Sir Russell Allen is one of the most versatile vocalists in rock. He moves seamlessly from the grandeur of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra to the progressive metal of Symphony X and the melodic rock of Allen/Lande. He is back now with his second record alongside Anette Olzon, titled Army of Dreamers, and recently took some time to talk about it.
Please press the PLAY icon for the MisplacedStraws Conversation with Russell Allen –
On how he teamed up with Anette Olzon – I believe the label’s idea, or someone at the label thought would be a great idea to pair us together and I thought it was a great idea. I think what we had done with the Allen/Lande records was always sort of, at least the artwork and things like that, like The Battle and pitting these two monster rock voices against each other in a kind of a vibe. But I like the idea of a duet situation where her and I could kinda play off each other, and I thought the lyrics would be more interesting and we’d have more content that I think people could grab onto. That seems to be what’s happening. So I think it was a great idea. I don’t know exactly who particular had it in the beginning, I just remember being presented by it, and I thought it was a good play, so we went for it. 1:01
On if they ever worked together in person – It’s all been remote. The technology, luckily, is there for us to do things like this. We had done the Allen/Lande records the same way even before the pandemic, so we had a lot of experience producing albums in the style and it’s a good thing when you can work with people that can work off of what you’re doing. S a lot of times I would go first, there was times with the Allen/Lande stuff where he might go first and I can play for him and understand his energy levels and his vibe and his feel and match those articulations within my own performance to make sure that harmonies sounded good and Anette’s great at that too. So we were able to do this remotely. A matter of fact, I think the first time I even really talked with her in person was on a podcast that we just recently did, kind of funny. We did want to get together and do videos together, I didn’t like the idea of doing these sort of remote video things, I’ve never really been into that, but when they approach, they said, “Well, this is gonna be like a lyric video of the two of you in it”. They sent me an example of one, I said, “Okay, well, this will work”, but I feel like with the chemistry that we were having, singing together, it would really come across if we were in the same room and actually videoing together, it would just add that extra element of connectivity to the fans, but we unfortunately, weren’t able to do that because of what was going on with the restrictions, so we came up with this idea and I think it works great. I think it’s cool that they do that now, it’s like the new format, the lyric video with the artist appearing, you get to see the artist emote, but you also get the lovely visuals that these great lyric video artists put together. So I think it’s really cool. It’s worked out really well. 2:20
On his working process with Magnus Karlsson – It’s always been the same, he’s always done an amazing job arranging these songs for singers and really understanding that the arrangement is all an accompaniment to the vocal performance. So the songs are structured and built around that premise, so I’ve never had an issue working with him on anything. From the beginning, he’s always given me solid stuff, I’ve never really had to change anything except for some grammatical things, maybe in the English language where the rhythms might be a little off because of how they might accent, certain consonants within a word in a sentence. Other than that, I’m always free to kinda do what I feel is best, ad-libs and things like that, and if I need to change a melody line, but I’ve been saying this is all the interviews, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. If it resonates and it always does, he’s very good at what he does. So no, it has never been a problem. I’ve always been comfortable with him from the beginning. Good music is good music. It is what it is. Again, I had time to listen to him in the beginning before I even agreed to do this. I get offered a lot more things than I actually do, even though it seems like I’ve done so much. But I’ve been approached by a lot of artists and people that want to work with me, but I’m very selective. So I know going in, “Okay, this is something that I wanna do, and this is gonna be good”. He’s always delivered and this album’s no different, he’s always upping his game and bringing even better stuff to the table, so it’s a pleasure to work with him. 4:47
On if he sees Army of Dreamers as a continuation of World’s Apart – Well, I feel like the first record was kind of thought of, it was supposed to be another Allen/Lande album. I do some songs, she does some songs, we do a couple duets. The big difference now is it’s all duets, and I think that’s great. I don’t know if Anette wanted to do that or whose idea it was, but I thought that this is way better because now it has its own identity, so that’s kind of what happened. It kind of morphed into this and so is the progression that this collaboration has taken with Anette involved. I think it’s a much better structure for us to work off of each other emotionally through the vocals and singing songs like “All Alone” and things like that, you can really sense that these people were missing each other. There’s just a thing when you have two singers like us, who are polar opposites in a lot of ways, not just physically and things like that. For her Nightwish days, she’s