Singer Jeff Scott Soto had worked as one of the singers in the Queen Extravaganza, a tribute band sanctioned by Brian May and Roger Taylor. In a new interview, Soto, who now fronts Sons of Apollo, says that there had been talks of him joining the band prior to Adam Lambert getting the gig.

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"I can't go into the specifics and I don't wanna go into anything that throws caution to the wind, basically. I can't really elaborate," he told Miles Schuman in the video below. "There were discussions, let's just put it this way. There was a short little window of time before Adam that there was a discussion and it didn't get past that. So I'll just leave it at that. I value my friendship and everything that I have with those guys, so I'm not gonna say anything to pat myself on the back just for people to go, 'Hey, you should have…' It's not necessary. But to answer your question, and to be honest and truthful about it, yes, there were inklings at one point, and it just didn't turn into anything."

Soto didn't say anything further about what happened, but had he joined Queen, it would have meant that he'd been hired to fill the shoes of his two biggest influences. He spent parts of 2006 and 2007 fronting Journey, singing material made famous by Steve Perry. Soto called Perry and Freddie Mercury "part of my DNA. I'm not trying to be them — I'm just so influenced by their music and what they left behind and their legacies."

"That's one of the reasons why I personally thought I fit so well with Journey," he continued, "because even though I don't sound like Steve Perry — maybe I did when I was younger, but by the time I started singing with them, I was older and huskier in terms of my delivery. So those two bands were something I could have stepped into naturally without trying to emulate and trying to be a tribute version of them. They both mean so much to what I do as a singer that it was just a natural thing for me to be able to step into Journey, and it would have been just as natural to step into Queen."

Last year, Soto noted that, although he had been announced as a full-time member of Journey, his brief tenure in the band is not referenced in their official bio. “There’s zero mention, there’s zero attention brought to the fact that I was even in the band and I did those tours,” he said. “I was officially made a member of the band. And then for them to act like it didn't exist or to say that they wanted a signature sound and I was only supposed to be a hired gun and just to get them through the tour, that kind of bums me out."

 

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