MEGADETH bassist David Ellefson and SONS OF APOLLO vocalist Jeff Scott Soto have been collaborating on some new material recently under the moniker ELLEFSON-SOTO.
When asked by Chris Akin of “The Classic Metal Show” what ELLEFSON-SOTO will sound like, Ellefson responded said: “I look at it like this. When people come to me, they go, ‘Oh, dude. It’s thrash,’ and, ‘It’s heavy,’ it’s, like, I’m already in the greatest thrash band in the history of the world, so I don’t need to do thrash anywhere else. I do that in MEGADETH. I play with the guy who invented the genre. So, to me, when I do other things, it’s fun to expand. And I’m always writing. I bring certain things into MEGADETH that I know are fitting, I think, of that style. There’s a lot of stuff I write that’s not, and I don’t bring it there.
He continued: “This stuff that Jeff and Andy and I are working on, some of it’s quite progressive. And we’re able to go there because of the capabilities that we have. So there’s definitely no lack of musicianship. You’re gonna go, ‘These guys, they’re serious. They know what they’re doing.’ So that’s good. And I think, quite honestly, people would expect that.
“I know for Andy, who’s a few years younger than me and Jeff, and being from Europe, is a pretty good barometer; that’s a good temperature that we can gauge. He even said, he goes, ‘C’mon, Jeff. ‘I Am A Viking’. C’mon. All of us in Europe, we just think that’s…’ Just like people know me from ‘Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying?’ and ‘Holy Wars’, the die has been cast with Jeff with the early days of Yngwie [Malmsteen], of course, and now what he’s been doing recently with SONS OF APOLLO and solo stuff.
“I think the fans, they wanna see us in a certain sphere,” Ellefson added. “But at the same time, we can take a few chances on a couple of things. In fact, the very first song I had Jeff sing on last year was actually a ballad. Which, I think, for me, was great, because I know Jeff can sing the hard stuff… So, quite honestly, the first thing Jeff and I worked on was not some shred Vivaldi neoclassical metal thing; it was not that at all.
“And I think that, for me, actually, quite honestly, got me really excited, going, ‘Okay, there’s a wide berth here of what we can do.’ And I think that’s when we started throwing some ideas back and forth. It just got us all excited going, ‘Wow, this is pretty wide here. We’re not limited to just being a one-trick pony.”
Full interview can be heard below.