Your voice has held up amazingly well after all these years. What challenges do you at this point in your life face as a singer? And how would you compare your singing ability now as opposed to 10-20 years ago?
It’s different obviously; the physical challenges of getting old have come into play. Having said that, I listen to what I did on Nostradamus and I feel pretty good about it all. Robert Plant said recently, “I wish to Christ I hadn’t screamed my tits off in those early days of Led Zeppelin. People want me to do it now, 40 years later and I can’t do it.” That’s just a fact of life, you know. See, when you’re putting on a show, you just have to make the subtle adjustments to get through the music. But it’s all doable. I don’t worry about it that much. I can still cover a lot of territory.
Did you ever have a vocal coach?
I never did, Charlie. No, I’m all self-taught. …
My next question has to do with Nostradamus. Now, this is a great record. It has one of my all-time favorite Judas Priest songs, “Revelations.” What made you as a band want to do this record and was everybody on board for this from the beginning?
Yeah, we always wanted to do something like for as long as we can remember being in a band. It’s just that it took forever to get around to providing enough time that you need to do something of this magnitude (1 hour and 40 minutes). It took almost 2 years or writing and recording…. So, to finally have the chance to cover the life of Nostradamus was an epiphany, really. Everything about that man seemed to kind of fall into lockstep with everything that we wanted to cover musically. So that was just a tremendous feeling of excitement. … We knew the story of his life through the research that we’d done before we even played a note. So yeah, everybody was ready for it [the band and label, Sony]. Everybody was just geared up to get this great achievement into the world of metal.
I want to thank you for taking every minute out of your hectic life to talk to me on behalf of Blogcritics Magazine. It’s been a thrill. Is there any other thing you want to promote between now and February?
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