CRIMSON GLORY TRIVIA
Trivia
When Hibria's 2004 debut album Defying the Rules was reissued in Japan by Spiritual Beast, the reissue added two cover versions as bonus tracks for the Japanese edition only, and one of them was Crimson Glory's "Painted Skies"; the other was Pantera's "Hard Ride". The label's product page lists the pair as tracks 11 and 12 of the reissue, POCE-16053.
The organisers bill Crimson Glory's appearance at Keep It True Japan 2027 as the band's first show in Japan since 1989. CHROSH Bookings named the band among the first acts on 8 November 2026, for the main festival at Club Citta' in Kawasaki on 12 and 13 November 2027, with the line "First Japan show since 1989!". Singer Travis Wills called playing Japan a long-held dream of his, and guitarist Ben Jackson said the band was very excited to be returning.
Before they were Crimson Glory, the musicians played as Pierced Arrow and then as Beowulf. The band profile that BraveWords Records, the band's current label, attached to its signing announcement in June 2024 traces the name through those two before it settled on Crimson Glory, and places the formation in Sarasota, Florida, in 1983. A 2018 feature in the web magazine Crystal Logic tells the same story: Crimson Glory grew out of Pierced Arrow and Beowulf as a new band, in Sarasota, that year.
The vinyl edition of Chasing The Hydra was released and distributed by No Remorse Records in several versions. BraveWords Records' announcement lists a special liquid-filled LP, limited to 100 hand-numbered copies, alongside a "Hydra's Breath" edition of 100, yellow-and-black splatter and half-orange, half-red editions of 200 each, and black vinyl, all pressed at 180 grams with a lyric insert. No Remorse's own online store also offered an exclusive box set of 100 numbered copies holding a gold LP, a cassette, the CD and a photo signed by the whole band. BraveWords Records announced the album's worldwide release for 17 April 2026 on digital services, CD and vinyl.
Crimson Glory's silver masks were, in Jeff Lords's words, "an afterthought". The bassist said in 2018 that the music could stand on its own and that the masks and the image were a device for launching a few unknown players from Florida into the metal world; with their faces hidden, the band gained an air of mystery, and the masks even put them on magazine covers. Guitarist Jon Drenning describes the aim as a mystical aura and a way of keeping the players from upstaging the music, as well as a look that no other band had at the time. Midnight, asked in 2005 whether the masks had been his idea, said they were not.
Between the first and second albums the masks were cut in half, and the idea was Jeff Lords's. The full-face masks hid every expression and made the stage unbearably hot. On a long drive to the next show, Lords recalls, someone had left a music magazine in the van with Duran Duran on the cover, and he idly drew silver half masks onto their faces with a felt-tip pen. He showed the drawing to the others and proposed slicing each man's mask diagonally, with a different cut for each, which kept the mystery while letting their faces show and made breathing a good deal easier. The band photographs in the booklet of the Japanese CD of Transcendence show the result: five half masks, no two cut alike, with Midnight's leaving his mouth uncovered.
The comeback brought new masks and then a decision to do without them. In May 2025 Ben Jackson said the band had tried modern, futuristic masks in 2024 to launch its new look, but was already moving towards appearing bare-faced; the fans had seen every variation, full face, half face or the new style, and that the band could go either way, and the masks were no longer really needed. A year later Jeff Lords said the members had agreed that this phase of their career should be closed, not least because so many bands wear masks these days. When he sees someone in the crowd wearing a metal mask, he added, he knows it is a die-hard fan.
"Lost Reflection" is the one song on the debut album Crimson Glory that was not re-recorded for it. Jeff Lords says the band signed with Par Records on the strength of demos made at Morrisound's first studio in Tampa, and that all of those songs were recorded again for the album, with this one the exception. It is also one of the pieces Midnight had written on acoustic guitar before he joined. Midnight named it in 2005, together with "Painted Skies", as a song he wrote on his own, and called himself the "mellow half" of the band: Jon Drenning and Lords wrote the heavier music, he brought his melodies into it, and the mixture was where the band's character came from. In 2026 his successor Travis Wills said he had taken care to get the song's inflections right, since it was such a personal song for Midnight and one the fans hold dear.
