Paul O'Neill, the creator, lyricist and composer behind the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, sees the group as having a little in common with Charles Dickens.

"We never intended to do 'Christmas Eve and Other Stories' for 13 years in a row. It just kind of happened," he said in a recent teleconference. "William Morris is like, 'Paul, it's not broken. Don't fix it.' We really didn't have a lot to guide us. The closest thing we had was Dickens, who wrote five books about Christmas, and he made his biggest money in his life by reading them live, but he always had to read 'A Christmas Carol.' They would never let him do 'The Cricket on the Hearth' or any of the other ones."

Two years ago, Mr. O'Neill decided to fix what wasn't broken and also break the Dickens syndrome by switching it up and taking "The Lost Christmas Eve," the last album of the Christmas trilogy, on tour.

The logical progression, also prompted by fan mail, was to move on to 1998's "The Christmas Attic," the middle piece in the trilogy, which had never been performed live.

"Musicians love writing albums, love recording them," he says. "Of course, you love watching them go platinum, but it's not real until you play it in front of a live audience, and you feel the energy of the audience back. It basically creates an energy tape loop. It just takes music to a level you simply couldn't do listening to it alone, on your stereo."

The TSO, a hard-rock holiday institution for the past 15 years, is once again dividing itself in two and playing more than 120 shows in 71 cities across North America. The first half will feature the unplayed rock opera followed by a second set of TSO classics and fan favorites, such as "Wizards in Winter," "Requiem" and "Christmas Eve/ Sarajevo 12/24'."

It will all be presented amid what is arguably the flashiest, most bombastic spectacle in the industry complete with a visual assault of fireworks, pyro, lasers, snow and eye-popping light show. Mr. O'Neill, a New York native who founded TSO in 1996 with Jon Oliva and Al Pitrelli (both members of Savatage) and keyboardist and co-producer Robert Kinkel, will be the first to tell you that he takes some inspiration from Pink Floyd.

Along with writing rock operas, he has a talent for answering simple questions with long essay-type answers filled with historical references, ranging from Aristotle to Ozzy. The transcript of his print media teleconference hit 250 inches. Here is a condensed version:

On the TSO's successful association with Christmas:

I'd love to say that we planned this. We didn't plan it at all. It was an accident. It just shocked everybody that it took on a life of its own, and then the other side thing that came out of it was when that gentleman, Carson Williams, lit his house to 50,000 lights, and then somebody else the next year did 100,000, and then somebody else did 200,000, and the last house I saw was 2 million lights, all going off to TSO music.

When you go to Disney World or MGM, all the lights are all going off to Trans-Siberian Orchestra music. I think we're No. 1 for fireworks displays, and a friend of mine just got back from Disneyland Hong Kong, and he said he was in this part of the park and all the music was going off to "Night Castle," and it's just weird. I never would've predicted it. I could never have planned it. I just think it was all those prayers my mother said when I told her I wasn't going to college. She was like, "Please don't let this kid starve. Please don't let this kid starve." So far, so good.

On doing 'The Christmas Attic':

"The Christmas Attic" was simply staring us in the face. Like all my rock operas, it has a happy ending. If you want sad endings, you don't need me. Just read the paper. Especially because what the world's going through right now.

It's about a kid who goes into an attic where people have been throwing things for decades, if not centuries, and anyone who has been in an old house with an attic knows it's filled with all kinds of treasures. She discovers a trunk where she reads all these letters from the past, distant glimpses of how the holidays affected people decades and centuries ago, and a glimpse into the future. Of all the rock operas I've written, it's probably the lightest. ... People need escapism, and so we just wanted to give them a great escape story.

Then, the second half also, we're going to be showcasing some of the songs from the upcoming album too.

On the genesis of "The Christmas Attic":

My daughter had just been born, and I didn't have my first child until I was in my 40s, so when I was writing that story, it was just seeing Christmas through her eyes. I could see the anticipation, but it just brought me back to the past. Again, you want to keep it magical and adventuresome, and that's why I like the idea of the attic, because everybody's been in an attic, and everybody knows people throw things in an attic, and an attic is like a built-in Adventure Land. You never know what you're going to find there. That's why I think shows like "Antique Roadshow" are popular. You don't know if it's a paint-by-number or if it's a real Rembrandt.

Basically, it's a bunch of little adventure stories with a happy ending, and I would say of all the rock operas I wrote, it's probably the lightest story because I have a tendency to write dark, because the darker it gets, the happier the ending.

On how they continue to up the ante of the visual feast:

A deep-seated fear of having to get a real job.

We've just been lucky in that technology has zoomed ahead so quickly in the last 10 years that we have our own division of Nightcaps Management, which handles Trans-Siberian Orchestra. It's our own company. There's a division of young kids whose only job is to come up with new special effects. We always tell them all the same thing: Make believe you're working for NASA. We don't want you thinking rocketry or jet propulsion. We want you thinking transport beams and warp. If only one out of a hundred ideas makes it to the flight deck, we win. We get a lot of our ideas from in-house. Also, every light company, every pyro company, every special effect company knows that we're always looking for cutting-edge stuff.

When Michael Jackson canceled his tour -- God bless, because he passed away -- PyroTech all of a sudden had 10 lasers they had built that did a really thick blue beam, which is the hardest laser beam to produce. They're unbelievably expensive, and they were kind of freaked because they were now stuck with these 10 lasers. I'm like, "I'll take all 10."

You love the look on the audience's faces, especially the kids, when they see a new special effect that they've never seen before, and we need more than the ordinary band.

On whether he's amazed they get people's grandmas to come see a metal show:

We were kind of stunned at the beginning, the diversity of the audience. Around 2004, I got a call in the middle of the night from one of our promoters, who's a demographic nut. He goes, "Paul, I just got your demographics back. I'll give you 10 guesses, you'll never guess them."

