The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum will host a Hall of Fame Series interview with inductee Smokey Robinson on Saturday, June 18 at 11 a.m. in the Museum’s Foster Theater.

Robinson will be interviewed by the Rock Hall’s Vice President of Education and Public Programs Dr. Lauren Onkey. Questions will be taken from the audience at the end of the interview. This event is FREE with a reservation. Seating is limited.

RSVP information is as follows:
Rock Hall Members can RSVP starting at 10 a.m. (EST) on Monday, June 6 by emailing education@rockhall.org or by calling (216)515-8426.  Limit two (2) people per reservation.  Members must include membership number with RSVP.

Non-Rock Hall Members can RSVP starting at 11 a.m. (EST) on Monday, June 6 by emailing education@rockhall.org or by calling (216)515-8426.  Limit two (2) people per reservation.

This event will also be live streamed on rockhall.com.

By Lee Zimmerman

Longevity isn’t exactly commonplace in rock ’n’ roll realms. With the exception of The Rolling Stones and The Grateful Dead, few bands survive much beyond their first few albums before infighting, restlessness or even mortality takes a toll. Given the public’s fickle appetite and the ever-changing state of what’s deemed commercially palatable these days, the ability to linger more than a few years or even beyond a couple of albums has become a challenge in itself.

Los Lobos are, from left, Conrad Lozano, Davis Hidalgo, Cesar Rosas, Steve Berlin and Louie Perez. Photo courtesy of Shout! Factory

So credit Los Lobos with not only sticking together for the better part of the past four decades, but for also staying relevant and on the cutting edge, able to reinvent itself seemingly at will while remaining true to its original roots.

Indeed, the band’s latest album, the Grammy-nominated “Tin Can Trust,” encapsulates many of the diverse elements — rock, roots, R&B, covers, south of the Border sounds — that the band has proffered so proficiently over the course of its career. The album’s track “Do the Murray” is up for Best Rock Instrumental honors; the album is nominated for the Best Americana Album. The group will hit the road with Eric Clapton in February and March 2011.

Indeed, it’s been nearly 36 years since Los Lobos —comprised of David Hidalgo (singer, guitarist, accordion player and occasional violin); Louie Perez (guitar, drums, vocals); Cesar Rojas (guitar, vocals); and Conrad Lozano (bass, vocals) — played its first gig on Thanksgiving night, 1974. Steve Berlin (saxophone, keyboards) joined the band 10 years later, after making the transition from another seminal L.A. outfit, the Blasters. The line-up hasn’t wavered since.

“It’s all in the mists of times,” Berlin says.

Goldmine: So how do you account for the fact the band has been able to stay together for so long?
Steve Berlin: It’s a couple of things. We’re all long-haul people. We’re all wed to one woman and not shopping around all the time, so I guess it’s the nature of the personalities involved.

That and — I know it sounds like a ridiculous thing — but we get enough time away from each other and the band stuff, so that everybody feels, at least, I hope everybody feels, that there’s enough balance there. The fact that we’re on and we’re off enough means that you can breathe and you can sort of live in the non-Los Lobos universe for awhile, so when you come back, its always nice. And the last thing is that we like the noise we make. That’s the real thing. When we play at the peak of our ability, it’s a grand thing, so that by itself is enough to hold the beast together, I think. It’s always fun to see this big thing blow up just because we’re up there tooling away.

I saw you guys in at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival three years ago, and Emmylou Harris was in the audience, and she was going crazy. Did she come backstage and congratulate you?
SB: On a good night, we can compete with anybody. She did come back. I love her. I think she’s amazing. So it was great to see she’s that big a fan. It certainly made me very happy.

With all the diversity in your music, with practically every album being different from the one that preceded it, do you guys conceptualize in advance? Do you make a deliberate effort to pursue a particular tack?
SB: If there was a way of saying whatever you just said, the opposite is true. The idea that we would get together and talk about anything we do beforehand is laughable.

