Millenium guitarist Ralph Santolla is a busy man. His band have just released their fourth album, ‘Jericho’, he’s recently been part of Iced Earth’s latest album and tour, and he played on Cryptic Vision’s ‘Moments Of Clarity’ CD. As we speak (literally), he’s in a van with Sebastian Bach, somewhere in New York State between Albany and Long Island.

‘Jericho’ is heavier than previous Millenium albums, Ralph along with long-time guitar partner Shane French, and with original singer Todd Plant back in the band, have made an album with less of the layered harmonies and polished sound of their earlier records, however not all of these things were planned. Ralph takes up the story…"Well, the more heavy part was, but not the less polished," he begins. "There were tons of problems with everything about making that record, it’s just like it was fucking cursed – just trying to get a note on tape was like finding the Holy Grail. Basically, because of all the mishaps that occurred while we were making it, I just ran out of time - I had to come home and go on the Iced Earth tour. So, there are overdubs missing, and vocals, and things in the mix that just had to be left as they were because I simply didn’t have any more time. There would have been more keyboards – not Journey-esque keyboards but more orchestral things, and the arrangements would have been more elaborate if I’d gotten to finish it – but having said that, I think 90-95% of it works in the form that it was left in. I did mean it to be heavier – ‘Hourglass’ should have been much heavier too, the kind of record me and Jorn (Lande) did together should have been a lot more metal, but for whatever reason he had some songs that were more Sweet influenced – we just started writing together and that’s what came out. My intention this time was to go back to stuff that I was originally inspired by, and still listen to - like early Dio, ‘Heaven and Hell’ era Black Sabbath, Ozzy with Randy Rhoads, Thin Lizzy, Accept – that sort of stuff. It doesn’t sound like any of those bands, but it’s a lot more like that than anything we’d done previously."

After trying to get something going with three other singers, including Jorn Lande, original singer Todd Plant sang on the new album. Santolla relates the tale in his usual frank manner, "Okay, we’d finished ‘Hourglass’ and we had four cover songs done – we were going to do a complete covers album – then, there were a few problems that dragged on – then I did my instrumental album, which also dragged on endlessly. After that I had a period where I had a huge amount of personal problems, so I just kind of left everything – at the same time, Jorn started doing the Masterplan album with Roland (Grapow). He actually called me to tell me he’d been offered that, and I said "Dude, you’ve just got to do that because you can probably make a lot of money, and we’re not doing anything." It wasn’t ever that I didn’t want to work with him anymore, or that he didn’t want to work with me, his thing just got going with Masterplan and I’ve been doing a lot of things too. I’m sure – actually I’m positive that we’ll do something together again in the future – it won’t be a Millenium album – but because of what was happening to both of us, it just kind of fizzled out because of lack of attention to it – but we never had any personal falling out or anything like that whatsoever."

Ralph’s problems also led to losing another singer, ex-Harem Scarem and Emerald Rain drummer Darren Smith. "Well, we spoke to Darren, and he was into it," the guitarist recalls, "but like I said, I went through a really dark night of the soul, and I just left everything – and you can’t expect someone to hang around for two years when you haven’t written a single note of music with them. I still feel really bad for him, but everything that’s occurred has been because of my personal problems, it affected everything."

You would think that a Florida band recording much of their album in the UK, at Mastertone Studios in Runcorn, would have logistically been a nightmare. Not so. "No, it didn’t make it more difficult that we were recording in England," he counters. "There were little problems involved in that – but originally this album was going to have a singer called Johnny Leanerts – who’s a guy who sings on this project I have called Stare – and he can sing in a much heavier and more modern style, and he’s a wailing guitar player too. For whatever reason we weren’t getting things together, and we really had to get this album done before the Iced Earth tour – so I went and got Todd and we did some vocals in one studio – just scratch vocals which I left with an engineer – I had to go back to England to do some guitars so I just left them to it. Todd actually did a good job, but because of the engineer the audio files were unusable, so we had to go and do the vocals again – it was things like that, that made it take forever." It wasn’t all bleak though, one of the positive things about the experience was working with a top producer. "One thing that made it better about doing it in England is that Pete Coleman is a fucking genius!" enthuses Ralph. "He’s such an incredible engineer and producer – and he’s a virtuoso musician – just his whole vibe and personality is really conducive to getting me to be productive. From the moment I met him, I just wished I’d worked with him my whole life – I can’t overstate how talented he is, and how much I learned from just being around him – he’s just fantastic. He’s the kind of guy that - anything I can think of, he can make it happen with the minimum of fuss – he’s absolutely fucking brilliant and I can not wait to work with him again. If I could pick anybody in the world to work with, it would be Pete. Actually I have a project I’m working towards called Ex-Cathedra – this is a long-term goal – it’ll be me, Steve DiGeorgio – who’s in Testament, and was in Death with me, Gene Hoglan – who’s in Strapping Young Lad, and was also in Death – those two guys are metal legends – and Tom Englund from Evergrey singing. It’s going to be sort of an epic, romantic, melancholy, kind of metal, with real strings, and religious-themed metal tunes – I’m really excited about that. My idea is to have Pete do part of that – we have another couple of people in mind as well because Gene is in Vancouver, Steve is in San Francisco, I’m in Florida, and Tom is in Gothenberg, Sweden – so it’s going to be expensive no matter what we do – but depending on where we work on different aspects of it will determine who we work with. I definitely want Pete to be involved in that – I can’t say enough nice things about Pete Coleman."

