A Conversation with Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Paul O’Neill – HuffPost 4.25.12

Mike Ragogna: Paul, how are you?

Paul O’Neill: I’m doing so well, Mike. Thanks for having me.

MR: My pleasure. Paul what are you up to these days?

PO: Well, we’re out on the road again even though the Winter tour just ended. This is our third year of touring. Last year, we hit all of Europe and this year we intend to hit all of America. We’re also in the studio trying to finish up the next album called Romanov: What Kings Must Whisper. We’re also developing this thing called Rock Theater, which is basically taking the coherent storytelling of Broadway and marrying it to the standards of vocals, musicianship, and the special effects of rock ‘n’ roll.

MR: Can you tell us more about all that?

PO: Well, Romanov was supposed to be TSO’s first album in 1994, but when William Morris heard it, they said it was too good to be a rock album, so the intent was to turn it into a Broadway musical instead. But, as I said, we wanted to do so in a way that had more of the spectacle and musicianship of a rock ‘n’ roll concert. It was also a very timely story to tell in 1994 because of the things that were happening all over the world–the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Berlin Wall falling.

MR: Paul, can you tell us a little bit about how and where you started out?

PO: Well, I grew up in New York.

MR: Did you? I did as well, name a street on Second Ave and I lived there.

PO: (laughs) Nice. For me, it was Astoria, Hell’s Kitchen, and Flushing. Right now, though, I’m the only one in my family left in the city.

MR: How did Trans-Siberian Orchestra come to life from there?

PO: Well, back in 1993, Warner Bros. called up Atlantic and suggested that rather than producing and writing for other bands, that I should start my own. I agreed, but on the condition that they would allow me to do something completely different than the norm. When they asked me what that meant, I explained that I wanted to make a band that built on everyone that I’ve ever worshipped. Giving a third dimension to a song, like in a Rock Opera, is something I picked up from The Who. When I found out that the pinball champion was deaf, dumb, and blind, it gave the whole thing a new dimension. It was the same when I found out, after listening to “Heaven On Their Minds,” from Jesus Christ Superstar, that the song was being sung by Judas.

MR: Right. Are you a fan of Jesus Christ Superstar?

PO: You know, I’ve always been jealous of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice because what they did with that show was brilliant. They didn’t have to explain who King Herod or Judas Iscariot was because it was all there in the show for you. There were rock shows that I saw in the ’70s and ’80s that thoroughly confused me when the band explained the plot to me after seeing the show. That’s one of the things I wanted to be sure came through in our albums. In every TSO album that we do, we tell the story in a short story form, then we retell the whole story in a rhyming pentameter, which I blatantly stole from Oscar Wilde. (laughs) But when we perform it onstage, there’s also a narrator there to guide the audience through the story. It’s important to me that you know what’s going on in the music.

MR: Now, TSO is known for the theatrical staging of its concerts, and there’s already a certain level of production value and stage presence that people expect to see when they come to one of your shows. Can you tell us how you manage to come up with these show ideas?

PO: Well, the show usually comes in about five minutes. It then takes me about five days to write it, and maybe two or three weeks to put it all into a rhyming pentameter. Writing the music is usually the part that takes me a couple of months. The hardest part for me was always trying to make both the music and the lyric good enough to stand on their own apart from each other, that’s why Night Castle was four years late. The band that cracked that code, in my opinion, is The Who with Tommy. I learned very early on in my career that writing a great song is only half the battle. You then need to write in vocalists to bring it to life. “The Music Of The Night,” from The Phantom Of The Opera is great, and when you have an excellent singer behind it, it’s brilliant. In Night Castle, I wrote the role of the Captain with Rob Evan in mind, who I saw in Les Miserables, and because I had eleven other male singers, I didn’t think I needed to worry about who I cast in the role of his adversary. However, every guy I put up against Rob Evan, he ran over like a tank because his voice is so big and powerful. The easiest way to solve the problem would have been to create a way for Rob to play both roles, but that would have gone against the ideals of TSO. The first ideal is that the fans own the band. The second was to make the best possible album, sparing no expense and time, then charge the lowest possible price. Well, in 2009, Al Pitrelli saved the day when he suggested that I try asking Jeff Scott Soto who took over for Steve Perry in Journey. So, we flew Jeff in and once I heard him sing, I immediately asked him to be a part of the project, and he agreed. He came and recorded, and five weeks later, the album went gold. The point is I’m glad that I waited to find the right vocalists to bring the piece to life.

MR: Some of your shows also seem to circle around the Christmas theme.