Obviously, the kids’ records we did talk about beforehand, but I wouldn’t recommend this for the kids at home; it’s not like we’re holistically oriented people in any way, shape or form, but we literally do no planning, no rehearsing, no anticipating, no nothing, before we start a record. We pick a day, and everybody has to come to the studio on that day, and whatever happens, happens. And, like I say, that can be really scary. It is always a scary for a day or two or three or four, and then, somehow, the gods smile on us, or we force the issue, and we start making music, and away we go. Its kind of nutty, and I don’t know why that is, but it’s the nature of who we are, and in a weird way, it enhances the thrill of doing. I don’t know. I wish I could tell you there was a rhyme or reason to any aspect of it, but there isn’t. The only way I can put it is that the music tells us where it wants to go. Probably the last record would be a case in point, where we started it and we really had no idea what it was, but as we did it, we were realizing that these songs had kind of a sameness to them, and there’s a theme thing going on. So we realized about two months into it that we were making a concept record. But we sure don’t start that way.

That’s really amazing!
SB: Maybe that’s what you get for being together for 30-whatever years … you get to have a little bit of that telepathy.

I wish I understood it, but at the same time, its kind of cool that there’s this magical thing that happens, and we just roll with it, and so far, it serves us well.

I can’t say it’s without its thrills and chills and spills, but I think that what I’ve learned is that if you trust the process and allow it to play out and we don’t really try to steer it, then good things can happen — our records being evidence of that.

Do you guys do a lot of jamming before the songs take shape?
SB: No, not really, It just goes. Basically the way that it works is that each song happens, and we’ll do a song. And then another song happens, and then pretty soon, another song, and pretty soon we’re making a record. But it’s never a jam, per se.

You read about bands that jam their way through an album and cutting them up into songs, but that most definitely has never happened with Los Lobos.

There’s always a chord sequence or ideas, or, with David Hidlago’s stuff, there’ll be an amazing demo that we just add on to and put down as the basic track, and then we go on from there. You know, it’s crazy, (chuckles) but it works.

How did the title of the new record, “Tin Can Trust,” come about?
SB: Louie sort of came up with the song itself, “Tin Can Trust,” and if there was a theme — there wasn’t really much of a theme to this record — it was that living and working and coping with this economic climate that we’re all in, just how to basically survive.

That’s sort of the underlying part of the ethos of the record, so it just kind of fit the sentiment, and I think its light-hearted enough and it just sort of tells a story without having to say life just sucks. We’re all in it together. I don’t know anyone that isn’t affected one way or another, but as the song says, if you got love, the money doesn’t matter. That’s our advice for the day.

You do another Grateful Dead song on the album.
SB: It’s not like we’re beating it to death, I hope.

No, not at all, but you were represented on that Dead tribute album called “Deadicated” a few years ago.
SB: We were very close to Jerry — he was a huge fan. And we’re certainly honored by the respect shown to us by the Dead fans, because certainly as much as we, the band, are fans, we’re certainly not Phish or String Cheese Band or going whole hog by living the Dead ethos the way those guys are.

I feel like we honor them and the Dead fans by periodically covering a song of theirs or periodically showing our love and respect for the organization, because we are close to all of them. We’ve had a couple of songs where Robert Hunter’s come in and helped us out enormously, and I have the highest respect. Coming from one band that’s been together for 30-something years, and going to another band that’s been together for even longer that’s been able to hold it together and show the way forward in an ethical and gracious way … my hat’s off to them, and we’re honored by their friendship.

Even though you’ve been in the band 26 years, in some respects, you’re still the new guy.
SB: Someone called me the Ron Wood of the band the other day.

Yes, an obvious analogy. So how did you meet these guys?
SB: I was in The Blasters, which was pretty cool, and one weekend we were playing our first big headlining weekend at the Whisky A Go Go in L.A., which was a pretty big gig for us because as far as the L.A. food chain goes, that’s a pretty high bar.
It was Dave Alvin that mentioned to me, “Hey, we have this band called Los Lobos opening up.” And I have this vague memory of a couple of years before that, seeing this band Los Lobos opening for Public Image and playing Mexican folkloric music, which was astonishing, considering they were playing this Mexican folk music to probably the most rabid, out-of-control crowd, like a soccer riot of a concert. Yet they stood up there and did it. My thought was, “Well that’s going to be interesting, a bunch of Mexican folkloric musicians opening for us, but our fans will treat them better than those other fans did.”

And then they came and played, and they were a rock ’n’ roll band playing this amazing stuff, so it kind of blew everybody, including me, away. So we got to talking, and they said, “We’ve got these songs, and they have sax parts. You want to learn them and come and play with us once in a while?” And I said, “By all means,” and I’d say by about two years from that conversation … by the end of the second year, I was in that band. The beginning of the first record, I was producing, and by the end of the record, I was in the band.