I tell Ralph how pleased I am that he’ll be working with Tom Englund - one of my favourite singers – and that I’m looking forward to seeing Evergrey at next month’s Bloodstock festival. "There’s a possibility I may be coming over for that – I want to see my buddies in Evergrey, and also I want to see Children Of Bodom." In his spell with Iced Earth, Santolla did a leg of the tour with both bands as special guests. "I tell you, if you want to see the best guitarist I’ve seen in the last 15 years, watch Children of Bodom, their guitarist Alexi Laiho is fucking amazing! Those guys phoned me at six this morning, they said "Dude, seeing as you’re playing with Sebastian Bach, you look like a monkey so play like the business," and hung up. It was pretty funny – they were all drunk."

It’s no surprise that Ex-Cathedra will have religious themes in their lyrics, Evergrey and Millenium have both touched on it in the past, in fact there are references in almost every song on ‘Jericho’. This is clearly Santolla’s doing, "That sort of thing is always on my mind anyway," he says, "it’s one of my major interests in life – because I’m philosophical by nature I have a kind of searching personality and I want to know why everything is. It’s interesting to me – in fact almost an obsession – and if you couple that with the music on ‘Jericho’ being more aggressive – it has to have more serious lyrics. I don’t like writing lyrics about fantasy stuff and monsters – so it’s like the Peanut Butter thing – two great tastes that taste great together – serious sounding music and those kind of lyrics just seem to go together to me. I’m not some religious nut, but – even though my outward personality to people who know me, maybe it doesn’t seem like it – I am religious. Then there are other things – there’s a song on that album called ‘Let There Be Light’ – even though it mentions things about God in it – what it’s about though is the war in Iraq, and that a certain population of the world are up in arms that the United States and Britain went into Iraq and got rid of that fucking murderer that had been abusing his people for years. The song is about the people demonstrating in some countries, where were they when women were being raped and men were being tortured? I totally agree with the words of Thomas Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence – as trite as this may sound to sophisticated Europeans – he said "Every human being is endowed by God with the right to determine their own destiny and be free, and no other man has the right to take that away from them". So, even though a song’s about something that isn’t overtly religious, there can be things about that that creep into it."

Every Millenium album is different from the last, Ralph doesn’t even give me time to finish the question. "I fucking knew you were going to ask that." he laughs. "Well, yes I do get bored with doing the same thing – that’s true – but it’s also because I’m disorganised in my life too – it’s hard for me to go in a straight line. I’ve never had anyone to give me, or the band, enough direction about what we should do – so it always just comes out being what it is. It would probably have been much better if we’d just picked a style and stuck with it, and refined it – but on the other hand we tend to not repeat ourselves, so I guess there are good and bad things about that."

There’s a new Millenium ‘Best Of..’ CD on the way, the bonus disc of which includes the four songs from the proposed covers album that were actually finished. – MSG’s ‘On and On’, Rainbow’s ‘I Surrender; Jefferson Starship’s ‘Jane’, and Sweet’s ‘Love Is Like Oxygen’. I ask Ralph if that means that the project is now officially abandoned for good. "It’s hard to say," he replies. "We recorded drums, guitars, and keyboards for ‘Neon Knights’ by Black Sabbath, ‘Shout It Out Loud’ by Kiss, ‘Love To Love’ by UFO, ‘Perfect Strangers’ by Deep Purple, ‘Love Ain’t No Stranger’ by Whitesnake, and one other tune I can’t remember off the top of my head. You never know what’s going to happen, we could finish it with Jorn someday. I don’t know so I can’t predict."