a very clean, more operatic style of singer, I’m a gritty old metal pirate. I could sing the clean stuff too, but I’m a power guy, and so it’s like beauty and the beast. So that’s kind of what we were going for, and I think it plays out great, the Beauty and the Beast angle with our collaboration, because it allows me to be powerful but also be vulnerable, working with her and be able to sing those songs and have that sort of that emotional exchange with her in context of whatever we’re singing about, whatever the story is, so I just think it’s way more interesting. I think it’s way more engaging and people can really relate to it, I think it appeals to a larger base of people because there is that male-female thing going on. There’s something there for everybody pretty much, in terms of the relationships between people, something about the two of us doing this seems to attract people’s attention in terms of how we’re interacting, things like that, which I always found to be very primeval, I guess you could say. There’s just something about it. It’s an interesting combination. Most metal things don’t really have this type of vibe, so it’s different, and I like that. If it is, it’s usually just a guy doing the grunt and growls and a beautiful female vocalist singing, which is the classic sort of combination, but this is actually different, this is actually like I said, the beauty and the beast, but where the beast is not just the growling, the heartless menace, he has a heart and a soul as well, so I think it works great together. So it’s a very good collaboration and a good backdrop that we can paint on together as singers. 7:16
On the recently-completed Symphony X tour – The experience was legendary. I gotta tell you how impressed I was with the people, with the fans. We were playing in markets that normally, we know we do well, and we did well, but we were playing the markets where we never traditionally really drew a lot or sold a lot of merch and stuff like that, and it was just stellar the entire tour. There were people coming out in places like Denver, Colorado, I couldn’t believe how many people were there, and it was like that the whole tour, I was just amazed. The LA show is of course great. The New York show was great, but it was these off markets, I guess these B markets, you could say in business terms or whatever, however they talk, to me, a show is a show, I don’t care where it is, but I know the bean counters wanna see progress or whatever, and we definitely delivered on that. So to see all those people there was exciting and they were really hungry for it, of course, we all are hungry for entertainment, and it made the tour just that much better, so we had a great time. Then of course in South America, we were down there playing in some of the places where we (played when) were at our highest points, we were back in those rooms again, it was pretty cool. I can’t say enough how I’m happy I am with the tours that we did do and looking forward to doing some more with these guys. I think there was a great turnout, and I wanna definitely keep the ball rolling with the band. I think we’ve touched on something that we have that legacy/still relevant thing, it’s really strange. Symphony X has always been sort of like that though…We’re looking at next year to get (a new record) all out there and done, that seems to be the plan right now. 11:06
On touring with TSO – I’ll be out there, I believe this is my tenth year, it’s just crazy, time just flies. I think, of course, the pandemic stuff kinda added this sort of lull in there that makes it feel like I haven’t been in as long. In the blink of an eye, it seems like, woosh, a decade has gone by with those guys, and of course, I love that whole organization from top to bottom, just really great people. I was fortunate to get in there before Paul (O’Neill) left us and got to know him and work with him and learn from him, and be a part of his legacy moving forward. He was very complimentary of my ability and things like that. He really liked the fact that I was so versatile. He used me in a lot of different roles, as you know. Everything from an “Old City Bar” blues guy to the grieving father, to the rock guy, everything. Whatever Paul needed me to do, I was happy to do it. I’m happy to be there now to help continue his legacy after he’s gone and deliver every night in a way that he would be proud of. I can’t wait. It’s a great time, of course, to be out. It’s always tough on all those artists being away from our families, but we know how much it means to all the families we are blessed to entertain, so I always keep that in mind. Like Paul always said to me, “Go out there and make them smile, Russ”. People need this right now, and there have been some years, of course, a lot of tumultuous years in that last decade where people were needing that escape and needing that joy with the world at each other’s throats, especially in our country, as you know, with all the political upheaval and then just being able to bring some sort of peace to people. It was a very noble thing that Paul believed in a lot, and so I’m proud to still be a part of that and help deliver that message to people at that time of year. 13:31