"Painted Skies" on Transcendence also began as a piece Midnight had written on acoustic guitar before he joined. Jeff Lords says Midnight had never listened to heavy metal before meeting the band and was not always keen to see his folk-style songs reworked as metal. Years later the same song became the test for his successor. Travis Wills, announced as the new singer in December 2023, recorded "Painted Skies" first, at Lords's request; he sent a version, told the band he could sing it much better and recorded it again. Ben Jackson remembers that Wills caught the emotion of the song in a voice of his own instead of imitating Midnight, and Lords says that within a day or two Wills was singing on demos of new material.
The drums on Transcendence were assembled with a Synclavier. Jon Drenning says the instrument was new at the time and Def Leppard were making heavy use of it; someone working at Morrisound happened to own one, and the band adopted it in the hope of sounding more cutting-edge, which set them apart from most metal bands of the day. Jeff Lords explains that the drum tracks combined the Synclavier with real cymbals played by Dana Burnell, an approach that took a lot of trial and error and gave the album its solid, machine-like feel. The booklet of the Japanese CD credits the Synclavier programming to Jim Morris and Lex Macar.
Producer Jim Morris was relentless about detail on Transcendence. Jon Drenning recalls him insisting on take after take while the band spent long hours perfecting every instrument's sound and every member's performance, Midnight's vocals above all. Morris was keen to experiment with amps, microphones and drums, and when it came to the mix he asked the band to trust him, then surprised them with what he did on "In Dark Places" and the title track. The booklet of the Japanese CD credits Jim Morris and his brother Tom Morris as producers, with Drenning and the band as co-producers, and its backing-vocal credits hand the brothers comic roles: Tom Morris for a "kruschev impression" and Jim Morris as "mission commander", listed alongside "the Red Death Mob" and "The Dragon Beast".
The painting on the front of Transcendence is credited to Takashi Terada, and the artwork as a whole to Jon Drenning. On the back of the Japanese CD a Kabbalistic Tree of Life, its ten spheres labelled by name and its paths marked with Hebrew letters, is ringed by lines in an unfamiliar script. Drenning has explained that he combined the Tree of Life with ancient Egyptian Coptic to add to the band's mystery and to reflect what the lyrics and the music were about. He had spent hours in libraries since he was young reading esoteric books on the world's great mysteries and religions, Midnight was just as drawn to the subject, and both believed firmly in an afterlife, which they tried to convey through the songs.
Midnight wrote most of Crimson Glory's lyrics. Jon Drenning remembers him working alone late into the night by candlelight, filling small spiral-bound notebooks and rewriting until the metre, the rhyme and the feeling were right, down to a single vowel. The others sometimes supplied a central passage or a bridge. The four lines of "In Dark Places" printed on the back of the Japanese CD of Transcendence are one example: Midnight wrote the first two and Drenning the other two. Drummer Dana Burnell also contributed words, to "Red Sharks" and "Dream Dancer" among others, and the US CD credits the lyrics of "Red Sharks" to Burnell and Drenning.
Par Records, the first home of the debut album Crimson Glory, was a small independent label in Florida run by a man and his wife. According to Jeff Lords, Par sold the rights to Roadrunner Records as soon as the album was finished, and that is how the band came to be on Roadrunner. Ben Jackson tells it the same way: the first record came out on Par, a small Florida label, and Roadrunner picked up both that record and Transcendence.
Wade Black's phone number spent five years in Jon Drenning's drawer before he sang on Astronomica. Drenning and Jeff Lords had seen him singing with a local band at a small event in Tampa and were both struck by the power he had on stage. They introduced themselves after the show and told him so, and Drenning kept the number on a scrap of paper. Five years later, when the time felt right, he dug it out and rang Black out of the blue to ask whether he would sing on demos the band were recording at Drenning's house. As far as Drenning remembers, Black was working at a garage, fixing cars, at the time.
Strange and Beautiful started with demos made at a house by the beach. Jeff Lords recalls that after the Transcendence tours Jon Drenning and Midnight were living there together, and that among the first ideas the two put down on Drenning's recording gear were what became "Strange and Beautiful" and "In the Mood". When the band was shopped to a major label, the A&R man loved the song "Strange and Beautiful" so much that he asked whether they could write a whole album in that style. Drenning, for his part, had pictured a double album: one disc of the songs he and Midnight wrote together, the other of the band's established progressive metal. That never happened, but several of the heavier songs first meant for Strange and Beautiful, among them "Touch the Sun", "War of the Worlds" and "Edge of Forever", turned up years later on Astronomica.