So how did The Blasters take that? Dave Alvin must have been sorry he agreed to have that band gig with you.
SB: It was no big deal. The Blasters weren’t changing. They were kind of moving a little bit away from the horns within the context of the music. Lee Allen, my partner in crime with The Blasters, was getting older, and I think the travel was getting a little bit harder for him.
It wasn’t this horrible dramatic thing. I didn’t have to have a command meeting with the council to discuss the terms of my departure. It was really like one day Los Lobos’ bus was going north and The Blasters’ bus was going south, so I got on the Los Lobos bus. It really wasn’t that big a deal for anybody.

What was it like for you being the only non-Hispanic member of the group? Was there a big culture shock?
SB: It was, for me, a wonderful education. I came quite literally from knowing nothing about Spanish culture, or Mexican culture, growing up in Philadelphia at that time.

Now in Philly, there’s pretty much a large enough constituency that everybody’s conscious of it, but in early 1970s Philadelphia, where I grew up, there was nothing. There was one Mexican restaurant that I went to all the time. It was absolutely terrible, but it was so exotic; I thought it was cool, especially as I got to know the guys, and we became friends. Obviously there was a cultural difference, and I had to learn about it and come to terms with it, but on another level entirely, we were all second-generation Americans, except for Cesar, who’s really a first-generation American. My grandparents, just like everyone else in the band’s grandparents, came from someone else before coming to America. So on a lot of other levels, we were very similar in many other regards. So I think there is something to be said for that kind of generational thing, where having our grandparents struggle and providing a life for their kids, and our parents providing a life for us has more to do with how we got along than anything.

• Get the new John Lennon book: “John Lennon: Life is What Happens, Music, Memories & Memorabilia”
• Buy the brand new edition of “Goldmine Standard Catalog of American Records 1948-1991, 7th Edition”
• Order the latest Ozzy book,“The Wit & Wisdom of Ozzy Osbourne” (estimated ship date: 9/30/2010) Very witty. Very funny. Very Ozzy.
• Get a Goldmine collective on The Beatles, “Meet the Fab Four CD”

By Harvey Kubernik

Janie Hendrix is not only the sister of legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix. She’s also the CEO of Experience Hendrix, a company devoted to protecting the legacy of one of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest artists.

As such, Janie was heavily involved in putting together Valleys Of Neptune, the new posthumous album of Hendrix material that’s being released March 9.

How did Valleys Of Neptune emerge and how was it constructed?

JH: Well, I think kind of [by] history repeating itself. When we signed with Universal, we obviously put out the core albums that Jimi had already created. In addition, we put out First Rays. And during that timeline it was the same as Valleys Of Neptune was. And it was kind of keeping in the same theme that this is what he was working on prior to his death and marks the 40th anniversary of his death, and the thing is that mode of we’re starting with Electric Ladyland, moving into what he was working on next, combination of First Rays and Valleys of Neptune. All those songs were done around the same time. And, listening to “Valleys of Neptune” and “Bleeding Heart” in that album will make you cry.

And the concept of the new collection?

JH: Really, it’s John [McDermott] and I. We really are kind of our own team. We talk probably two or three times a day. We go through what the next release is going to be and when we’re in the vaults and going through things. “This would sound cool to put in there. This picture for the booklet.” So it’s John and I, and we bring the tapes to Eddie in the studio. He then gives us a history lesson, since most of the time he was there.

1969 was a tumultuous year for Jimi Hendrix. Lots of stress, business scenes, touring, duress. You feel that around the construction of Valleys of Neptune.

JH: Oh absolutely. You hear it in the music. You hear it in the moaning of the guitar.

Talk to me about the musical license and master recording requests you receive for soundtrack, movies, television usage and DVD products.

JH: Sometimes we get some deeper catalog requests. I think we get probably, honestly, about at least 25 requests a week, which is a lot and not all of them, obviously, go through.

It’s about awareness. It’s about helping people to be aware. We often get requests for “Fire.” We want “The Star Spangled Banner.” And, “All Along The Watchtower” and “Purple Haze.”

Then it’s like, for instance, I’ll say this, for the [movie] “City of Angels.” Originally, I said, “Why don’t you guys want to use ‘Angel?’” How appropriate. Or “Little Wing.” All the songs on that soundtrack were about angels. And they said, “Here’s the deal with this: We want ‘Red House,’” which was great, because nobody was taking “Red House” before as a synch license. And they said [it was] because (actress) Meg Ryan really likes the song “Red House.” So, we’re like, OK. Sounds great. And because the movie, the story line, the actors that were in it … we really felt it was going to do well and that was really the first soundtrack that we ever OK’d Jimi’s songs to be placed in.

