Chad Bowar from About: Heavy Metal spoke to JUDAS PRIEST guitarist K.K. Downing recently. Here are a few excerpts from the chat:

Chad Bowar: How is (the new Judas Priest album) Nostradamus coming along?

K.K. Downing: "We are working on it day and night. It’s going really, really well. It’s a long project in terms of the length of music. It’s over an hour and a half of music, so for that reason alone it is going to take us a bit longer to pull it together. But hopefully we can offer something unique and wonderful to the world. We’re totally into it. We promise the fans we’ll get it to them as soon as we possibly can. We’ll get a Priest tour together as well."

Chad Bowar: Are you and Glenn (Tipton) doing the production on the album?

K.K. Downing: "So far that is the way it seems. We’ve been working hard, pretty much nonstop. That’s not to say at some point we might bring someone else in, but we’ll see what we need. If we think we need to, we’ll certainly do that. But I think between Glenn and I we’ve got an awful lot of experience. It’s sounding really good. It’s the closest guarded secret in rock and roll at the moment. It’s a bit different than the work we’ve done previously. We’re looking forward to exposing it as soon as we can."

Chad Bowar: Obviously writing lyrics is different on a concept album, but is writing the music any different from a regular album?

K.K. Downing: "I think there are a lot of the usual ingredients, but with a bigger spectrum of sound with a bit of a classical element and more orchestrated sounds, which can be extremely heavy if used right. Hopefully it’s going to be pleasing to a lot of people, and that’s what it’s always been about. We’ve always tried to widen the audience of rock and metal and make it more credible to more people, and hopefully we’ll achieve that goal with this project."