MICHAEL ROMEO Explains Why SYMPHONY X’s New Album Is Taking A While

Symphony X released nine albums between 1994 and 2015, though 2025 will mark 10 years without a new record. So what’s going on in the Symphony X camp? According to guitarist and main songwriter Michael Romeo, the new stuff is coming – it’s just taking a while. Romeo said in an interview with Coffee With Ola that he’s got roughly three hours of new Symphony X sitting around, but he’s largely been derailed by touring so much now that album sales don’t pay the bills.

“With us it’s not like, ‘oh yeah we’re just going to write one single and then just have a bunch of filler,’ you know? It’s like, everything’s got to be as good as it could be,” said Romeo as transcribed by Metal Injection. “So yeah, it gets harder and it takes longer. Then you’re throwing COVID and a bunch of other things and then it’s just like, ‘oh shit. Now it’s like, I don’t know eight years or something.’ I lost track.”

Romeo continued: “We have been [working on the record], too. It’s just that now what’s different now than in the past is that we could take a bunch of time off. There would be some royalties from CDs back in the day coming in to kind of float the downtime, and [we could] really get the record done and then come back out, have a new record, and tour. So now it’s like, ‘well that money is gone’ so we have to tour a little bit keep things going, then work on the record, go back on tour, you know? It’s been like that for a while.

“For me I mean, you know I do most of the writing. So for me it’s hard because you’re sitting in the studio for whatever, a month, [and you’re like] ‘I got this idea’ and you’re trying to put these things together and it’s like, ‘oh we got to go on tour now, do our thing.’ Then you come back and it’s like ‘what the fuck was I working on again?’ Like, was this riff here? So you’re trying to arrange all this stuff. So you have all these new ideas, so then you keep adding. Now there’s plenty of material. Like three hours of stuff right now, but now it’s actually making sense of it.”

Romeo later noted that he’s done writing new Symphony X and needs to move on to arranging once the band is off the road.

“I mean it’s going to take some time to organize everything. It’s not like there’s nothing there. It’s not like, ‘oh man we have to start from scratch.’ There’s quite a bit. It’s actually overwhelming. I never remember being this overwhelmed by the amount of stuff, ’cause you know over last year and a half or whatever, every time there was a break it’s like ‘okay I’ll write something’ or you know it’s like, ‘oh I didn’t stop’ and ‘oh, let me finish this. It was like, boom –I got all these ideas and they just kept going. So now it’s like, ‘all right no more writing. Now more arranging.'”