By Jim Barber
The music world is actually a pretty small community when you really look at it. Each genre represents a neighbourhood, or village, where everyone knows each other, everybody helps each other (for the most part), and working together is commonplace. Even though as an individual musician, or songwriter you work away and your own creative interests behind the doors of your home, it’s also fun and mutually rewarding to work with your metaphorical musical neighbours.
A few years ago, two veterans of the metal scene, both of whom had admired one another’s work from afar, decided to get together to make a little music – mostly for fun, but also to see what might happen. The result of the meeting of the musical minds between noted bassist David Ellefson, best known for his long tenure in Megadeth, as well as his current projects, The Kings of Thrash and Dieth, and also his David Ellefson Show podcast (available on Apple podcasts and Spotify), and vocalist extraordinaire Jeff Scott Soto (Yngwie Malmsteen, Sons of Apollo, Journey Trans-Siberian Orchestra), has led to two incredibly potent and compelling albums. The first, Vacation in The Underworld, came out in 2022, and the second, Unbreakable, comes out this Friday, Aug. 15 on Rat Pak Records. It was recorded at Rogue Studios in the U.K. by Alessio Garavello and produced by Chris Collier (Korn, Mick Mars, Flat Back), and features guest appearances from Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens, currently of KK’s Priest, and Burning Witches frontwoman Laura Guldemond.
Both Ellefson and Soto are close to the same age. Both have a similar musical pedigree in that they have worked with some huge names, but have also participated in many collaborations and bands over the past three decades. Based on their respective pedigrees mentioned above, it was inevitable that the two would cross paths and that their similar mindsets, tastes and prodigious work ethics would lead to something special.
“We were just acquaintances at first. I would always try to go see him with Trans-Siberian Orchestra when they came to town every year. And the more I thought about it, the more I’d like to work with him. This was back in 2020, and by 2021 I was doing more stuff under the Ellefson name, including a cover record called No Cover in the middle of COVID. It was great because it allowed me to reach out to all my friends and say, ‘hey, let’s not get down because of this COVID thing. Let’s not be morbid. Let’s keep our chins up. Let’s get back in and start being creative again! Let’s stay connected as a community because this too shall pass.’ Andy Martongelli, he’s been a good friend and musical part for me, and he lives over in Verona, Italy. When I’d go to Europe to tour, I would always call him and ask him to put a band together for me, and he always did a great job. So he’s got great skills for that kind of stuff, as well as being an amazing guitar player and songwriter. We started writing some material together and started gathering a nice collection of tunes. And it was Andy who said, ‘call Jeff and have him sing on a couple of songs. You’ll love the guy. You’re already friends. Let’s do something with him,’” Ellefson said.
“I send him a track and then I sent him another track and after a couple of songs Jeff just says, ‘hey listen, this is really working. We’re making some great quality stuff here. I’m in. Don’t just hire me to sing, I’d rather be fully involved in this.’ And that’s where it started. That was 2021 and our first record, Vacation in the Underworld, came out the next year. There were challenges in touring together both in terms of the timing because we’re both so busy, but also with logistics of half of us being in the States and Andy and our drummer Paolo [Caridi] being in Italy. So Jeff and I kind of left it alone for a bit and life moved on. But in 2023 Andy I got together at a friend’s studio and we wrote the majority of another album in just a few days. We really cranked out some tunes, but it wasn’t until last year when I was over touring in Europe that I hit up Jeff but it was for something different that I was working on.
“I wanted to do at least one new song to kind of refresh the Ellefson catalogue a bit here for the Bass Warrior shows and I’d love to do a cover of a Queen song. I’m thinking ‘Death on Two Legs.’ And I know Jeff’s a huge Queen fan, and he jumped on it. And while he was there I brought up the idea of doing another album. He goes, ‘f*** yeah! I’d love to.’ So all it took both times was me simply asking him. It’s kind of funny how that goes right? It’s sort of like asking a girl at the dance, ‘hey, you wanna dance with me?’ and she immediately replies ‘sure!’ If you don’t ask, you’ll never know. I guess it works the same in our world with musicians. So, I’m very glad I asked because we’ve got two great records. I feel like Unbreakable is some of the best material I’ve written in a long time. And I feel like, without it trying in any way to even sit in a Megadeth bucket, there’s some stuff on this record that I think feels very sympatico with some of the 1990s Megadeth stuff that I was writing for the group back then. I think it’s a good listening journey through the whole record.”