On if he would ever record another solo record – Yeah, I’ve been kicking that around for a while. That whole record for me was just a great learning experience, I really wanted to learn how to make records really. I just said, “I like blues, and I like this”, you know the album, there’s no direction really, it’s just me doing a bunch of stuff. Everything from “We Will Fly”, which is like a proggy rock thing to “Losing You”, which is more of a swing or blues thing. Everyone’s been asking me to do one. I sign a lot of those records when I’m out in the world. I’m surprised actually when people own this because I put it out at a time when Symphony X was doing its thing, and I wasn’t really known for anything but being a prog guy. I didn’t make it for any other purpose than to learn and to make music and produce music, play some stuff, and actually the art recording. I went with a very dry sound, as you know, to try and emphasize the fact that the vocal has no effects on it. I just wanted to have this really raw-sounding thing because I was buried underneath the sea of instrumentation in Symphony X, so there was a part of me that just was like, “I just want a wail here and let people hear what I’m feeling”, and I’ve had such a good response to it over the years. I definitely wanna do another one. I’ve been thinking about it, and now you don’t really have to do albums anymore, you can kinda just put songs out, so I’m thinking about that, just maybe doing that. But I know people enjoyed hearing me in that style, and I’ve been kicking around the idea with some friends in Nashville, about doing something along those lines again. The Cry of Love guys really like that record, and I was a big fan of those guys, so who knows maybe I can work with those guys and come up with something cool because they’re all based out of there. That’d be a lot of fun. 16:19
On how he got the nickname “Sir” Russell Allen – Well, that was Arjen (Anthony Lucassen)’s fault. I was a knight at a place called Medieval Times here in New Jersey. I started out in California when I was in high school working for them, I was playing football, a line backer at the time, captain and the defense. One of my defensive lineman guys, I think it was John Gaston was his name, and he said to me, “Hey, Russ, they’re looking for guys to work out, that Medieval Times place”, I’m like, What is that?” He said, “Well, knights and horses and stuff”. At the time, my mom was bugging me to get a job, bcause I was at that age where I just needed money to go out all the time. I’m a big video game guy I love video games, programming and also sort of like geeky stuff that nobody knows about me, and I got fired from the arcade I was working at because I caught playing the games. Actually, this one kid, typical “Come on, man, we won’t get it trouble”, sure enough, he was 18, I was 16. The manager was like, “I know he did this, but I need him because he’s old enough, you guys and he can close the place legally”, so let me go. I got no job, mom’s pissed. John comes up that week, tells about this thing, I go in and audition, and my high school girlfriend says, “Come on, we’ll go on this riding thing and you’ll learn how to ride”. So basically, all we did was go to one of those little trail things, when you got a half dead horse and he walks behind the horse in front of him, and then you walk through the trail and you trot a little bit and you gallop and come back. I’m like, “Yeah, I could totally do this”. So I go there, show up and say, “Yeah, I can ride”. They get me on a horse on a lunge line, which is basically a line where guy sends the center horse rose a circle, and I just fell off the damn thing repeatedly. The guy said, “I thought you said you could ride?” I try it again, gut up, bam, fall off, try again, bam, fall off. I get up, get on the horse again, like four or five times the guy says, “Alright, that’s enough”, I’m thinking that I’m not getting this job. Guy goes, “You’re hired”, I was like, “Really?” He goes, “Yeah, you can’t ride, we know that. But the fact that you got up and got back on the horse every single time, you’re the type of guy we’re looking for”, I’m like, “Okay, well, tell me when I start”, “You start at 5:00 am tomorrow”. So what I had to do in the beginning was learn how to groom the horses and care for the horses, it was a whole process before I even got on a horse, there was months of that, and then of course, I stunt work stuff took a while, took me, about six months really to get into the actual show where I was actually performing in the show, and that’s how it all started. I was with them for about 15 years. And so during that time when I was still working at Medieval Times, I had done the first Star One record with Arjen, and I guested on the Universal Migrator record. When I went out to see him and stuff, we got to talking and I was still working out, and so I was actually doing my workouts in his backyard when I was over there, because you have to stay in shape to do that show, not just a physical shape, you have to do the move, so it’s like a dancer, so I was remembering on my moves and my fights, I had to get right back home in a week and go back into a triple show cycle where we were doing three shows a day, every day but two. So I was very committed. So he was like, “Oh my God. Sir Russell Allen”. So then he put that on the darn album, and that was it, man. From then on out, everyone was like, “Oh, he’s a knight” and I don’t have any official title or anything, or like a Royal Family, anywhere on the planet. If you were a betting man and you put me on a horse with the lance and some guy who’s been knighted by somebody these days, chances are, I’m gonna win. I’m more of the traditional knight, than those knights out there today. That was the ongoing joke too. Yes, I was trained in the Western martial arts by those guys, and I made a lot of great friends there. My best friends still keep in touch with them. So it’s kind of like my college fraternity, if you will, of those group of people that I still have in my life, and I’m very grateful for that. I met my wife there. It was great, it was a great experience. 18:42
