I got a call from Claus from Intromental, shortly after the news had hit the presses that I had parted ways with BALANCE OF POWER. He asked me if I would be interested in hearing a new project that he thought would be great with my voice on it. I said send me some stuff, he emailed me three tunes on MP3 and I was very impressed with the production and mood of the songs. I liked the open-ness, the melodic-ness and the Power of the tunes. I’m like sure sounds good, let’s make an album!

Well, I’ve been doing a lot of side projects and most of the time, though I really like the tunes and the album there is something I’m not totally digging in the end when the album is finished. This one, I didn’t have that problem, there is a solid chemistry between the players and the songs, it is a band and it’s obvious from the songs, even though Michael writes the stuff, each member contributes his own “musical essence” into the tunes. Michael is fine with me coming up with my own melodies and if I feel the need to change the words around for phrasing or if it just makes more sense to me as I sing he gives me the freedom to work the song as he does with all the guys.

It was great!! The dates went off really, really well. Met a lot of nice people saw a lot of road and airspace and rocked a lot of metalheads! What more do you need when your doing shows?

Not surprised no, happy that others hear what we hear in it. This album was a labor of love for Michael and when I received even the rough tracks, it sounded fantastic. When I heard the final mixes, I was like….dude, these tunes sound killer! I’m still not sick of the album, and that’s saying a lot!

Well there are a few that pump up the testosterone levels for me…. Sleepy Hollow, The Journey, Melancholy Beast, and My favorite to play live that totally kicks is Power of Imagination!

Oh dude, do we have to? Let’s just say a friend asked me to sing for his band, I always wanted to be in a band as the singer so it worked great, except, I couldn’t sing very well. I had about a one octave range, was listening to melodic rock and the band was a total bunch of KISS heads!

Long story, tired wanna go to sleep……if you were typing this, I would spew on, but since I’m typing it at the moment, I’ll just say that I hooked up with the band after I left My first group called FREELANCE, ….no….I didn’t name it! Anyway… This was in 1986…we started doing shows 2 weeks after I was in the band. Needless to say some of the stuff was a little loose on my end, but I quickly brought it together It was a cover band in the beginning, the band had a few mainstay clubs and ballrooms that we would rotate dates with and it was all nice, but wasn’t going anywhere. After a year I’m like, gotta go dudes, I want to make my own music. The band was like ….we can do that! So we started breaking into new major markets like Minneapolis/St. Paul/ Milwaukee/ Chicago / Winnepeg / Kansas City and we rotated these while playing full time 8 days a week as the song goes. We’d practice in the clubs during the day, writing our own material, then once a month book a couple of days studio time, and hammer out the new tunes we’d come up with, soon we had an album. We’d try the tunes in the clubs the night after we’d write them and see how they went over, it was pretty cool. By the time we had our first album together, we had a very large fanbase that wanted to buy it. We were selling hundreds of copies a night off the stage. It was really something.

I guess I don’t think of Nightmare Records as a big label, we’re still the underdog in my book, but yes it was the birth of Nightmare records, the name Nightmare records came from a song on the first GEMINI album called NIGHTMARE. I was particularly proud of the lyric and the song and we needed a ficticious label name for our new indie release. I’m like, hey let’s call it Nightmare records…The artist that did the Gemini art, made me a logo and I’m still using it though I’ve made some slight changes along the way. Around 1995 after I’d left Gemini, I decided to help my local musician friends out with distribution, and started recruiting bands like LIFEFORCE, PASSION, MALICIOUS, GODHEAD, TRAGIC DREAM and a few others. Nightmare began to build now 15 years after it’s inception it’s a fairly known label in the metal community.

Same story as most bands….Tension and dissention in the ranks, it just stopped being fun when we were playing. So it was either fire everyone at that point or just quit. So I opted to quite and started KINGS MACHINE.

It was meant to be a full time band, we wrote two albums worth of material before We released the first album, we have 2 hours of live multi track stuff mixed and a full album in the can…I may release this stuff one of these days. Originally we had recorded and mixed the album with the intent of shopping it to a major label in the US. Well that just didn’t seem to happen we did have a few nibbles but nothing to mention. So I released our first album A STATE OF MIND on Nightmare, it got great reviews and sold very well for me.

I knew the Keyboardist in BOP Ivan Gunn, he had a small company in England called Anthem Records, we had worked together getting them deals in Japan and Europe. So one day, he calls me and asks me if I knew of anyone that could fill the bill with BOP. He said their singer Tony wasn’t really working on the new material that they were doing since they had switched main guitarists. I gave him a few names and said I may be interested, though to be honest, I was never really all that impressed with their first album ; ) when I got the tunes though I liked them a lot more, they were a lot heavier and much more progressive, a lot more my thing. I demo’d up 4 songs I believe and sent them mixed roughly on a cassette tape in late 1997. They loved them and asked me If I would sing for them.