I'm going, "It's really late. Could you just tell me?"

He said, "You've got every economic class, from the extremely poor to the super rich." He goes, "Here's the weird part. Your average age is 21."

I said, "That's impossible."

He goes, "Nope. You're like the 'Lord of the Rings' movies. There's 7-, 8-, 9-year-olds, cancel out 60. 10, 11, 12, cancel out the 50." Honestly, that bothered me for like two weeks because it just didn't make sense. This is just my own pet theory. It was TSO's second lucky break. The first lucky break was, I think, we were the last band to have blank-check artist development from the label system, Warner Bros. The second lucky break was, again, a lot of your average readers out there think bands like Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, Queen were all hits out of the box. No, they weren't. They were all nurtured by the labels.

When TSO's first album came out, it did not sell. We turned out "Beethoven's Last Night" in 1999, and that's when we started to tour. That's when the band exploded. My personal theory was, again, being at the right place at the right time. ... Unless you're in your 90s, for the first time, every generation has rock in common. Even great-grandmothers are the Woodstock generation.

On what he hopes the audience takes away from this show:

Basically, we want it to be just like an emotional rollercoaster ride. You come to the show, and again, if you're having a great life, come, add another great night to your life. If you're having some speed bumps in life, leave your problems in the trunk of your car. No one's going to steal them, I promise.

If we do our job right, when you leave that arena, you won't ... Basically, that's the job of the arts. It's to inspire people, give people escape when they need it, help them calm down when they need calming down, get them excited when they need to get excited. It's also one of the things I love about progressive rock.

Musically, as an artistic form, progressive rock not only gives you the most freedom, it also has the best toys, because as I'm sure anybody who has seen TSO knows, you can obviously see them massively influenced by The Who, the rock opera, bands like Queen, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, the marriage of bringing the classics out to the kids. A lot of kids won't listen to Beethoven or Mozart, but if you slip some of their songs into your songs, they're like, "Oh, that's Beethoven. Better go check it out."

Again, to me, Mozart was the world's first rock star. He lived like a rock star, penniless like a rock star, died young like a rock star, and Beethoven was the world's first heavy metal rock star, because you think of the Fifth Symphony ... da-da-da-dum.

On the view from every seat:

When I saw the Pink Floyd Pulse tour in the '90s, they were very kind. They gave me front row seats. But also, out of professional curiosity, I wondered what it looked like from the nosebleed, so I went all the way to the back, and it was just as great. It was from Pink Floyd that I learned as long as you didn't give a damn about the budget, you could do a show where there was no such thing as a bad seat. The back is more cinematic. Up front is cool, because you know, you can see the sweat dripping off the guitar player's hands as he's doing a solo. It's just very important to the band that no one walks away saying, "Oh, my boyfriend took me to see TSO. We're in the nosebleed," or "Yeah, we're going to see TSO, but we're behind the stage."

On the philosophy of the band:

The band is very stratified. There's teenagers, 20s, 30s, 40s. I'm the only one approaching 60, and I think that's important because people like Al Pitrelli, who was in Alice Cooper, Asia, Megadeth. You know, Jeff Scott Soto, who was in Yngwie Malmsteen, Journey, they bring all the little tricks of the trade to the stage. But the kids, and anyone between 18 and 25 we call the kids, they just bring this youthful exuberance, and they don't let anyone become jaded. It's infectious, and it's another good thing I like about the band. Al Pitrelli is not just a great guitar player. Same with Joel Hoekstra, who is in Night Ranger, played with Foreigner, and he's with Whitesnake now. They mentor the younger kids. They actually go out of their way.

I've worked with so many bands in my lifetime. I've never seen a band where egos are checked at the door and everybody wants the other person to steal the night. Everybody's looking out for everybody else, and it really does work as a team, and the other thing, TSO was designed to breathe, because when I started the band, I wanted to correct what I saw as a lot of flaws that were built into rock that everybody was so used to that they just assumed it was the way it had to be.

The first one was, in the old days, if the label system broke a rock band, either rock band, a prog rock band, a metal band, whatever, they expected you to tour. By that, I mean, 11 months on, a month off, 11 months on, a month off, five to six shows a week, two hours a night, and the human voice is not meant to sing on top of Marshalls for two hours a night, five nights a week. I can name dozens of singers that used to have great voices who no longer can sing.

In TSO, some of the rules are, always bring in youngsters and let the older members mentor them, always protect the lead singers, and also always allow the artists to have a private life as well as a professional life, because I think everybody, when they're kids, they imagine they would love total fame until you get it. I do know people that can't go anywhere without disguising themselves, and they hate it. It's just unhealthy, I think, as a human being not to be able to just go to a McDonald's by yourself or with a friend and have a burger without constantly being disturbed.

On balancing the music and spectacle:

If the production is not as good as the music, you lose an opportunity to take the concert to another level. If the production is better than the musicians, then it's a farce. You have to be very, very, very careful that the visual productions and the musical productions advance in tandem. You constantly have to stay on top of it, and we're just ... I'm really lucky to have people like Derek Wieland and Al Pitrelli, who are just like on every single note, not just great musicians but great musical directors, and if they hear a wrong note, there's an early soundcheck the next day, and they're going through that song over and over and over again.

Also, TSO is all live. There are no tapes running and playing music. Nobody's lip-syncing. That is also part of the magic. I feel this more strongly every year.

I've been doing arena rock for a lot of years, and I've never left a TSO concert and had to break up a fistfight. People leave in a good mood, and I just think that's important these days.

First Published: December 11, 2014, 5:00 a.m.