TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA / MACHINES OF GRACE drummer Jeff Plate is featured in a new interview with Life In The Slow Lane. An excerpt is available below:

Trans-Siberian Orchestra might keep Jeff Plate busy during the holidays, but the TSO drummer has kept busy during his down time with a passion project.

Jeff Plate, pictured with the drum kit he uses with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, has revived material he and his Machines of Grace bandmates wrote years ago.

The former member of Savatage — from which TSO was born — gets to unleash his hard rock side with Machines of Grace, a quartet made up of Plate, Zak Stevens, Matt Leff and Chris Rapoza.

Although revived in the past couple years, Plate said the seed for Machines of Grace was actually planted nearly two decades ago. The musicians started playing together in 1990 in Boston and played regional shows for several months.

“Then grunge came along and kind of screwed that whole thing up,” said Plate, citing a distaste that formed for metal around that time.

Both Stevens (in 1992) and Plate (in 1994) joined Savatage, staying along for the ride in 1996 when TSO first came to be. While Plate has toured and recorded for TSO since then, and Stevens has done some work with the group, Machines of Graces decided a couple years ago to revive the material they’d worked on in the early 1990s.

“We decided that the old material was strong,” said Plate, who cited Iron Maiden, Queensryche and Dream Theater among the group’s influences. “At the time that we were doing it, I felt that we were doing something unique.”

And so the band went to work in the studio, eventually releasing a self-titled rock album this past summer with help from veteran technician Paul David Hager (Goo Goo Dolls, Pink). Describing the album as melodic metal minus the thrash and “Cookie Monster vocals,” Plate said it felt good to finish off what had been started so long ago.

“It was just kind of a weird time. We felt that we had never gotten our due,” he said of the failed attempt at a record in the 1990s. “When it didn’t happen, it was quite discouraging, but over the years I always revisited the demos. I think it was just unfinished business.”

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