Earlier, Ralph mentioned a new modern rock band that he’s been working on, he played me some of this a few months ago – at the time they didn’t have a name, but now they’ve settled on Stare. "Yes, that’s the name of the band," he confirms. "We’ve got seven tunes done - we’re trying to get a deal, so we need to write a few more songs, finish the whole thing up, and we’ll just wait and see what happens. We could probably get a deal with a small label really easily, but I’d rather get a really good deal for that stuff because it could be on the radio – and one likes to get paid occasionally. It’s really good stuff – you heard some of it in the studio in England – I’m really happy with it – it doesn’t even have any guitar solos or anything, it’s all about the songs and the sound, and I’m really happy with the way it came out. Speaking of Stare, some of the songs have a girl from a British band called Seasons End doing some pseudo-operatic vocals on it – she’s really good, her name’s Becky – her band are playing at Bloodstock as well. I hope people check them out – they’re kinda gothic."

Like a lot of people who know Ralph, I was happy for him when he got to tour the world as guitarist for the increasingly popular Iced Earth, but unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be as good for him as he’d hoped. But first Ralph backtracks, "I’ve known Jon Schaffer since back when Eyewitness was just me and Oliver (Hanson) practising in a warehouse in Florida, his band Purgatory used to practise at a warehouse a couple of blocks down, so I’ve known him through that and through Morrissound studios for a long time. I’ve known Jim Morris, their producer, since I was a little kid, and kind of grew up in that studio – which is also how I got the Death gig. Anyway, they fired the other guitarist they had, and Jim called me from Jon’s house where they were doing guitars, and said "Do you want to come up and play solos?" so I said "Sure." I went up there – it took one day, and Jon was apparently thrilled with what I did so we arranged that I would do the tours. I came back from England two weeks before that tour started to learn the tunes and get ready to go do it, but I got so sick when I got home – I was bed-ridden, literally, for ten days – so I was a little behind with the tunes. I get there and start rehearsing, and some of his guitar parts are very difficult to play – as a matter of fact, some of them I don’t think anyone but him could play them because they’re so idiosyncratic. They’re so peculiar to his way of playing guitar – just like I do things that I know Marty Friedman or Paul Gilbert couldn’t play – not because they’re not incredible guitarists – it’s just my thing, you know what I mean? Anyway, I started playing and I saw some weird things early on when we were rehearsing – and I just dismissed them because I thought it must be me – I was out of my element and I was a bit nervous – I didn’t know what to expect. I was trying to cram all these tunes and I saw a lot of things – by this time I realised that it wasn’t me – but I had a fantastic time for 90% of the tour. I did avoid Jon Schaffer quite a bit – I tried to not be on our bus when I didn’t have to be, or in the dressing room or anything, because – to put it kindly – he’s a very negative person – he’s not a nice guy, and that’s not trashing him to say that – he’s not a person who goes out of his way to show compassion for other human beings. I had a pretty good time – I was sick with the flu for about three weeks of it, which was absolutely horrible because I couldn’t get well due to not getting enough rest – so I felt pretty bad for some of it. I will say though that Tim Owens, Jimmy McDonagh, Bobby Jarzombek, and Richard Christy are fantastic people, and I’m so glad that I got to know them and be friends with them – and I did learn a lot about playing guitar and a lot of other things from being around Jon. I don’t personally hate him or despise him, or anything like that – but he’s not a person that I care to be around ever again. There was also a dispute about money that sealed it for me that I would never put myself in a situation like that ever again. I also got to make friends with Evergrey and Children Of Bodom, and they are some of the best people I’ve ever met – I absolutely love them – and any of the bad stuff that happened was worth it a hundred times over for all the good people I met and new friends that I made."

So, on his last day with Iced Earth he got an offer that he couldn’t refuse. "We played at Bang Your Head in Germany," he begins, "and Sebastian Bach played too– he saw me play and asked me if I wanted to be in his band – I was already interested in doing that when later that evening the ….accounting irregularity let’s say, came to a head and from that moment I wasn’t going to be in Iced Earth no matter what. So I didn’t quit Iced Earth to join Sebastian, I would have quit Iced Earth anyway."