Even though we get requests, we kind of feel like it kind of dilutes the catalog. Before downloading if your song is on a soundtrack, then they’re gonna buy that soundtrack and not going to buy your album. But it really proved to do well because it went quadruple platinum, maybe higher than that.

For more information, visit www.jimihendrix.com. For more information about Jimi Hendrix, please write Experience Hendrix P.O. Box 88070 Seattle, Washington 98138.

Redemption (L to R: Bernie Versailles, Chris Quirarte, Nick Van Dyk, Sean Andrews, Greg Hosharian, Ray Alder

By Marc Garrison

Led by guitarist/composer Nick van Dyk, American progressive power metal band Redemption have had an already storied career in their short few years of existence. Since their debut the band has enlisted members from several prominent progressive metal acts including Steel Prophet, Fates Warning, Symphony X, and, most recently, Dream Theater. With four albums and a DVD in a mere six years, they are quickly climbing through the ranks and going toe-to-toe with the best of the genre. Nick was kind enough to talk with Goldmine about a wide variety of topics, including the most recent release “Snowfall On Judgment Day.”

I first discovered Redemption while searching for other projects involving Rick Mythiasin, being a huge fan of Steel Prophet. Given that you only worked with him for one album, what kind of experience did you have with him, and how did the search for a new vocalist come about so soon?
Nick van Dyk: We hired Rick as a session musician for the first CD. Ultimately, while I think Rick’s performance on that CD is some of the best work of his career, he is really a power metal vocalist at heart, and I knew I wanted to work with somebody who was more comfortable with prog metal. When we were asked to play the ProgPower festival in 2003, we took the opportunity to find a vocalist more suited to this style of music. Bernie and I listened to a bunch of CDs and decided to ask Corey Brown, who was with Magnitude 9 at the time, to join us in Atlanta. When recording for the new CD commenced, I suppose Corey would naturally have been our choice for a full-time vocalist, but Ray [Alder] heard the pre-production materials and really wanted to sing on it, and so we had the discussion about Ray formally joining the band.

I came across your debut and was instantly hooked, and naturally I was thirsty for more. This led me to purchase the first album I could find in the local music store, which happened to be “The Origins of Ruin.” There was a drastic difference i n the sound, with the superb Ray Alder on vocals. He seems like such a natural fit for your sound. How did you guys originally come together?
Van Dyk: We became friends first because I had seen him a couple of times at some small shows in LA and struck up a conversation with him. After I knew him pretty well, I played some of the music that I’d been tinkering with. I wound up co-writing a song for his first Engine CD, and he offered to help produce the first Redemption CD, and to appear as a guest vocalist on a track. As I mentioned, when he heard the pre-production materials for “Fullness of Time” (Origins’ predecessor) he wanted to join the band which was a tremendous compliment, and also a pretty wonderful thing for the band. His voice has a ton of emotion and a unique character to it insofar as he doesn’t sound like just every operatic vocalist. Both aspects of that are critical to Redemption sounding the way it does.

One aspect of each album that always sticks out is the sheer depth of emotion involved with each song, musically and vocally. What are some of the inspirations you draw from when writing the music? Does Ray take the finished music and add to it or is there another process involved when composing?
Van Dyk: I do think it’s one of the things that makes Redemption what we are. Musically, I continue to be intrigued by combining very heavy, riff-oriented metal with strong melody and big choruses, and by having technicality but subjugating it to the needs of the song. My influences range from classical music to classic prog rock (e.g. Kansas, Genesis, etc.) to NWOBHM to technical thrash to prog metal. There is a certain amount of “urgency” to the music that I think is created through harmonic tension — like an ascending scale played against the same root note. It creates a need for resolution. It’s hard to describe but it’s a key part of our sound and I think it contribute to the emotional aspect of it, as do the melodies.

Our lyrics are about human frailty: fears, regrets, and the like, but also hope and triumphs. All of these are done in a way that people can relate to, which is critical to establishing the emotional link with our audience. Our songs, in a sense, are all relationship songs: they either deal with how we relate to ourselves or to others. Even “Leviathan Rising” is about how people relate to each other in the context of society and government.

