“We’ve taken a different approach on this record. We wanted to do something much bigger. We wanted a concept record and to tell a story. In the past we’ve written the music and Jake [guitar] and I would sit down and write the music and demo it, then Andy [vocals] would write lyrics. This process was a little different, we had the story pretty much written then we wrote music to the storyline. It was like we were writing an opera to libretto. It turned out like a rock opera.

“We wanted to make the songs great. The root of the songs and the melody was written first and then the complex guitar solos and structures came after that. Then there was the matter of tying the songs together with musical interludes.”