JON OLIVA

JON OLIVA - "I Love To Play For People, But Everything That Goes Along With Touring Is A Nightmare"

The following is an excerpt from an interview with SAVATAGE / JON OLIVA'S PAIN frontman Jon Oliva conducted by Rocknworld.com:

antiMUSIC: So how did this record (Maniacal Renderings) take shape, what songs came up first and how did it all come together?

Jon Oliva: "Well, basically, right after the last tour, I did what these guys after the first J.O.P record - we call it J.O.P. for short, it's just a lot quicker - you know, what I wanted to do was, I wasn't a hundred percent satisfied with the first record, I thought there were some good songs on it, but I had hardly known and had hardly played with the guys that played on that record. I mean, I've known them for many years but I've never really played with them before so, and the fact that I only had a couple months to do it was kind of weird, because I'm not used to working that way. I've always worked a long time on albums with Savatage and with Tran-Siberian Orchestra. You know, we spend eight months to a year on an album, so I wanted to go back that way because that's where the quality of my work comes out, is when I can spend the time and you know see things through to the end without having to do a rush job, I hate being rushed [laughs]. I'm really bad like that. So I started and then we took every song…you know the songs started coming out, and there were some pieces and things of Chris' that inspired me to pull some other things up and you know we just started formulating. What we really did is we spent a lot of time on pre-production, we spent almost five months in rehearsal just taking each song and going over and over it. We'd do what we used to do in Savatage, we'd take a song a week and we would, in pre-production, and we would work the song for one whole week. I mean, just trying every different possible instrumentations, beats, tempos, keys, just every kind of thing you could imagine that you could possibly do to the thing, we would do it. And then, we'd look at everything and then pick the best way to go. And that's what I did with this, we spent a lot of time, especially the title track, the title track was a very painstaking-- [laughs]—painstaking effort because it was a lot of different pieces of things that all of us had, including a little piece of Chris' music, that we had to formulate and put together in one song. So that was a pretty tough one, but it was very satisfying when it was finished."

antiMUSIC: Are you a touring kind of guy or do you prefer to just write and record?

Jon Oliva: "I'm a studio guy. I love to play for people, but everything that goes along with touring is really a nightmare. Especially going overseas. So it's a sacrifice you have to make, because I love to play and if I could just be like I Dream of Jeannie I would just blink and show up five minutes before show time. I'd tour...I'd never stop touring. But it's the flying around, and the shitty hotels and you know now you have all the shit with the terrorists going on and the people over there are just a little creepy sometimes. You know, when you go over there…I was just over there when they had the thing where they broke up the plot of blowing up the 10 airplanes flying from Europe to over here? Well we were booked on one of them. So that kinda...when shit like that hits happens, it kinda hits you. When 9/11 happened we were on tour. We were in California at a rest stop in our tour bus. We were on like a whole string of shows coming back to the east coast, and the next thing we know we're stuck at a rest stop in California. The borders are all closed. No airplanes are flying. The phones are all screwed up. We couldn't get a hold of anybody at home. It was like a slap. It was really intense. I'm kinda over the traveling. I've been doing it for 25 years but I love to play, so you've got to take the good with the bad."

To read the entire interview go to this location.