Rock My Monkey recently hooked up with JON OLIVA'S PAIN / SAVATAGE frontman Jon Oliva to discuss JOP's new album, Maniacal Renderings, and the future of Savatage. The following is a brief excerpt, beginning with Oliva explaining which riffs written by his late brother Criss made it onto the new album following the discovery of some old writing tapes:

Rock My Monkey: Which songs actually have Criss’ riffs in them?

Jon Oliva: "Okay, well, the title track, 'Maniacal Renderings', has a piece of his in the middle section. It’s kind of a fast spot that Matt plays a little lead blurb over. So that’s the song with the least amount in it. It’s just one little riff. Theres’s a plucked string thing, and then it goes into this kind of a ride. But when you hear, you can tell it’s so Chris it’s like, that’s got to be the riff. That was one. 'The Evil Beside You' has a couple of riffs of his in it. The main riff I sing the chorus over. ‘Feel the weight of the world upon you.’ That riff that’s playing under that is one of his. And a couple pieces in the solo section. 'Time To Die', the middle section to that, the real doomy middle section of 'Time To Die' is something that was from 1981, I think. It was one of the first things he ever wrote. Me and Matt kind of doctored it up a little bit, and modernized it a little bit, but the basic doomy riff was Chris’. And the biggest one, and my favorite song I think on the album, 'Timeless Flight', the entire middle of the song, from after the second verse it goes into this piano thing, and it goes through a long solo passage, and all that was stuff that he had on a tape that was being played on an acoustic guitar. So I had to sit and figure it out on piano, because I wanted it to be piano. I switched it around. But that whole middle section of that song, up until where the third verse starts again is all Criss’ music. I believe there’s another one too. It’s just escaping me for some reason right now. It might be 'Push It'. There’s another little riff in somewhere. So I mean, he’s got credit on like five songs on the album where he contributed pieces of music. So I think that’s just - that’s a lot how we used to do it in the old days anyway. It was kind of just, the only thing is he’s not here to play it. But at least it’s part of him, you know what I mean?"

Rock My Monkey: So you say there’s thirty tapes that you found?

Jon Oliva: "Oh, yeah. There’s a whole boxful."

Rock My Monkey: Does this mean that we’re going to be hearing Criss’ work, for how many albums after this?

Jon Oliva: "Well, it’ll definitely be - as long as there’s stuff that’s usable. I would never put something of his out that I didn’t think was at his level, because he was an incredible player. There’s a lot of stuff I’m sure I’m going to run into when I get into the earlier tapes that’s really not very good. Sometimes you can take something that’s not very good and make it something great just by working with it a little bit. So I’m not sure. I would like to keep him a part of whatever I do. If the material is there-like I said, I still have a lot of tapes to go through that I haven’t even had time to listen to yet. Once I start going through those, I’ll see. Obviously, if there’s stuff there that I can use, I’m going to definitely use it, because if I don’t, no one will ever hear it. I think for the Savatage fans, something like that, this is a good little surprise for them. Here’s something that no one expected to happen, because I didn’t even know. I didn’t even know I had that box of cassettes anymore. I had no idea. If you would have asked me two years ago if I had them, I would have bet my house that I didn’t. But my wife is a pack rat, and thank God. She packed everything in. It was just buried at the bottom of a box full of boots and sneakers. All the moving around I do, we just never went into that box. It was just so weird."

Rock My Monkey: With riffs from a lost tape recorded, some of these in the early 80’s, fitting this current release so well, do you think that shows how timeless the music you and brother made was?

Jon Oliva: "I think it definitely does. There is some old stuff on there. Again, like I said, you got to take the stuff, and you got to sit and have the patience to analyze it a little bit, and work with it a little bit. And that’s what I tried to do. I gave it a lot of time. Especially the 'Timeless Flight' song, because there’s actually another riff that comes over the one riff that was from a whole completely different thing. So I had to take this one riff, which was just a guitar riff, and change the key so that it would play in the time and the tempo of how it was played, because he had it playing a lot faster, and I wanted it to play over the other part of his that I was using for the solo section. So it was two totally different things, and that took a long time to get right. But when it comes in, it’s just so cool. You can tell it’s a Criss Olivia riff. Plain as day. I just love that. That was a labor of love, definitely."

Rock My Monkey: Cool. You also said, you made it clear that Savatage is over, but when I talked to Zak Stevens a week ago...

Jon Oliva: "Well, it’s over but it’s not over, you know what I mean? It’s over right now because no one’s doing anything. We haven’t disbanded or anything. We have plans to do something in the future. We’re just - it’s like every time we talk about it, and every time I say we’re going to do something, something happens to fuck it up (laughs). So in my opinion right now, nothing is going on until everybody says, okay, let’s go do something. Then we’ll probably do something. We want to do something for the 25th anniversary of the band, but it’s just a time thing, and a schedule thing with everybody so busy with Trans Siberian Orchestra. Is like a runaway freight train right now. It’s just getting everybody together. They all play in the orchestra, so that makes it even more difficult. The demands on the guys for that has become ten times what it was four or five years ago. That’s one of the things that is been holding up there being a Savatage thing.

Another thing I think is the fact we’ve been together for twenty some odd years, and I think everybody just needed to get away from it for awhile. We never really had any break from 1983 all the way up until 2001. The most time we ever had off was when Criss died, and even then, I was recording Handful of Rain four months after he passed away. I mean, it was just, I think after the 2001 tour, and being stuck in the middle of 9/11, and being three thousand miles from home, and not being able to get home, I think that was the emotional thing that snapped everybody. We just got to put this down for a while. It wasn’t fun anymore. We loved the band so much, I didn’t want the band to end that way. I don’t want the band to end that way. When everybody can give it the time and dedication it deserves, then we’ll get together and we’ll do something. Until then I’m going to continue doing what I’m doing now. We’ll see what happens. You never know."

To read the entire interview go to this location.