PO: The whole Christmas thing was actually kind of an accident. I think Charles Dickens explained it best when he said that Christmas is too large a subject to take on in one book, that’s why he wrote five. (laughs)

MR: Nice. Paul, the artwork and imagery that goes along with each TSO work is so beautiful and has become one of the things people love about the whole experience of your concerts and albums. Can you tell us about where that art comes from?

PO: Well, I always wanted my own artist because some great bands, including The Grateful Dead, had their own artists. Growing up my favorite artists were the Hildebrandt Brothers. They did the art work for The Lord Of The Rings, and they had the biggest selling calendars of all time. They also did what is, in my opinion, the most iconic piece of artwork in the 20th Century, and that’s the original Star Wars poster with Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. Everyone knows that’s Greg Hildebrandt. As it turns out, Greg and I had a mutual friend who gave him my home phone number. One day I randomly got a call from Greg saying that he and his brother had listened to Beethoven’s Last Night over 60 times without sleeping and they wanted to be the bands artists. The problem with that, was that I know that one of their large oil paintings can go for six figures, and TSO is about keeping the cost as low as possible. So, we had a meeting in New York and they agreed to do all of the artwork only for the cost of paint. That made their agent start banging her head against the fucking table. (laughs) We, obviously, paid them more than that, but it was amazing to just have the opportunity to work with them. It’s great – once I describe the piece to them, I have artwork in a few days, followed by a huge oil painting. I am just in awe of Greg. He really understands TSO and the vision that we’re going for.

MR: It occurs to me that you are also quite in tune with the music and shows that your fans want to see.

PO: I suppose that’s fair to say, but it’s interesting how we got to that point. The original plan for TSO was to do six rock operas, a trilogy about Christmas, and a couple of other albums. Ahmet Ertegun came to me and said that he could understand the six rock operas, but not the trilogy about Christmas. I explained to him that in addition to being a fan of The Who and Pink Floyd, I am very influenced by Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo who wrote about subjects that are larger than life. However, Dickens didn’t write these stories from the perspective of the most powerful characters, but through the eyes of regular people. Dickens also wrote five books about Christmas. I told Ahmet that if it was too big a subject for Dickens to do in one book, it was too big a subject for me to do in one album. I also learned at a very early age that there’s something very special about that time of year…even most of the major wars in our world history took a brief hiatus on December 24th. I told Ahmet that I was going to divide the Christmas albums into three sections–exploring the affect that it has on the world, exploring the fact that it’s been going on for centuries, and finally how Christmas allows you to undo mistakes that you didn’t think you could undo.

MR: Those are pretty ambitious concepts. And as I hinted at earlier, your Christmas music has become so wildly popular.

PO: Well, it’s funny because most people wouldn’t do a Christmas album until they’ve had multiple successes with other albums, but I wanted to try it because it intimidated me the most. In the entertainment world, Christmas is the Holy Grail. You know when you write Christmas music that you’re competing with the best of the best. However, it has all turned out better than I could have completely imagined. When our record first came out in ’96, it didn’t sell, but Atlantic really thought that we were onto something. When we finishedBeethoven’s Last Night in ’99, we started touring, and by 2001 the band had exploded.

MR: It must be rewarding in some way to be getting to share both your music and some music from great composers of the past.

PO: It really is. Most teenagers probably don’t really listen to much Beethoven, but when they hear it with fresh arrangements and some new music, I feel like they’re much more interested in the material. I’m sure if Beethoven and Mozart were alive today, they would definitely be using electric guitars and keyboards. So many symphonies treat Beethoven’s work like its musical fossils. It was very much influenced by the instruments of the time.

MR: Right, something most people don’t realize. Because you are able to present the music in new forms to older and younger demographics alike, do you have any advice that you’d like to share with new artists?

PO: First, I would say that, in my opinion, you don’t go to college to become a professional musician or a recording artist. I don’t know any professionals who got here because of their Master’s degree. Rather than spending thousands of dollars to study at a school, use that money to buy Pro Tools and start writing music. I learned to write by studying some of my favorite writers of all time and listening to all of the music that I admired and finding a way to make them all better. In my opinion, there are three types of art–bad, good, and great. Bad art is everywhere, good art is something that you find and elicits some sort of emotional response from you, and great art makes you feel emotions that you’ve never felt before and transform you for the better. That was our intention as a band, and I hope that every new artist moves forward with that intention.

MR: Paul, thank you so much for spending some time with us.

PO: It really was all my pleasure, Mike. Maybe one of these days we’ll bump into each other on the road.

MR: That would be terrific.

Transcribed by Evan Martin