JEFF SCOTT SOTO: I Don't Know What It's Like To Work 'With' YNGWIE MALMSTEEN

Metal Shrine recently conducted an interview with legendary hard rock singer Jeff Scott Soto (TALISMAN, JOURNEY, YNGWIE MALMSTEEN). A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metal Shrine: When did you realize for the first time, that a professional singer was what you wanted to be?

Jeff Scott Soto: Oh, since I was like five years old! Since I saw Michael Jackson doing it at such an early age. It's so true when you see even things like today like Hannah Montana. They're huge now and, obviously, their fan base are kids that are much younger than them. It's exactly the same thing it was for me when I saw Michael Jackson. "That's what I wanna do! If he can do that, and he's just a few years older than me, why can't I?" It was already in my blood, already in my frame of thought. That's what I want to do for a living and that's all I'm gonna do for a living!

Metal Shrine: Working with Yngwie and those two albums, what do you remember from… you didn't audition, do you remember what songs you played or did you just jam?

Jeff Scott Soto: I remember it like it was yesterday. I met Yngwie and I basically got the call… I was surprised I got the call because they didn't expect the demos that I sent them. I was 16 years old when I sang it and I didn't even expect that I would get listened to and when I found out later, that out of the box of tapes that they brought to Yngwie, only two were taken out and played for him. The first one that they played him was the absolute worst one that was in the box and the second one they played him was my tape. Everything else they didn't bother with. That is amazing to me, that they got this 18-year-old kid who was 16 on the demo and that was good enough to play for Yngwie at that point in time compared to everything else that was sent to him. I went down to the studio to meet him and he was working on the instrumental album and he was kind of cold and reserved. He didn't put any real interest into meeting me. He was in the middle of doing his record and was like, "Yeah, I'll take some time and meet this guy, whatever!" He brought me into a little room, pulled out this acoustic guitar and started playing. "OK, I've got this song so just come up with some melodies!" So I'm kind of singing along and he goes, "OK, this is the chorus and this is the melody for this — ba ba bapa ba!" And I'm just jotting down lyrics as fast as I can and I'm trying to remember the melody and singing it to him, just me and him, like a duet kind of thing and he goes, "Yeah, that sounds pretty cool! Let's put it on tape!" He goes into the control room and they set up the microphone in the room in front of him and they start playing that same song, but with the whole band playing and I was like, "Oh, Jesus, now I've got to sing these lyrics and this melody!" and I'm trying to remember everything right on the spot. I think I even have a copy of that. They mixed me a copy of it on a cassette tape and I still have that somewhere at home. And that was my audition. I basically sang "As Above, So Below" with my kind of fake lyrics and tried to remember the melody and all he remembered was the soaring high notes I was able to hit at the very end and he said, "Man, sounds cool! Let's get together at my house and demo some more songs and we'll see what happens from here!" And it was about three weeks of that, that we did together and which eventually led to "Welcome to the band!"

Metal Shrine: Wow! When was the last time you met Yngwie?

Jeff Scott Soto: I haven't seen Yngwie in a couple of years. I usually run into him at the NAMM show in Anaheim. He lives in Miami and I live in L.A. and I'm all over the world and I'm basically never around anywhere he's at when he's touring or I'm touring, so the last time I saw him… actually I think I saw him in London, he was playing a gig two years ago and then I saw him at the NAMM show, but I didn't see him this last year, so I'll probably run into him in January.

Metal Shrine: I read in an interview from earlier this year where you called him a "mad genius."

Jeff Scott Soto: Yeah, they were asking me if I had to define him in one sentence.

Metal Shrine: Right! If it came up, would you consider working with him again?

Jeff Scott Soto: I don't know! First of all, that's the key sentence right there: "work WITH him?" I don't really know what it's like to work with him, I know what it's like to work FOR him. To work with him might be a conflict of interest, because he's so headstrong and God bless him for it. He's very headstrong and what he wants and how he wants it and what he he's gonna do and really doesn't want or need any input from anybody else, in how to complete that. So that's not really working with him. If he wanted to work on something where I got to put my influence and I got to put who Jeff Scott Soto is, as much as he's getting to put Yngwie Malmsteen in it, then that would be something I would be very interested in, because obviously we could finally put our history together and do something that actually works for both of us, as opposed to me just being hired by him again.

