PiercingMetal.com caught up with KAMELOT vocalist Roy Khan and guitarist Thomas Youngblood during the band's August 19th show in New York City. Excerpts from both interviews appear below:

Roy Khan

PiercingMetal: The great thing about Ghost Opera is that as you listen to it you are not going to find The Black Halo Part 2 because it's instead a new and exciting piece of music in the chapter of Kamelot's own metal book. Did you feel when you listened to the final mix that lightning had struck twice for the band and that another winner had been unleashed?

Khan: "Absolutely, and despite this there is always going to be people who have something to say, and we found this even on The Black Halo , where people are like 'Oh this is too different from what you did in the past.' I can only assume that everyone who hears us wants it to sound like the band they first heard when they first discovered it. Now along this line, I would love for Queensryche to sound like they did on Rage For Order although I kind of think that Operation: Mindcrime is a better album, but it was just at this time in my life that the album was very special to me. I've always wanted them to do more stuff like they did on Rage For Order."

PiercingMetal: This aspect makes me come up with a question as well. Given Kamelot's status as a power metal band, whether you like the term or not because in the larger sense you are a Power Metal group to most people. What is your own Rage For Order and your Operation: Mindcrime.

Khan: "For Kamelot? Wow, I wouldn't be the right person to ask, that's up to the listener."

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Thomas Youngblood

PiercingMetal: So let's move on to the new album - Khan had mentioned to me that first time we met a couple of years ago that some of the inspiration for the album came from his reading of books like Faust. So I'm just curious about what inspired the tales that we find on the newest epic Ghost Opera.

Youngblood: "It's a mixture of a lot of things really because we read a lot and we watch a lot of movies and there are personal things that have happened in our lives over the past couple of years, there are historical events and there are always touches of religion on our records that we put into certain songs. With this record we wanted to step away from the concept record so it was kind of refreshing to just write about anything that you wanted because there was no guideline for what each song had to have a subject about. So there are various things that this record is about. When you talk to Khan you will probably be able to go a little deeper into that."

PiercingMetal: Ghost Opera has also received a lot of rave reviews and is truly a powerful piece of Metal music that is quite strong on the melody. Was it difficult to get this one put together based on the studio release before it? What I mean by this is - was the bar set by The Black Halo so high that you looked at the new album and said "Wow, how do we top this one?" Would the success of that last record make you wary when creating the new music?

Youngblood: "No, because I think it's like what I was saying earlier where the record before or each previous one has sold more copies or have garnered positive reviews which we are very happy about and we never take that for granted. We always work as hard as we can and it's our philosophy with everything – live shows, writing songs or the business side of it. In everything we try to give 100% and if you do that you can never look back with regrets and that's what we always try to do. So there is never really any pressure on our side to top anything. We've been fortunate with the reaction like I said because in Europe, Ghost Opera has already sold more copies than The Black Halo and in the US that album has been out over two years so we have already almost hit the halfway mark for that record with "Ghost Opera. So, it's just a good thing for us to have a record that opened a lot of people's eyes so when the new record came out we already had a new fan base to start with and this album out we are finding a lot of new doors opening for us in terms of a fan base. There are a little bit more varied types of songs on this record that maybe Black Halo didn't have."

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