've ever heard from the band. The second thing from this album is the sonic quality… that is striking. It's a little more bombastic and a little more epic than the last one, if you can believe that, and it's got a little bit more of an ambient sound to it. It sounds like the band is in a big place, in a big room, but a good sounding big [room} and thirdly, which is really firstly, but the songs are just very well written. The songs are very well written, so those three things to me are the ingredients for a great record, but on this one, for some reason, it's all there. It's all there. It's cool.

Phil:  Tell us a bit about the cover art and how that goes with the ideas behind the album.

Russell: Warren Flanagan is the artist. Obviously he's a very talented digital artist. He does all that stuff with a digital brush and everything. He's an amazing and gifted artist who works on major motion pictures, everything from, I think, I, Robot to King Kong and all these huge movies, so he does all of this, models and all of the scenes you see and they're a full-on Hollywood production company that he and his cousin run. And effects, also special effects, digital production house. And he just happens to be a fan of SYMPHONY X, you know. [laughter] Isn't that cool?

Phil:  Yeah.

Russell: It's funny how shit like that goes on, 'cause he liked us when he was younger and we had another experience on this tour, like the CEO of Sharpie is a huge SYMPHONY X fan, so he came to the show with his wife. He's actually not just the CEO of Sharpie, he's the CEO of the top company that owns them and a couple other pen producing… like Papermate… I don't know.

Symphony X's Russell Allen

Interviewer: Philip A. Wickstrand

May 28, 2011

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(Click on Photo to Enlarge)

Formed: 1994
Middleton, NJ  USA
Label:  Nuclear Blast Records
Genre:  Progressive Power Metal

CURRENT LINE-UP:

Russell Allen:  Vocals
Michael Romeo:  Guitars
Michael Pinnella:  Keyboards
Mike LePond:  Bass
Jason Rullo:  Drums

DISCOGRAPHY:

Symphony X (1994)
The Damnation Game (1995)
The Divine Wings of Tragedy (1997)
Twilight in Olympus (1998)
Behind the Mask Comp. (1998)
Prelude to the Millennium Comp.
                                                        (1998)
V: The New Mythology Suite (2000)
Live on the Edge of Forever (2001)
The Odyssey (2002)
Rarities and Demos Comp. (2005)
Paradise Lost (2007)
Iconoclast (2012)

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