BW&BK Exclusive: SYMPHONY X Guitarist Michael Romeo On New Record – “A Little Darker, But It’s Still Us”
May 9, 2007, 17 years ago
Special report by Martin Popoff
“Definitely, as time goes on, the business gets weirder and weirder,” quips SYMPHONY X guitarist Michael Romeo, pinning his hopes to the band’s long awaited new record Paradise Lost, out next month. “We're just kind of counting on this thing. We put all our eggs in one basket. We spent so much time and put ourselves into debt, just killed ourselves on this thing to make it something special. So I hope that the fans are digging it.”They likely will, as Michael is classifying the album as immediate, a metal record as such. “For me as a writer, going into this thing, as a metal fan, I just said what would I want to hear? That, right off the bat was the big thing. Every song, killer from beginning to end. We do the recording here and we had a lot of time to experiment and try different guitars and amps and mic positions. And over the years, all that stuff improves too. I always learn something new every time. So I think all of those things… we just kind of do our thing and make our way and do the album as we want to do it, for what we're actually looking to capture on the final product, and try to get the great performances and some different sounds. But yeah, this was the most amount of work and most amount of attention to detail for us of any album.”
“A lot of time was spent when we were putting the songs together,” continues Romeo, “thinking about space and instruments not stepping on themselves, trying to integrate different textures and different guitar sounds and all that stuff. That was another big thing that we were really conscious of, seeing that it was more guitar-oriented, more riffy - so the keyboards had kind of a different task. Yeah, the guitars and the keyboards are equal, but on the heavier songs, the keyboards are more ambient, creating texture in the back, that kind of thing. And we do all the recording here at my place. So I'm able to do preproduction and really demo the hell out of everything, and really see what's working and what’s not. We had a lot of freedom to noodle and make stuff work.”Asked about getting tagged as either a progressive metal band, a power metal band, or a little of both, Michael says, “We just do our thing and really, every album is a little different. It's hard to categorize. Maybe one album is a little more progressive. This one is obviously more metal. So I think the labeling thing of where we stand is weird. It's a hard thing to pigeonhole us like that. But at the base of it all, we’re a metal band. We have some classical influences, some rock influences, metal, progressive, and all these things go in, but at the end of the day, we're metal guys.”
