MetalLife.com recently caught up with SYMPHONY X guitarist Michael Romeo. An excerpt from the interview is available below:

Q:What's the most challenging aspect of playing your songs live since they are intricate and detailed?

Michael Romeo: "Nothing really, we spend a lot of time rehearsing before we start recording. Everything is ironed out so its kind of second nature now. Some are more challenging than others or longer, but nothing that's ridiculous, its just what we do, we never try to write something that's so impossible to play that we can't or it doesn't feel good. We are at the point that if it doesn't feel cool, we don't do it. The challenge is good, but it has to feel cool and rocking and sound good you know. Is the song cool as a whole? We don't try to make it crazy for the sake of crazy or challenging for the sake of challenging. It's music at the end of day and it's not a race (laughs)."

Q: Tell us about the new album (Iconoclast), it seems to have a theme, so what was the thought process behind writing all the songs for the album?

Michael Romeo: "With every album, we do that. I think it kind of helps me during the whole starting phase. You know, to come up with some basic song ideas and coming up with some riffs. Kind of find a direction. I think I just work better when we have an idea in mind or some kind of goal or something that maybe we think we can do with the music, you know. With the last record, Paradise Lost, we started talking with that as a topic or a theme for the record and to me that just helped a lot with just writing the music and pulling everything in that direction and letting it go where it needed to go, you know. It was definitely a little darker and we had some of the orchestra, you know, the male choirs and stuff. You know, that kind of gothic good and evil kind of vibe. The same with the lyrics, you have a direction. And this record was the same thing. We were kind of looking around for some ideas, talking about some different things and we started talking about a 'man vs machine' kind of a theme. I'm a big movie fan, so you know for me when we were talking about Paradise Lost, I was thinking about The Omen, The Exorcist and kind of good versus evil. For this album, when we started talking about this 'man versus machine' thing, you know, I was thinking The Matrix, or Terminator and that kind of thing. So when coming up with the music and the riffs, that's always in the back of my mind to maybe add some different type of textures to the riffs or to the production of the album. Stuff that kind of paints that kind of picture. For me, like I said, it just helps a lot when you kind of know what you want to say or what you want the music to be. It just seems to help to have a goal so you know that's it going to be this or going to be that. I went with a kind of mechanical types of textures, you know, like abrasive guitar things underneath or the keyboard sounds will be a little less organic, you know and more synthetic. So yeah, all that kind of just helps out."

Click here for the complete interview.

The tracklisting for the jewel-cased version of Iconoclast is:

'Iconoclast'

'The End Of Innocence'

'Dehumanized'

'Bastards Of The Machine'

'Heretic'

'Children Of A Faceless God'

'Electric Messiah'

'Prometheus (I Am Alive)'

'When All Is Lost'

The tracklisting for the two-CD Special Edition digi-pak version of Iconoclast is:

CD 1:

'Iconoclast'

'The End Of Innocence'

'Dehumanized'

'Bastards Of The Machine'

'Heretic'

'Children Of A Faceless God'

'When All Is Lost'

CD 2:

'Electric Messiah'

'Prometheus (I Am Alive)'

'Light Up The Night'

'The Lords Of Chaos'

'Reign In Madness'