ARJEN LUCASSEN’S Supersonic Revolution – new track out

ARJEN LUCASSEN’S SUPERSONIC REVOLUTION
TO RELEASE GOLDEN AGE OF MUSIC 19 May 2023 VIA MUSIC THEORIES RECORDINGS / MASCOT LABEL GROUP

Arjen Lucassen on “Rise Of The Starman”:
 
“My guess is that a lot of people will think this lyric is about David Bowie. But they would only be partly right… it is actually about his fictional character Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy was an alien character that Bowie created back in the early 70s with his album ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’. I have to admit that I never really understood the deeper meaning behind this concept album, but I did my best to give it my own spin here! Alien creatures land on Earth with a mission to set the children free. The aliens only have 5 years to do this, but they fail hopelessly. Ziggy dies on stage. But… Bowie lived on, and how!”
 
You think you know Arjen Lucassen? Towering Dutch prog rock polymath? The man behind the super successful prog rock conceptualists Ayreon? Not to mention his prog metal of Star One and Guilt Machine? Enormous overarching concept albums about space and time, packed to the hilt with special guests that read like a who’s who of modern day progressive rock? Arjen Lucassen? Well, think again…
 
Supersonic Revolution, the band behind ‘Golden Age Of Music’, are simply five men: Arjen on bass, long-standing keyboard player Joost van den Broek, guitarist Timo Somers, drummer Koen Herfst and singer Jaycee. Five men rocking out and having one hell of a time doing it.
 
The whole project grew from a request to provide a track for a cover CD for the German music magazine Eclipsed. “They asked if I had any cover versions lying around,” he recalls. “I said, ‘No but I’ll happily record one for you.’ So, they gave me a list of bands and I saw a ZZ Top song ‘I Heard It On The X’ that I really like. I said I could record it for them, but then they told me it had to be ready in one week…”
 
“I was like ‘Oh my god!’. I contacted my favourite musicians in Holland via WhatsApp and literally within 30 minutes I had assembled five people. A band basically. From there the seed was sown in Lucassen’s mind. ‘I want to form a band. And I want to simply have fun!’.

“I’m a perfectionist as you know, so I’m always sending musicians their parts back and asking them to change stuff,” he acknowledges. “But this was all brilliant. We were having fun, calling and WhatsApping all the time, and within a week we had a complete product.” He continues, “Also I wanted to have an up-beat, positive project.”

“I was like, let’s form a band and let’s write songs in the style of the 70s, and have the lyrics be a celebration of all the memorable things from that time, because those were my formative years,” he enthuses. “But I didn’t want it to sound like the 70s because that’s already been done, and I can’t do it any better than ‘Stargazer’ or ‘Kashmir’.”

“The guys are all younger than me – around 30 – so they weren’t even alive yet in the 70s. So, it was a great way for me to make 70s music with lots of Hammond and blistering guitars, but to update it to this time.”

The end result is 11 tracks of high energy, progressively inclined heavy rock that swings with the kind of groove Deep Purple rocked with in the early to mid-1970s. “This album is not a typical prog album. It’s not Yes or Genesis. But it’s not a metal album either. There’s a track called ‘Burn it Down’,” Lucassen notes, “it’s totally based on ‘Smoke On The Water’ but written from the perspective of the ‘stupid with a flare gun’ mentioned in the original lyrics.

The album also features covers of some legendary songs given the Arjen Lucassen treatment as bonus tracks: T-Rex’s ‘Children of the Revolution,’ ZZ Top’s ‘Heard It On The X,’ Earth Wind and Fire’s ‘Fantasy’ and Roger Glover’s ‘Love Is All.’

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the real Arjen Lucassen. Job done. Having fun.

Arjen Lucassen’s Supersonic Revolution Online
facebook.com/ArjenLucassenOfficial twitter.com/arjenlucassen
youtube.com/user/ArjenALucassen