The ex-Skid Row singer hasn’t really worked with any great writers since he went solo, so hooking up with Ralph could be good for both of them. "Last night we did our fourth show," says Santolla enthusiastically, "they’re going really, really well and it’s a lot of fun – it’s like night and day from the experience I was in before. I’m thrilled by it – everybody is so cool and the vibe is so different – I’d say that 99% of it – there’s no perfect situation in life – but this is great for me. We’re already playing some of my tunes – Sebastian and his wife have bent over backwards to be nice to me – and coming from where I did I really appreciate it. We’ll be writing together in the future – don’t ask me what the direction is going to be – but it should be fairly heavy."

So, did Ralph ever envisage playing with Sebastian Bach, and is he enjoying playing those old Skid Row songs? "Not particularly," he laughs, "the thing is though – the people that are paying $20 a ticket, a lot of them are paying it because they want to hear ’18 and Life’, they want to see him sing that, or ‘Youth Gone Wild’ – and I totally respect that. It would be ripping them off – which I’m not into doing – to not play the Skid Row songs that they want to hear – but I’m actually pretty shocked at the amount of unknown stuff we play. We play some of my stuff – we play some stuff that Randy, the other guitar player, brought from his previous band – so I’d say we probably play half new stuff that people have never heard – and it’s also surprising to see how well the, mostly female, audience responds to it." A mostly female audience, how weird must that be? "Yeah, it’s weird but in a fantastic way – I’ve made myself adjust," he says, resigned to his fate.

Finally, with quite a few albums under his belt now – I wondered which he was most proud of? He pauses before answering, "It’s hard to say – every album to me – and probably to the other guys who’ve played and written on them – every album is filled with the spirit of the time it was recorded. They’re products of what was going on and fuelled by circumstances, like ‘Messiah Complex’ by Eyewitness – hearing one note of it, or even thinking about it, takes me right back to what was going on at that time. With ‘Hourglass’ – we’d got Jorn and we did the album really quick, we went all over the place – it was so much fun, but so much stress at the same time. I’m proud of them for different reasons. The two Eyewitness albums and ‘Angelfire’ I probably put the most work into because I had the most time – I’m proud of ‘Messiah Complex’ because I think it has the best lyrics – that and ‘Jericho’ have the best lyrics – there’s stuff on there that I think is very unique. I’m proud of ‘Jericho’ because it has definitely the best guitar playing and some of the best songs. I’m proud of ‘Hourglass’ because Jorn, in my mind, is one of the best – if not THE best singer ever, and getting to work with someone like that and be friends with them – even though half the time I’d want to strangle him – was a fantastic experience. We have a fairly incendiary personal relationship - I love him to death, but I’m pissed at him most of the time – but to work with someone like that is hugely inspiring – he’s such a brilliant musician. Also Don Airey played on that album – I’m so proud to have worked with someone who’s worked with most of my heroes at their peak, and be accepted, not as a fan, but as another musician by them. So I’m proud of them all for different reasons – but having said that, I’m not overly proud of any of them. I don’t think they’re bad – and I think all of them have an emotional depth that’s lacking in a lot of other melodic hard rock music. But I feel like this….Aerosmith – ‘Toys In The Attic’, Ozzy – ‘Diary Of A Madman’, TNT – ‘Tell No Tales’, Black Sabbath – ‘Heaven & Hell’, UFO – ‘Obsessions’, Thin Lizzy – ‘Black Rose’, I haven’t made a record as good as those yet, that’s the kind of stuff I listen to and love – and that affected me. Until I make a record that good – something that actually matters – to the extent that rock music can matter – I won’t be happy. I’m more concerned with doing the work and coming up with something that has value rather than what people say about it. No offence to you Phil, but reviews in magazines, good or bad, and guys who say "Dude, you rip on guitar" – that stuff isn’t important to me – but if you see someone that you know is a better musician than you at guitar playing, song writing, or whatever, or worse than you – you’re not diminished or enhanced in any way by that experience. There’s no cause and effect in that relationship. But when you tour with people like Children Of Bodom, and Alexi (Laiho), and Janne (Warman), the keyboard player, were really into my guitar playing, and told me frequently – and Don Airey did too – that does matter to me because they’re incredible – and it’s nice to see someone you would look at and say "Wow!", give you respect. It’s like I have a quest – I want to do something great, and I don’t think I’ve done anything, or lived up to my potential yet – there’s always some missing element. So that’s my answer – I’m proud of all of them but I have this unquenched fire or drive – I haven’t done what I’m supposed to do yet. I’ll let you know when I’ve accomplished something close to what I want to do."