Todd La Torre, who became Crimson Glory's singer in 2010, came to the band as a drummer. The band's announcement described a man who had spent 22 years behind the kit in hard rock and metal bands around Tampa Bay while his ambitions as a singer went largely unfulfilled. The opening came from Matt LaPorte, guitarist of Jon Oliva's Pain, who had heard La Torre sing only a few times when he casually suggested him to Jon Drenning in 2009; soon afterwards La Torre was standing in the band's rehearsal room. Drummer Dana Burnell said he was blown away on the very first night, and La Torre's first public appearance with the band came as one of seventeen guest performers at ProgPower USA X. In a 2013 interview La Torre credited his friend LaPorte with the introduction and said the stage felt like home, since he had been performing on it as a drummer from the age of 14.
Travis Wills was announced as Crimson Glory's new singer in December 2023 before he had met the band in person. He and Jeff Lords had been Facebook friends for years, regularly sparring over each other's posts, and when Lords asked whether he would like to sing a few of the band's songs, Wills, then fronting Infidel Rising in Dallas, recorded them himself and went on to add vocals to the new songs "Triskaideka" and "Indelible Ashes". Ben Jackson says several songs were finished, mixed and mastered that way, and the band announced Wills before he had even flown to Florida for a rehearsal. The full line-up rehearsed only twice before its first show, at Keep It True Rising IV in Würzburg, Germany, on 5 October 2024, Crimson Glory's first concert in more than twelve years. As a boy, Wills has said, he had the band's posters on his wall.
The title track of Chasing The Hydra was sung again after it had been tried on stage. Travis Wills says three new songs were ready by Keep It True Rising in October 2024, "Triskaideka", "Indelible Ashes" and "Chasing The Hydra", and that the band played "Triskaideka" and "Chasing The Hydra" there; the latter fell flat live, so he asked to redo it with more energy and recorded the vocal again to a different melody. Jeff Lords wrote almost all of the music. Wills reworked the vocal lines of the two songs that existed before he joined and wrote every melody and lyric for the rest. The album holds nine songs; another was meant to be on it, but time ran out, and the release was put back twice because studio openings and the members' schedules would not line up.
The riff of the title track on Chasing The Hydra is a salute to "Red Sharks" from Transcendence. Jeff Lords says the new album deliberately set out to build a bridge back to Transcendence, and that on the title track he took the descending riff of "Red Sharks" and turned it into a rising one. He had written the opening and closing riff of "Red Sharks" in the first place, so he felt free to borrow from himself; he also wrote many of the key riffs on the first two albums, from "Masque of the Red Death" and "Eternal World" to "Mayday" and "Queen of the Masquerade". Ben Jackson says the plan was to lean towards Transcendence, which he calls the band's most acclaimed album, and that the nods to the old style were intended, not a sign of running short of new ideas.
Even Ben Jackson cannot say quite how "Lonely" came about. In 2026 he described it as the one song on the first two albums that lay outside the band's usual style, something that simply came out of them at a time when they were writing constantly, and he acknowledged that its accessibility had made it a fan favourite and one of the band's best-known songs. The song had a music video, and in its issue of 7 July 1989 the American radio trade paper The Hard Report wrote that the band was going "over the top" with "Lonely". Still, Jackson says, a band built on technique and progressive writing did not go looking for another "Lonely" when it made Chasing The Hydra.
In its issue of 7 July 1989 the American radio trade paper The Hard Report placed Transcendence at No. 6 on its "Hard Hitters" chart, up from No. 8 the week before. A column in the same issue, after reporting the band's success with "Lonely", named "Lady of Winter" and "Masque of the Red Death" as the tracks to follow.
Kamelot and Crimson Glory, both Florida bands, have crossed paths more than once. Asked in 2015 whether Florida in the 1990s had been death-metal territory, Kamelot guitarist Thomas Youngblood replied that he had grown up seeing Savatage and Crimson Glory, so the state had its metal bands too, and he has recalled that Kamelot's first trip to Greece, in 2000, was made with Crimson Glory. On 16 September 2006, when Kamelot played the State Theater in St. Petersburg, Jon Drenning, Dana Burnell, Jeff Lords and second drummer and singer Jesse Rojas joined Ben Jackson during the Ben Jackson Group's opening set to play Crimson Glory's "War of the Worlds", "Masque of the Red Death", "Dragon Lady" and "Red Sharks".