As this interview is conducted with only one member of the Ellefson-Soto tandem, Ellefson was asked what makes Soto special as both an artist/collaborator and as a human.
“He just seems like such a great guy; so enthusiastic about everything, like even just waking up in the morning and having a cup of coffee. Musically, out of the gate, he’s a very big voice. He’s got a huge presence to his sound. He’s instantly recognizable. As soon as you hear him, you know it’s him. And that to me is the identifying stamp as an artist is to have that ability to be recognizable for your work. That’s why I wanted to put both of our names on the door to this project. I thought, let’s just state the obvious. I talked to one manager and he thought we needed a band name. I said, ‘no, we don’t. I don’t want to start a new band because then you’re starting all over again, and you’re having to put a lot of time and effort into re-educating the public.’ I didn’t want to do that. I said let’s just state the obvious, Ellefson/Soto. And I think when you see the names, you already start to form an opinion of it in your mind and I’d like to think when you open the record and put it on, it delivers what you expect, and more,” he said, adding that the combination does indeed have a distinctive tone to the songs they’re writing together, which is infused with that element of enthusiastic energy of which Ellefson spoke of as a core feature of his partner’s character.
“With Jeff and I, one of the things we have in common is we’ve worked with a couple of difficult people in our careers. And we can sort of have a laugh about it now because we’ve moved on. But this is not an easy business. And whereas ‘Death on Two Legs’ is very pointed and never lets up in the lyrical content, reportedly about this manager they [Queen] had, the song ‘Unbreakable’ is our version of that. And it’s funny because the record starts off with ‘Unbreakable’ and ends with ‘Death on Two Legs’ because they’re kind of the same song. They’re written about people in our path who were really shitty and did some pretty unforgivable stuff. But in those cases you can either stay bitter, or you get better. And Jeff and I talked specifically about the chorus on ‘Unbreakable,’ in that we wanted it to be a call to arms, like a call to action. So is it that ‘I’ am unbreakable, or that ‘we’ are unbreakable? And he went with ‘we.’ His argument was that you may write about opposition but somewhere in there, in the lyric, there’s a resolution and it comes out favourable. And so I realized we had to go with ‘we.’ What I like about it is when I listened to songs growing up like Kiss with ‘Shout It Out Loud,’ and ‘Rock and Roll All Nite,’ they were anthems and they were about ‘we’ and ‘us.’ And Judas Priest always had those very positive lyrics about freedom and making our own way in life in songs like, ‘Living After Midnight,’ and ‘Heading Out to the Highway.’ And I remember [Judas Priest] frontman Rob Halford saying in an interview once that he always wanted to write songs that were inspiring and empowering to young people. There’s even that song on British Steel, ‘You Don’t Have to Be Old to Be Wise.’
“Neither Jeff nor I are negative, downer people. We’re probably sometimes a little too positive and a little too happy for some of the bands we’ve been in because that pisses people off sometimes. When you’re in a band with a negative guy, they don’t like being around someone who is being so positive. It goes against the grain. And our guitar player Andy is very much like us too. He’s a feisty player. He loves to box, but he’s not mean. He’s not evil. So there’s no shred of darkness in the room with this group. It’s feisty, it’s powerful, it punches hard. And if you punch at it, it will hit back. It’s not done with evil intent, and think that’s the difference of what you hear in our music – it’s heavy, but melodic and fires people up, not brings them down.”
Metal fans are a tribe. They’re a collective that is about as welcoming and inclusive as any group of music fans on the planet. The angst and aggression in their lives is sweated out of their systems at metal shows, it’s channeled through the shared experience where people can be themselves, no matter of race, creed, nationality, gender identity or politics. Metal is a tonic for tough times and having metal bands on one side who can express the fears and darkness of the world, but then there’s the counterpoint, who take that darkness and shine a light on it. Both aspects are what make metal music inspiring and fit in with the personalities and ethos of both Ellefson and Soto.
“As you say, metal is a tribe and songs in our genre unite the tribe. And it’s a genre that is defined by different bands from different generations. Each generation has their own. Like Slipknot is for the generation that came after me, right? I saw the changing of the generations when we took out Korn with Megadeth back in 1995. They were the new sound, the new voice of the next generation. And young people always propel the next wave of music – in every genre, including metal. So at some point in my life I knew I was no longer a leader of the next sound. That next sound is going to be created by young people in the same way that Megadeth and Metallica created thrash metal. We created the next form, the next iteration of metal after Ronnie James Dio and Iron Maiden. We were that sound, and we’ll forever always been that sound. Again, Kings of Thrash is where I go up on stage and revisit those songs that we wrote from the early 1980s and stuff and they’re still important. They’re timeless. I’m still an author and creator of that movement, so that part of my life, I never have to let go of. I can own that forever,” he said.
