How many albums has Jeff Scott Soto appeared on throughout his 40-odd-year career? Twenty? Thirty? Fifty? Who knows? Jeff Scott Soto doesn’t. “Over a hundred, easily,” he says, after a moment’s thought. “I kind of stopped counting.”
The Californian could be the Hardest Working Man In Music. Like a hard-rock Forrest Gump, he’s spent decades turning up in unexpected but interesting places, balancing a stop-start solo career with stints singing for Journey, Yngwie Malmsteen, prog supergroup Sons Of Apollo, cult Swedish hairballs Talisman, and a ton more. He’s certainly the only person to have played with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and former members of horror-punk demons the Misfits (in fleeting and long-forgotten late 80s project Kryst The Conqueror).
Yet his fame doesn’t match the depth of his CV, at least outside of connoisseur circles. He’s never had a huge hit, never been a household name. People with lesser voices have undeservedly gone on to much bigger things.
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“I got a reputation for jumping ship and doing too many projects, not really concentrating on one thing,” says Soto, 60 years old but looking 20 years younger. “I would have loved to have been in one Metallica all my life.”
He pauses and grins the grin of a man who’s done pretty well despite all that. “But you know what? It’s a great problem to have.”
Jeff Scott Soto never meant to be a rock singer. Growing up in Los Angeles in the 70s, he was a pop, soul and R&B kid: The Jackson Five, Motown, all the greats. It was Queen who put him on the path he’s followed for the past 45-plus years. “They were the masters of everything they put their minds to,” he says. “There was nothing they couldn’t tackle. I wanted to emulate that.”
The teenage Soto was nothing if not ambitious, writing his goals on the inside of his school folder: join a band, get signed to a label by 18, have a gold record by 21, play the Hollywood Bowl. “It didn’t quite work out like that,” he says wryly.
But he was hardly a failure. After his first band Canaan fell apart, he sent a demo to Yngwie Malmsteen, at the time the most talked-about new guitar hotshot on the block. The 18-year-old Soto got the gig, and appeared on two tracks on Malmsteen’s mostly instrumental 1984 album Rising Force and pretty much all of its follow-up, Marching Out.
It looked like a lucrative gig, but he ended up jumping ship after a year. Today he’s disappointingly circumspect about spilling the tea on why. “There are things you see and go: ‘That’s how I don’t want to be,’” he says. “It was painful at the time, but it was a learning experience.”
He maintained cordial relationships with Yngwie for a couple of decades, but the two men haven’t spoken since the death of former Yngwie bassist and Soto’s on-off musical partner Marcel Jacob in 2009.
“There was no acknowledgement from his side,” says Soto. “I took it personally, said some things I shouldn’t have. The damage was done. That wall has been there since.”
That wasn’t the only time he joined a big-name act only for it to end in tears. In 2006 he signed on for Journey, replacing previous incumbent Steve Augeri. It was a dream come true, although it wasn’t easy.
“The worst part was being in the shadow of [golden-era Journey singer] Steve Perry,” Soto says. “He’s very much still alive, and could have said at any point: ‘Guys, let me jump back in.’”
In the end it was Journey’s notoriously mercurial intra-band dynamics that did for Soto. He lasted just over a year in total.
“It was their band, they decided they needed to go in a different direction,” he says diplomatically. “Did it hurt? Of course it hurt. It took me years to get closure.”
It’s wrong to write off Soto as a nearly-man. That does a disservice to both his talents and his tenacity. He may have been down at times, but he’s never been out. If there’s been a problem, it’s been his timing.
He and Marcel Jacob co-founded classy hard rockers Talisman, whose 1990 debut album arrived just as grunge was about to reshape the landscape. Talisman released six more uniformly great albums, although Soto found it tough being a hard rock singer at a time when they were the last thing the world wanted.
During a career lull in the early 2000s, he decided to return to his roots and joined a band named the Boogie Knights, who played rocked-up versions of the songs he loved as a kid.
“I had the polyester pants, the braided Rick James wig,” he says with an admirable lack of embarrassment. “We were making more money than most doctors or lawyers I know.”
Around the same time, he cut his hair and started wearing flashy Italian designer clothes. “I didn’t want to be the dirtbag rocker guy any more.” The GQ look lasted a couple of years. “I went: ‘You know what? I miss my dirtbag friends.’”
That wobble is long in Soto’s rear-view mirror. In 2008 he signed up as touring vocalist in the classical-metal juggernaut Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a gig he still holds down today. “When I started, we wore tuxedos. We looked like waiters. We look more rock these days.”
The past 10 years alone have seen Soto release albums with lab-engineered AOR supergroup W.E.T., all-star prog collective Sons Of Apollo, Art Of Anarchy (alongside guitar maverick Bumblefoot) and Ellefson-Soto (alongside ex-Megadeth man Dave Ellefson), as well as his own band Soto.
He admits there were times when he did stuff just for the money over the years. “Many,” he says. “There’s been times where I’ve gone: ‘Oh my god, how am I gonna get through this?’” Unfortunately he won’t say who. “Ha, I’m not gonna throw them under the bus.” But at a time when so many musicians struggle to survive, Jeff Scott Soto has cracked it by embracing his inner journeyman.
“I’ll take that,” he says. “‘Journeyman’ is not an insult, it’s a badge of honour for me. I found my own way of survival. It’s been tough sometimes, but I get to do things that I enjoy. Not everyone has that.”