Savatage Put On The Backburner For Business Reasons

In a recent interview with BW&BK about his new project Jon Olivas's Pain, Savatage frontman/founder Jon Oliva explained why the long awaited follow-up to the band's 2001 album Poets And Madmen hasn't surfaced.

“Savatage has been together for 23 years, all the guys in the band except for me play with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, I write for TSO, and unfortunately Savatage has taken a back seat to that. It’s for business reasons mainly, because you don’t take something that’s selling out Madison Square Garden and 18,000 seat arenas and crush it over a band that sells 100,000 records. That’s common sense, and Savatage can go on as long as the guys want to make records. We’re planning on doing something for the 25th Anniversary of the band, which falls in 2007. We’ve been compiling video footage and I’ve been working on material, so we’re just going to see what happens. But, that’s still a couple years away, and in the meantime I want to go out and play. I don’t want to sit around and get old, which is why I came up with Jon Oliva’s Pain. I figure that if it takes two or three years to get another Savatage record out it’s not gonna matter because I’ll still be doing stuff that makes me happy.”

The Jon Oliva's Pain debut, 'Tage Mahal, will be released on October 25th through SPV. Savatage guitarist Chris Caffery released his solo debut Faces / God Damn War on September 24th.

Source: BW&BK