“But when I get in a room with Jeff Scott Soto, we’re not trying to write ‘Holy Wars,’ or ‘I Am the Viking.’ We can let go of our pasts, shed that skin and start fresh and start with something new. Guys of our age, we can do that, we can start with a new blueprint, with a blank canvas and create something new. And it doesn’t have to sound like what we did in the past. It’s going to sound like us, no matter what we do. And I think that’s one of the things too that’s special out this partnership. Jeff’s been in groups, he’s made his own records. I’ve been in groups and made my own records. But when Ellefson and Soto get together, you get to hear very distinctively what David Ellefon and Jeff Scott Soto sound like individually, but also collectively.”
As busy as he’s been with multiple projects, including the new Ellefson/Soto album, Ellefson had little difficulty clearing of time in his schedule to be part of the biggest rock concert experience of the year – Ozzy Osbourne’s emotional swan song appearance in his hometown of Birmingham as part of the Back to the Beginning show on July 5. It featured a plethora of incredible musical guests, including many of Osbourne’s former band members, of course the other three members of Black Sabbath, Nuno Bettencourt, members of Metallica, Anthrax, Yungblud … and David Ellefson.
“I was there. I was listed and advertised as one of the performers and it was a total honour to be there. [Former Judas Priest axe slinger] K.K. Downing had reached out to me about it back in January and I gladly accepted and got in the loop with Tom Morello who was the musical director for the show. And it was really just a wonderful event. If you saw it live or even online, you saw what it was like; it was just a beautiful, heartfelt event all the way round,” he said, talking about his experiences with Ozzy, who of course died mere weeks after the show.
“I knew him of course, but it wasn’t like I had his cell number. When I was in Megadeth we did Ozzfest 1998 and later we did a big stadium tour across South America and that’s where I really got to know Ozzy, just as a friend and as a gentleman. [Billy Idol sideman] Billy Morrison was down there with him, and that’s one of his dear friends as well, so the three of us did a lot of palling around and just spent some time, pretty much after every show, and even on some of the off days, just hanging around together. That was really the nature of my friendship with Ozzy. I never really talked music a whole lot with him. We were kind of more friends and talked about things other than music, and that’s why I never asked to have a picture taken with him. I never said, ‘hey bro, let’s get a photo.’ It was about being friends not fans.”
Ellefson said he was fortunate enough to have a few moments of conversation with Ozzy backstage at the Birmingham show, not an easy feat considering everyone there wanted to pay their respects, as well as the fact that the legendary singer was obviously not well. On reflection after his passing, Ellefson now treasures those spare moments with the great man.
“I did get a couple of minutes with him before the show and after the show. It was really great to connect again, one last time obviously. For me, that was kind of the focus of the event, aside from performing and doing the show. It was to just try to have a couple of minutes with Ozzy, which I got, and I was really happy about that. Before the show, we did the big band photos with him – all the group of performers together, and you’ve probably seen a bunch of those online. He really looked somewhat despondent, like he was really just hanging on. And then as he got into the show, as you could see on stage, he was so energized. He wanted to stand up, he wanted to get up and rock. And like he said from the stage, he hadn’t been able to do this for six years and I think being back, it really hurt him that he wasn’t able to give it his all. Being onstage though brought that all back to him. We all still get that buzz, that adrenaline hit, because we know we’re back in our element. We’ve got our game face on, ready to kick ass and rock with the fans. And you could see that in his face on the live stream and in person for sure,” he said.
“Then after the show I saw him too. He came back into the VIP area and that’s where his daughter [Kelly] got engaged [to Slipknot DJ Sid Wilson] right in front of us all. And Ozzy was sitting there, just beaming. He had that after-show glow. And at that point I remember thinking, ‘wow, maybe he’s got a couple more years. Maybe he could keep rocking for a while.’ And that’s what made it so shocking that, just two weeks later, he passed. But I think as sad as we are of course that he’s gone, seeing the condition he was in before the show, and obviously it’s a degenerative illness, to let someone go, and get away from their sick, broken body, is probably the most loving thing we can do.”