Metal Shrine: I went through your website and there's like tons of stuff. Do you have any idea, roughly, how many albums you've worked on?

Jeff Scott Soto: I think I lost count after 64. (laughs) It sounds crazy and it sounds ludicrous to think that I've sung on more albums than the biggest bands in the world combined. Thinking of how many albums THE ROLLING STONES have done and how many albums any of the biggest bands. AEROSMITH even. Bands that have been around since the '70s and are still going and I've done more albums than them. OK, it's not with the same group, but the idea that I've done over 60 albums, it makes me go, "What? How is that possible?" I don't even know how that's possible for one artist to do, but God I wish everyone of those went multi-platinum! (laughs)

Metal Shrine: How does it generally work? Do people constantly send you demos and stuff or do you look for stuff as well and think that, "Well, this might be cool! I'd love to do something with these guys?"

Jeff Scott Soto: Well, not so much looking for stuff. A lot of that stuff, especially back in the early days, that's how I make my living. I'm in the music business and music is my business. If I don't want to make a living from music, I would turn all that stuff down. Fortunately I have the versatility and the voice and the choices rather, to be able to do these kinds of things. In other ways, it's actually bad for you because it kind of prostitutes you out there. It's like Gene Simmons said the first time I met him. This is many, many years ago, before I did half the stuff that I have out there now, he went, "Oh, Mr. Soto! The man who'll sing on anybody's album for a buck!" and it was true. Back in the day I couldn't turn things down because not only was it means to support myself, but I also looked at it as a challenge to be able to sing on so many different things and to kind of put myself out there and challenge myself as a vocalist, challenge myself as a writer and do all the things that I was influenced by, that might channel into something I would do in the future for myself or that I could take something of myself and put it into something that somebody else wouldn't normally expect of me. It was kind of cool that I could wear all these different shoes and all these different albums and all these different projects, because it was just overextending myself of what I would eventually become.

Metal Shrine: Do you remember when you realized that your choice of career was actually going to work? This is really gonna pay off?

Jeff Scott Soto: I looked at it as I had no choice! This is do-or-die and I'm gonna get rich or die trying, like the 50 Cent movie. It's all about… failure is not an option, as far as I was concerned. There was no other thing for me to do. There was nothing else that I wanted or could do besides singing for a living! There was no other option and it had nothing to do with, "Well, I'm making money now!" or "I'm not making money now." It has everything to do with that this is in my blood. It is the only thing I can and want to do.

Metal Shrine: The stuff that happened when you sang with JOURNEY, was there ever anything put on tape or was it just doing live shows?

Jeff Scott Soto: Yeah, we did one song. It was actually for the last show I sang with them before they fired me. It was a big America celebration polo match or something like that. It's kind of a weird thing. It was organized more like a corporate gig, yet they sold tickets to the public, and with that they asked us to write a song in the theme of celebrating America's history and Jonathan Cain kind of whipped up this kind of ballady type of thing, but the lyrics were about the pilgrims coming here and settling down and fighting for our freedom and all this stuff. It wasn't the normal JOURNEY song and it wasn't meant to actually ever be released. It was only meant for us to write for this event and perform it at this event. We recorded a demo of it, just so we could all kind of whip it up and we sang it at this gig and it never saw the light of day after that. I think later, when they were working with another singer before Arnel, they reworked the song with normal lyrics, like making it more like a love song or a break up song or whatever, but it didn't even end up on the latest album. It was kind of hokey and when you listen to it now you hear this beautiful JOURNEY song with cool melodies and everything and then you hear these lyrics and go, "What?" It didn't really work and I think it actually leaked out there. Some of the fans got wind of it and went, "This is horrible!" Of course this is my one and only representation of me singing for JOURNEY and they go, "This is terrible! No wonder they fired him!" (laughs)

Read the entire interview from Metal Shrine.