In a recent interview with BW&BK;, SAVATAGE / TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA guitarist Chris Caffery discussed the making of a few of the songs that appear on his new album, House Of Insanity. He describes the inspiration for the Savatage-flavoured song 'Winter In Hamburg', which is currently available for streaming on his official MySpace page.

“When I wrote that song I was really missing the road and playing with Savatage, and I started thinking about 9/11 and realized it was one of the most brilliant terrorist attacks ever," says Caffery. "It fucked up the world and it caused what’s going on right now because it distracted people from the actual problems that we do have. Savatage had a European tour for Poets And Madmen scheduled for a month after 9/11, and I really feel that if we would have done that tour – which I wanted to do – there might have been two or three Savatage records after that. Instead we went back in February / March after that, and the tour did well but not as good as it should have. And I noticed that everything about the people had changed. Before 9/11, when I was there recording the Metalium album (Millennium Metal in 1999), I loved going out and meeting people because they were total strangers but, being American, they were happy to see you. People were really friendly. When we went back for that Savatage tour after 9/11 everything had changed, and in the years that followed I saw that if you were American some people looked at you as if you were a piece of garbage. It’s really unfortunate, and that’s what Winter In Hamburg’ is about. It’s sad, because a lot of times I was over in Europe alone but I didn’t feel alone. That changed after 9/11."

Go to this location for the complete BW&BK; interview.