Jeff Pizek at Chicago's Daily Herald recently spoke with TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA keyboardist/co-founder Bob Kinkel. An excerpt from the story is available below:

"If it wasn't for SAVATAGE, none of us would have met or worked together."

In tribute to TSO's roots, the keyboardist says the group's current tour includes a few Savatage songs, while the touring band contains Savatage alumni including drummer Jeff Plate, bassist Johnny Lee Middleton and guitarists Chris Caffery, Al Pitrelli and Alex Skolnick (also of TESTAMENT).

Along with the heavy bottom end, TSO features an array of male and female vocalists for whom Kinkel offers effusive praise. "We have people from the theater world," he notes. "We have people who have only done rock their whole lives, some people are just classical. The mixture is always there with TSO. Some of our songs go from real hard rock tunes to operatic things. 'Queen of the Winter Night,' which Danielle Landherr is singing this year, is based on Mozart's 'The Magic Flute.' She's got kind of an opera style and she can rock it out. She does an amazing job with that."

Storytelling is another key TSO component, as all of the group's albums have been linked by O'Neill's inspirational librettos. Kinkel says that the stories and the songs that make them up "evolve together. In general, Paul writes the stories and lyrics and comes up with the concepts we're working on. Sometimes a song will be born and we'll have to modify the story to fit the song in, and sometimes the story is in need of a song."

Kinkel doesn't believe that TSO's association with Christmas pigeonholes it as a once-a-year attraction, citing the inclusion of music from their nonseasonal 2000 album Beethoven's Last Night at sporting events and on television. Their next album, Nightcastle, which has been in the works for several years, also has nothing to do with winter, and Kinkel says it will allow the group to tour in other seasons.

"We're keeping the story very close," laughs Kinkel, "so I can't tell you about that. It's our most ambitious album to date, and it's probably going to be the longest we've had. We've been releasing little bits of it as we go. We just made the opening song from the CD, 'Night Enchanted,' available on Amazon, and we're playing that live as well."

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