Sleaze Roxx recently interviewed SAVATAGE/TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA legend Jon Oliva of JON OLIVA’S PAIN about the infamous box of Criss Oliva tapes, the new CD, Festival, and will Savatage ever get back together? Excerpts from the interview are below:

Sleaze Roxx: You just released a new album, Festival, which is a slight departure from the previous Jon Oliva's Pain catalog. When you started writing Festival was it the intention to write an album like this and throw yet another curve to your audience?

Jon Oliva: “It was really to throw a curve at myself actually. You might recall when I was doing the interview for the Maniacal Renderings album I said that the next album would be very experimental. Global Warning was because there were a lot of pieces of music that I had done with my brother, Criss Oliva, and stuff that I wanted to release. A lot of that material was keyboard based or written on the piano, and for the next record I wanted a more raw type of sound, more of a Hall Of The Mountain King type of sound.

It was kind of around the third or fourth album with Savatage when did the exact same thing. It takes that many albums working in a band before you really get to know the band and begin to work as a cohesive unit. I really know these guys now, I've worked with them for five years. I went into this album writing everything on guitar like I used to do in the Savatage days with my brother. Most of the music that you hear on Festival was written on the road as we were travelling through Europe last year. I would write and record ideas on a portable recorder and I'd also sort through my Criss Oliva tapes and swipe stuff that we could find on there that we could use. I'm very happy with this record.”

Sleaze Roxx: The JOP group has grown leaps and bounds between the Tage Mahal album through the present album Festival, both musically and in the song writing department.

Jon Oliva: “I would agree with you there, it does take time. With these guys we don't see each other every day when we're not on the road or recording. Back in the day with Savatage we lived together, we ate together, we wrote together, we rehearsed together... we were together all the time. With JOP it took a little while to get that same chemistry going. Some of the guys in the band are teachers, they have their own lives, and I have this and TSO (TRANS SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA). I'm really happy with this band, they are really good guys, easy to get along with and they are great musicians and that really helps me as a songwriter.”

Sleaze Roxx: I'm curious how many of Criss' ideas made it onto Festival?

Jon Oliva: “He's on four songs on the new album. He's on the track ‘Lies’, the verse is Criss' music; ‘Living On The Edge’, a lot of that song is Criss' music, he also has a couple bits on ‘Winter Haven’. The song ‘Now’ is very special because it's something that we did when we were teenagers. The chorus was all Criss, I just put new music to it. It's always exciting when we have a Criss riff to work with and it's going to be a sad day when we run out of tapes I can tell you that.”

Read the entire interview here.