As for the compositional process, I’ll have a pretty good idea of what I want the melody to do, and have an idea about the lyrics. Ray will occasionally tweak one or the other in the studio. Over time, I’ve gotten better at writing with Ray’s voice in mind so there’s probably a little less of that than there was in the early days, but Ray will also come up with ideas for a harmony here or there, or a particular way to treat a vocal, so his contribution is more than just singing what I tell him to sing.

It has been fascinating to listen to your albums back to back, as there is really a drastic improvement with each release, while the earlier songs remain just as impressive. I have been told by some musicians that this is more a natural evolution, rather than an intended one. Is this concept of improving on each piece as time goes on important to you?
Van Dyk: I do feel an obligation to myself and to our fans to continue to make excellent music and to try to raise the bar with each release. It gets more challenging all the time, of course! With the first CD, I knew we had room for improvement in several areas. After Fullness, I knew I could improve the production somewhat and hopefully tighten the songwriting, both of which happened with Origins. With Snowfall I wanted a slightly more varied record, and to continue to push the production envelope, which we did. The next CD is just starting to come together in my head, but I have some ideas for how to make it pretty special and I hope they come together.

I am not one of these guys that thinks a band needs to reinvent itself, by the way, just to be relevant. There’s not a huge variability in Iron Maiden’s sound from “Number of the Beast” through “Powerslave” but all of those albums are killer.

The newest album “Snowfall On Judgment Day” has a wide range of styles on it. I feel it is certainly your heaviest offering, and while it retains much of the technical, progressive elements of previous releases, it seems very focused in comparison.
Van Dyk: Yes, that’s part of what we were going for, absolutely. As I’ve mentioned, combining strong melodies with heavy riffing is one of the things we go for and I definitely tried to push the heaviness envelope on this CD, both from a compositional standpoint and also from the production standpoint. I also wanted the songs to be very organic, rather than feeling composed, and they do have that organic feel to them. Striking a balance between that and the technicality that makes them interesting is very important to me.

When composing, how much of it is time spent dedicated specifically to writing music versus coming up with ideas on the fly?
Van Dyk: They can come from anyplace, really. This last CD, as I said, was less about the art or science of composing and more about what a song felt like it should do. I do keep a library of riffs and sections and I go back there occasionally to find something that works, but most of those ideas come about through fooling around rather than trying to do anything. Often I’ll be driving around and hear a melody line in my head and I’ll record it. I’m fond of telling the story of how the chorus to the song “Memory” came to me while playing golf by myself one day. So the ideas can come from anyplace.

A lot of your lyrics appear to be about the complexity of human emotion, some of it pretty dark. Yet, even so there is often musical hooks that sound brighter, happier, even hopeful. I think this kind dynamic really reaches out to me in a very personal way. Can you comment on this?
Van Dyk: I’m generally a pretty positive person and I think it’s important to acknowledge the positivity of life and to generally approach it without too much cynicism. At the same time, there is a lot that happens to us as humans that is difficult, dark, emotionally painful, etc. To deny either the positivity or the negativity of life is a short-sighted view. And frankly it’s heavy metal — there’s not going to be a lot of vapid, silly, light-hearted Lady Gaga type lyricism going on. A lot of people listen to heavy metal for cathartic reasons in the first place, so I think that people can generally relate to a lot of our lyrical topics. At the same time, I don’t want to be a fundamentally negative creative force — and here I use the force not in the sense that Redemption is particularly influential — just in terms of being a contributing factor to one’s worldview. I want to be positive. While at the same time not denying a lot of the pain and challenges that we go through.

Tell me about the song “Leviathan Rising.” As complex or brief a synopsis as you like.
Van Dyk: “Leviathan Rising” is about the role of government in society. The title comes from the book “Leviathan,” by Thomas Hobbes, which is one of the most famous books in political philosophy. It asserts that life without government would be a dangerous place where people’s worst instincts resulted in a great deal of enmity, and as a result we should be glad to surrender a large amount of our freedom to the state in the interest of maintaining order. As you can imagine from the sound bites in the song – which come from the movie “V for Vendetta” and from news footage of the Tiananmen Square massacre – I don’t agree with this point of view. Government has overstepped its bounds both socially and economically and we are operating, in the US, with fewer freedoms than we have ever had. The package of economic reforms that has been pushed through over the past couple of years is financially disastrous and wrong-headed. Meanwhile the civil liberties that were wiped out with the prior administration moved the country in the wrong direction. What’s saddening is that very few people draw the connection between the two. The problem isn’t the agenda of a President. The problem is the nature of government: the bureaucracy exists to grow, and Guantanamo Bay and the proposed healthcare legislation in the US are just two sides of the same problem.