Ellefson also talked about the importance of Ozzy Osbourne in the history of rock and metal music, including the influence that his early solo albums had on a certain impressionable young musician from upper midwestern U.S.
“Now, I didn’t start with Black Sabbath or Ozzy. I started with bands like Styx and Sweet and Kiss, even Aerosmith. I remember the first time hearing ‘Dream On’ come on the radio and it was something else. As a kid I listened to AM and then eventually FM radio in my neighbourhood where I was growing up in Minnesota. There were a lot of British and Canadian and a lot of American hard rock influences on me at the time because of FM radio. The bands that had gone before, I learned about them a little later. I was born in 1964 so The Beatles, The Guess Who, and eventually Black Sabbath and some of those other iconic bands came later in my formative years. So by the time I was 15 or 16 years old, I was listening to Black Sabbath, but it was the Dio era Black Sabbath. The new Ozzy solo records had come out and for me, and a lot of people my age, Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman were the first in-road for us to get into Ozzy’s Black Sabbath stuff, because, as I said, outside of playing Paranoid in one of my bands as a teenager, my real first bite into Sabbath was the Ronnie James Dio era with the Heaven and Hell album,” Ellefson explained.
“And Blizzard of Ozz came out at the same time, so for me it was ‘wow, we get these two awesome records at the same time! We get Sabbath with Dio and we get Ozzy solo. We win double here.’ Then of course I went back and learned the whole legacy. I guess what probably hit me the most when I really started to listen to early Sabbath was just what a melodic singer he was. For a band like Black Sabbath that was so heavy and had such ominous lyrics and sound to it, it was really his melody lines and vocals that made it more approachable for the mainstream. And interestingly, by the time I was 16 I had learned to play a lot of that music, but not through [Black Sabbath bassist] Geezer Butler. It was ironically through Ozzy’s Speak of the Devil live album, which as all Black Sabbath covers. So it was through his bass player at the time, Rudy Sarzo [Quiet Riot, Whitesnake] that I was really introduced to much of the Sabbath catalogue. Once I started deep diving I realized, ‘okay, this is where it all started. This is the origin of it, with Geezer.’ Of course I also learned that Geezer was the band’s main lyricist. At the same time, I was quickly becoming a huge fan of Bob Daisley [who also had a tenue in Osbourne’s solo band] who was the lyricist for the first Ozzy albums, as well as an incredible writer and bass player. Not long after he played on the amazing Uriah Heep album Abominog [1982], and then I learned he also played on Rainbow’s Long Live Rock and Roll with Ronnie James Dio. It was this wildly fascinating turnstile of musicians.”
When anyone of note passes, but especially someone who is a hero to so many people in the same field as you, it does get one thinking about their own life, health and legacy. For Ellefson, it’s no different.
“I remember one time seeing my chiropractor at age 40 and he said, ‘let’s face I David, once we get into our 40s, we’re probably not going to double our years.’ That’s the moment I went, ‘well, here it is. This is where there are more days behind me than ahead of me.’ Look, I’m 60 now. Fortunately, I’ve been sober my entire adult life since age 25. I take care of myself. I exercise, I try to eat right. That has certainly helped. I wake up every day and do what I did when I was a kid getting into playing the bass. I woke up every day asking, ‘what can I learn today?’ What song can I listen to and learn from? What things should I learn for my band? What phone call cane I make for may band? Can we book a gig?’ All that stuff,” he said.
“I’ve been doing this my whole life, since I was literally 11 years old. Here I am at 60, driving down the road, talking to you on an interview, listening to songs this morning that I need to learn for some recording sessions and for some shows coming up. Later, I’m going to be in my hotel room practicing, talking to my record company, doing all the same stuff that I was doing when I was younger. Sometimes I’ll review some of our episodes of the David Ellefson Show podcast. For my whole life, this is all I’ve done, with no regrets. I’m lucky that at a young age, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I went for it. There was never a Plan B. There was never a discussion about, ‘well what if it doesn’t work out,’ because when you’re convinced it’s going to work, it does work. For me, I think my whole life, my whole career is my legacy. It’s not like there was one piece in the 1980s, or that one time in the 1990s, or there’s that one record from 2016 that won a Grammy. To me, I think everything I do is about working for and preserving the body of work that I’ve created throughout my entire lifetime.”
