The Heavy Metal Examiner’s Mark Morton recently sat down with Jon Oliva ex-SAVATAGE/TRANS-SIBERIAN ORCHESTRA legend, to talk about the new Album Festival, the music, Savatage, and more. Excerpts from the interview are below:

Mark: I recently read an interview you did discussing Festival, and you mentioned that this album is a lot darker and more menacing than the stuff you’ve previously done. However, when I listened to the album, I noticed a sense of freedom and breeziness, like your imagination was soaring.

Jon: “Well yeah, everyone interprets it differently, which is cool. That’s what music is all about – to get the vibe off of it that you feel. For me, it’s a bit more straight-forward and rawer than the last couple things I’ve done. I think mainly, because a lot of it was written on guitar, and I haven’t done that in a while. So it was very fresh for me and a very enjoyable album to make. I got to do a lot of stuff that I haven’t done in a long time; I had a ball with it.”

Mark: Would you say that, in the context of your catalogue, this album comes closest to sating those frenzied Savatage fans that are practically dying for a new Savatage album?

Jon: [Laughs] “Yeah, I think this album, in my opinion, is very reminiscent of the past Savatage stuff. It’s hard to explain, really. It really just reminds me of that freshness during the Hall of the Mountain King / Gutter Ballet period. I don’t know why, because the songs are obviously different, but the vibe of it takes me back for some reason. And I’m fine with that; that’s not a problem to me.

I hope it does make some of the Savatage diehards happy. I don’t know what they want from me anymore, to be honest. They want Savatage to get back together, which is never going to happen. I think once they accept that and move on to the future, they will realize they have the best of both worlds now with Trans-Siberian Orchestra and JOP.

They’ve got me covering the earlier Sava-vibe and TSO doing what latter day Savatage was doing anyway. We were heading down that road from 1995 onward anyway. I guess some people just get hung up on the name thing. You can’t make everybody happy.”

Mark: So, because of all of TSO’s popularity and fame, do you feel like you are paying your dues again with JOP playing clubs, or do you feel that is where you are most at home?

Jon: “Well, in America, that’s where I’m going to be with JOP; it’s never going to go bigger than that. But I’m okay with that, because it is countered by TSO, which is more than sufficient. And in Europe, I’ll do clubs and small venues, but in the summer, I’ll play in front of 60,000 people at the festivals. I’m going over in June to play GrasPop and Bang Your Head, and each of those easily draws over 30,000 people.”

Read the entire interview here.