Not much different really, except you can’t get together anytime you want, but when you're in a regular band, you can’t really do that either, there is always something coming up with someone’s schedule. So at least this way you know what you have and you work on stuff on your own and send each other the ideas.

It’s funny when you say grew….when your in the band, you just don’t know how Much it’s growing, I mean you see the reviews, you see the interviews, you see the radio Playlists….but you never really see the sales figures…with the exception of in the US where I was selling our albums, I never got any sales figures, that even sounded remotely real. Anyway, Yes the band seemed to be right on the verge of really going somewhere, However there are a few things or maybe a few people holding the band back from making the next step and because of that they will either dwindle to a 3 piece or have a revolving door with players. But I will always remember the great music we made and the times we had together.

Well, first off thank you….I don’t know really, it’s just evolution I guess, you keep what you like, ditch what you don’t. I explored a few tones from my cover years, incorporated the ones that seem to fit me and the music we were doing at the time and worked them into my voice.

NO regrets, loved the time there, and I’m proud of what we did together musically, it was just time to move on so that I can continue to grow as a musician and they could do things the way they wanted.

Pretty much it was all just lending my talents. There was a time when Empire was more than that. I was asked to tour with them but the tour was a lame tour. In fact, the band that was going to headline the thing, I was like dude we have way more credibility than [the headliner] why are we opening. It was a long tour and basically I just said no, they couldn’t justify the amount of money I was asking.

It becomes very very time consuming. I spend a lot of time every day on Nightmare. As Yan will testify to you it takes away time from my projects. I’m engineering the mix and producing it so it takes a lot of exponential time. There’s a lot of work on the album but its coming together nicely its sounding pretty good.

I always think of myself first as a musician.

I could given the reality of the situation, if a band really takes off I couldn’t do both. I’ve considered it several times it would probably be my wife who would manage the company and if nothing else I would sell it.

That is what it is. I will help bands and do what I can. There’s several bands that send me things that I work with and give them my opinion and help them to achieve a final project. I help them with art layouts with manufacturing cds and want to pay for their own pressing and ill help distribute them. There’s no real decisive way that I work, I’m open to working in any capacity if they want to work with but if I want to put my money behind them I have to really believe it.

It depends on what you call that. If you mean promoting or advertising then yes but as to putting a huge part of my money into their pocket as an advance before the album is released, no.

That’s a good question. I am proud of all the work I have done with the various groups but all the projects were mixed by someone else and I’m not really happy with the mixes on the albums, there’s parts that I would do differently if I had been more involved in them. However if given that you’re talking just the songs and performances, I really like them all similarly but the Empire would be the best.

Through David Ellefson actually. Yan was working with him first and he started producing this project and recording Yan’s songs and he called me and said he had this project that was pretty cool and you might want to check it out. Yan got excited about this and we figured something out.

It remains yet to be seen. I’m thinking Pyramaze will be my band and all else will be side projects. It depends on what legs the album has and what people think of it and then it might become a another priority. I think its going to do very well, it will definitely do better than the other side projects I have done. I have been taking good care with the engineering and production. It will come out complete and done right, at least with my opinion of what right is.

Its very possible. I hadn’t considered that. I think that the sound is entirely different and I don’t think that people are going to compare them too much. Its like apples to oranges the band sounds entirely different.

It’s not there yet. The main hold up is a couple of things and Nightmare is exceptionally busy in the Christmas season. I haven’t been able to get my guitar friend to come over and finish the solos. Hopefully well get it put together in the next few months and get it finished and shopped.

I always look for another label but I know Yan is comfortable with me releasing it and it always seems to make more sense doing it on Nightmare in the US.

Avian recording lineup 2004: Jonah Weingarten keys, Lance King vocals, Yan Leviathan guitars, David Small drums, David Ellefson bass.

I recorded with a Brazilian band Shining Star. I completed that before I did vocals on the Pyramaze album. Due to very odd behavior from the Brazilian label company I retained the masters cos they didn’t pay me for producing the album. Its actually going to be shopped this year and we’ve come to a resolution between the label, the band and myself and we’re going to get it out there.

I actually still do the club scene. I play in clubs with Decibel and still sell cds out the back of my car at shows haha. That’s a really hard question cos you’re comparing apples to oranges. I like it now with the way everything is but I would love for the scene to be as strong as it was back then. My sales would also be a lot higher too (laughs).