But still, it must be pretty vindicating to decide to do this mad, three-part opera album, a sequel to an already massive album, and have people twig to it…
“I honestly don't feel a sense of vindication. I think I've had to learn over the last 16 years since we brought the band back, me and Jimmy, that it's not worth getting into, ‘I'm right, you're wrong.’ You’ve just got to keep keeping on. I remember when AC/DC were playing theatres in America in the ’90s, and Iron Maiden were playing theatres, and everybody declared them dead in America. And lo and behold…
“I guess what I'm trying to say is, you can spend a lot of time getting lost in expectations. And I'm a person who doesn't take into account a lot of expectations, but it affects you in terms of… you feel the pressure of it. It doesn't change my musical decisions, but it's like getting up and knowing it's gonna rain today. Don't get too caught up in the in the plus and minus of it. When you're winning, be humble, and when you're losing, live to fight another day, or something. Somewhere in there is an ethos.”
It’s not your first rodeo.
“Sometimes you're ahead of the curve, and people don't understand what you're doing. And it doesn't mean anybody failed, it's just that sometimes it doesn't line up. For whatever reason, ATUM is lining up for us. It shouldn't, if you look at it on paper: the band is releasing a 33-song concept album, three acts as a rock opera, what the fuck does that mean? Oh, by the way, the boxset has 10 extra songs. I’d see a comment saying, ‘Why can't you just write one good song?’ and be like, ‘Oh, fuck you,’ because I never worked that way. It was always important for me to jump into the ocean and see what happened. And when you jump in the ocean, and it goes well, you can't say, ‘I'm a fucking genius,’ because there's plenty of evidence to suggest I've done a lot of dumb shit that didn't work.”
When you were deep into making the album, you said you were working on four tracks at a time and had loads of things on the stove at once, and the whole thing was a lot to keep on top of. Is it easy to lose sight of things when you’re in that far?
“It's pretty blurry. We work sequentially, so we kept working through the record, and we’d go back to the top and go back through all 33 songs. We did that, like, six or seven times. And I hear me say that to you, and I think, ‘Okay, that makes sense.’ And then I'll hear a song and I can't even imagine how we got where we got. I remember writing it, and I’ll listen to the finished version, and go, ‘Why did they make all those decisions?’ And sometimes it makes sense to me. And other times, I think I could have made better decisions. But I also know I went through it six or seven times. So whatever decision I made, I confirmed it again. And again, and again…
“Bob Dylan said, ‘A song is never finished.’ At some point, I just become exhausted by it. Psychologically, for my own mental health, I have to move on. When I was doing predominantly guitar music in the ’90s, I was in the studio for thousands of hours, layering guitars. But then I have to do all the studio work, too. So, by the time I would come out of that entire cycle from a blank piece of paper to 46 guitars on a track, you know, doing all this crazy Brian May stuff, I was like, ‘Okay, I'm fucking done, get me away from this music.’ So it would be like going to a different restaurant. ATUM was two years of work just to make the record, and the idea went back four or five years.”
To take a break from that, you’re working on more music…
“Yeah. We're actually in the studio now recording the ATUM follow-up. And in contrast to ATUM, it's almost all guitar. Because it feels like that's the opposite of where I just came from, and I wanted to just go back to something really straightforward. What's the fucking drumbeat? What's the bassline? What's the guitar line? Strike a straight road.”