USAProgMusic.com recently caught up with ECHOES OF ETERNITY vocalist Francine Boucher to discuss the band's debut album, The Forgotten Goddess. The following is a brief excerpt:

USAProgMusic: How do you feel about performing in a primarily male-dominated genre of music? Do you have any ideas on how progressive metal music can reach out to more females?

Francine Boucher: "I feel comfortable performing for guys because I have a tomboy personality and hang out with dudes more than girls anyway. Actually I find that more and more women are getting into metal. They make up a good portion of the people who attend shows now and a lot of them are genuinely there because they enjoy the music (not just because their boyfriend dragged them along!). I wouldn’t call EOE straight up Prog-metal, though. We do have a lot of prog elements.

As far as reaching out to more females, well prog-metal by nature caters to a smaller population anyway regardless of your gender. It’s kind of an acquired taste and not everyone can get into it because it can get pretty technical at times where a song kind of loses its groove. I find musicians seem to enjoy it more than non-musicians (though not always) because the songs are really fun to dissect and analyze where you’re going, 'Wow, check out that part they just did right there! That dude’s sick!' There’s definitely a lot of showing off going on!"

USAProgMusic: You have a fairly extensive tour coming up, alongside a well-known American progressive band SYMPHONY X. What are you most excited about in this tour? What should the audience expect to see in your live performance? Will you be trying out any new songs?

Francine Boucher: "We are all very excited to be playing with Symphony X, as we are all fans ourselves, so it’s an honor for us! I had the opportunity to see them live a while back. They are truly talented musicians. We’re all stoked to get on the road as this will be our first national tour. You can expect to see a lot of energy during our performances and yes we will play some new stuff that will be on album number two."

USAProgMusic: Why did you choose to join a progressive metal band over any other music genre?

Francine Boucher: "Progressive style metal allows for more openness and diversity in the sounds you can incorporate and typically the vocals are clean as opposed to growling. I have always loved all sorts of musical styles and all genres of metal and have always had aspiring dreams of being in a band and just when I had almost given up, it found me. The right combination of people just popped up in my life, opportunity knocked and I opened the door."

Go to this location to check out the complete interview.