I feel compelled to mention how unbelievably incredible the song “Black and White World” is. Despite his enormous resume, this is without a doubt Ray’s finest performance in his career. Was it given any special attention in the process of writing the new album?
Van Dyk: There was no special attention given to this song, but I knew as it was coming together that if we pulled it off well, it was going to be spectacular. In writing the lyrics, and in the arrangement which is pretty sparse as the song beings it’s build-up at the end, that’s not a typical heavy metal song — so it was going to take a lot of conviction to make it work. But I’m very proud of it.

There are a few instances in our songs where there’s a complex vocal arrangement, and the overlapping lines here at the end are one such example. Ray usually has more difficult than I, at first, envisioning how it’s going to sound when it’s finished so he usually takes it on faith that I have some vision that hopefully will work out. There was a moment when Ray got it and I could see he believed it was going to be pretty special. That was a good moment in the recording. We’re able to pull it off live, too, and it comes together nicely.

How was it working with James Labrie [best known for being the lead singer in progressive metal band Dream Theater] on “Another Day Dies”?
Van Dyk: When we were touring, James was particularly gracious and told me he really liked what Redemption was doing. I asked him if he’d be interested in doing a guest appearance and he was totally fired up about it. I didn’t write that song for him, and I didn’t really even know what type of guest appearance would work, but when the songs were all finished, I knew the verses in “Another Day Dies “would sound great with James’ delivery, and the idea for the duet during the chorus came to me as well, and I sent him the pre-production demo and asked him what he thought. He loved the idea, and here we are.

Working with him was a great experience — he’s a complete professional, a very nice guy, very collaborative and a true friend. We spent a few hours in the studio, he brought the goods and delivered a great performance. I’d love to do more with him one day.

With so much going on in your world, what kind of activity can we expect from Redemption in the next few years?
Van Dyk: We will be playing some dates in the US, and had hoped to do some European dates this summer but unfortunately that’s not going to be in the cards. Ray has some shows to do with Fates [Warning] and it would have been too much for him to try to do both. So come this fall, I will probably start working on new music. The bar has been raised again, so I’m going to spend a lot of time on the music — as I always do — to try to make this next CD even better than the last.

On another note: While there is a thriving community for progressive music in the US, the market for music as a whole is at an all time low, with albums sales decimated by piracy and bands getting less support than ever before. How do practical considerations like this factor into the continuing existence of Redemption?
Van Dyk: Well, the reality of the music business today is that it’s terrible. A band like ours breaks even, if we’re lucky, on recording, and loses money touring, so frankly there’s not a lot of point to it, but for the fact that we want to create. It does mean that it’s difficult for us to play out extensively — there’s no way to mount a tour as the labels are under financial pressure and cannot offer much support, and tours no longer sell CDs. It’s a pretty awful time, frankly. Ultimately everybody loses — nobody more so than the music fans who, through downloading, are ensuring that the only type of music to be successful is pop.

How well does your sound translate to a live setting? There is some seriously intimidating and impressive musicianship that goes into your sound, with the epic orchestrations, long songs, and so forth. Is there any material that is particularly challenging to replicate in concert?
Van Dyk: I’ve been very pleased with how well they translate. We have a DVD out that faithfully captures our live performance, and we do our best to maintain the orchestrations as they are pretty important to the song. We also choose the material that works the best in a live setting — but most of it is fair game. I will say that the music is extremely difficult to learn and memorize. We worked up a cover that we ultimately didn’t end up playing, and I will say the whole band learned the cover to perfection in about 20 minutes. I compare that with literally ten hours of practice to get one of my own damn songs down – it’s pretty taxing!

I’m particularly pleased with how well the new songs work live — we’re doing three of them and they are all very different, and they all seem to go across well.

Lastly, since everyone has influences and people that inspire them, I’ll throw one more question out: Are there any specific bands you would like to share the stage with above all others?
Van Dyk: Opening for Dream Theater was a pretty surreal experience and it would take a lot to top that — I think opening for Rush might be the only thing that could top it. Although it’d be a lot of fun and a tremendous honor to open for somebody like an Iron Maiden or a Bl … uh … Heaven and Hell.