Part of that legacy is the willingness and ability to work with other people on various creative projects. In the music part of his life, yes there was the huge chunk of his career as a member of one of the most successful thrash metal bands of all time, Megadeth. But Ellefson’s list of collaborations and credits gets longer each year, with Ellefson/Soto being one of many that are ongoing. The time with Megadeth which took up two large chunks of his life 1983 to 2002 and again from 2010 to 2021, Ellefson subsumed much of his own creativity to serve the greater purpose of the band, and its leader, Dave Mustaine.
“I was appreciative when I met Dave. He was very focused on the style of music he wrote and that he wanted to do. He was very uncompromising in that mission, which is what you need, especially when you first start out. I’m lucky that I got to join in with that, to have my own lane within that, create my own style, have a distinctive sound, have a voice within that context. Yet, at the same time, as it goes with most bands, at 20 years in, you’re not the same guy you were 20 years before. I think it’s important to honour that who we are as grown men is different that who we were as young men. That can be a real conflict. Sometimes you’re better off leaving it the way it was when you were young. You can disband for a while, walk away for a while, let the guys make solo records or whatever because they’ve got something else to say that doesn’t fit inside the band. Sometimes it’s okay to leave something in order to preserve it in the long term. I think what I have today, making these new records with Jeff Scott Soto and with Dieth, is great. I can be as creative as I want to be. People call me to play on their records all the time and I really enjoy stepping into their world for a song or two.
“Kings of Thrash, that’s my full-blown ode to my Megadeth Legacy. I think it’s important to have that because what I do in Dieth, that’s not the time to be playing ‘Peace Sells (But Who’s Buyin’) just because some promoter says they’ll hire you if you play some Megadeth. Well, we’re not going to work for them then. You don’t bastardize one thing to make the other one work. You just can’t. There comes a moment when you have to choose. This one thing has its own lane and don’t make the traffic tread across lanes here. I think I’m lucky because I have so many different lanes on the creative highway and able to keep a vehicle in each lane.”
Rat Pak Records is releasing Unbreakable on vinyl as well as digitally on Aug. 15. Ellefson admits that most of the time, he streams and downloads music, but that’s primarily because he’s on the road so much and can thus just listen through his mobile device. But when at home, he’s perfectly happy putting on a little vinyl and enjoying some ‘hiss and pop.’
“I got to see Guns ‘N Roses in Munich back in June. I went into this big store, like a department store, I think it was called Ludwig Beck, it’s in the centre of the city. I pop in and they’ve got a Guns ‘N Roses display of clothing and things, obviously to promote the show that’s in town. And I turn a corner and there’s a big vinyl record section in it. This is like a five-story department store and we’re on like the third or fourth floor. And the first record sitting in the bin is Ellefson/Soto Vacation in the Underworld and next to it was some Guns ‘N Roses and Slash stuff. I took a photo and sent it to Joe [O’Brien, the label’s founder] at Rat Pak and said, ‘look at this, here we are!’ he said.
“I think when you’re buying vinyl, it brings back a satisfying purchasing experience. In my younger days of buying records, you’d go to the store, flip through the records, check out all the cool covers, get what you like, bring it home, open it up, and there’s a distinctive smell to a brand-new vinyl record, from the ink and the vinyl and everything right? You put it on and for me I would listen to it, flip it over, listen to Side B, and then flip it back over again and listen to both sides over and over. It was an all-encompassing experience because I would ‘listen’ with my ears, but also with my eyes. I would always look at all the album credits, I’d mull over the song titles, and read the lyrics. I’d want to know who wrote the songs, who were the band’s managers, all of that stuff.
“And now, I buy everything on digital, just because I can have everything on my phone. I travel so much so I can listen to it when I’m on the fly. But I also do still buy some vinyl stuff, and I love it. I love that Rat Pak Records is all about the complete experience with music. And besides the record, they’ll throw in some patches, and I think we’ve even got some trading cards to go with the new Unbreakable album. I think it’s a cool package to get. When it shows up at your door, there’s a kind of excitement you can’t get from just a download.”
While there is no talk of any live shows for Ellefson/Soto, Ellefson remains very busy, well into 2026 with his other band Dieth, touring with Kings of Thrash, guesting on other people’s albums and more. It’s a busy, fulfilling life, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
To follow along, visit https://www.davidellefson.com, https://www.ellefsonsoto.com, and https://diethofficial.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
