Poets and Madmen

Poets and Madmen, the eleventh album, came out in Europe on SPV/Steamhammer in March 2001 (SPV 085-72152 CD); Nippon Crown issued the Japanese edition on 5 April (CRCL-4780), and Nuclear Blast America the American one in April. It was the first record after fifteen years with Atlantic, a move Jon Oliva likened to a rebirth in the 2001 press release. It reached number 7 in Germany, the band's best placing there for a new album. Zak Stevens had left, and Al Pitrelli went to Megadeth while the album was being made, so Jon sang every lead vocal for the first time since Streets ten years before. The press release introduces the band as a quartet of Jon, Chris Caffery, Johnny Lee Middleton and Jeff Plate. According to the old official FAQ, Pitrelli's guitar survives in places such as the end of "Stay with Me a While" and the solos of "Morphine Child" and "The Rumor", and Caffery played nearly everything else. Paul O'Neill produced it with Jon as co-producer. The story begins with three teenagers who break into an abandoned asylum and find a lone patient and his file: he is Kevin Carter, the photographer who won a Pulitzer Prize for his picture of a Sudanese child and a vulture, as the official site's synopsis tells it. The FAQ says that everything apart from what concerns Carter is fiction. Jon summed up the title by saying that Paul was the poet and he the madman. "Morphine Child", close to ten minutes long, was the longest song they had written and stretched the counterpoint singing first tried on "Chance" in 1994, as the press release put it. The Japanese edition adds two live recordings from Germany in 1997. The running order here is the original's as printed.