Lance King

Lance King (born November 23, 1962) is an American heavy metal music singer and songwriter specializing in melodic progressive power metal.

An American hard rock band: 1981–86

As a performing musician since 1981, King has sung with many bands in his career, in 1981 the summer after he graduated high school in Winona, MN, King was asked by a few musician friends that he had jammed with in the past to join a small weekend club band called "The News" The band focused mainly on Canadian rock covers and after a couple shows they decided to change the name of the band to "Freelance".

During his five years with the band from (1981–1986) Freelance began playing local bars on the weekends, almost every weekend, then the band reached out to talent agents in the Twin cities and the band began playing farther and wider, by 1983 they were doing club shows, from British Columbia, and Idaho to Michigan in an old school bus they had renovated and dubbed "the urban insult vehicle", mostly due to the fact that they had simply painted it primer grey, so it was not school bus yellow anymore.

Freelance did create 10 songs of original material and played these live, but never recorded them properly and thus are lost to the world.

An American Hardrock / Metal band: 1986–1993

In 1986, when freelance was beginning to fall apart, King joined a Rochester, Minnesota-based band Gemini.

Gemini had been playing a circuit of clubs and ballrooms in the tri-state area of Minnesota, Iowa and Wisconsin for over ten years when King joined in 1986 they were a cover band playing as much new wave as they were corporate rock, after a year King gave the band an ultimatum, that either they started writing songs and trying to move to the next level or King was moving on to something else.

After somewhat of a power play, King managed to become the driving force in the band and in 1988 they started breaking into the clubs in the Minneapolis and Saint Paul market, eventually dethroning the reigning club champions of the day in the premier rooms "The Mirage" and the "Iron Horse" while also playing many other rooms.

Gemini was doing exceptionally well with their show attendance, normally having between 700 and 1000 people a night at their shows, playing over 250 shows a year, they started having major labels coming to the shows.

The band was courted by labels and managers but nothing solid was ever offered by the major labels due to the band only having a few originals at the time.

The manager's contract King deemed unworthy of the band.

So Gemini continued to play shows and write in the clubs during the days, testing the new material on the crowds at night, and every month saving enough to record a couple of their new tunes they felt strongly enough about.

He has sung with many groups over the last 35 years and started the record label Nightmare in 1990 to release his own music, and is currently still at the helm of the label.

By 1990 the band had released its first self-titled, self-financed and self-produced an album on King's own label Nightmare records... "Coming Home" was picked up by local station 93X and pirate radio station Z-Rock, the troop's station in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm as well as several regional broadcast stations from Minnesota and Iowa.

The band began extending their shows reach by playing major markets in Kansas City, Chicago, Milwaukee, Winnipeg and all points in-between in an effort to build.

The line up had continual lineup changes of second guitarists, drummers, and bassists, the only consistency was King and guitarist Rob Kruger.

Kruger and King switched off on vocals, guitar and keyboards during the band three-hour shows.

In 1992 Gemini released their second album Out for Blood.

With the demanding schedule of playing so many shows consistently over the last several years, the band was wearing on each other due to too many chemicals and lack of sleep.

In 1993 King departed to start his own band "The Kings Machine".

An American Progressive Hard Rock/Metal band: 1993–2000

Immediately King began auditioning players in 1993 for his new solo project "The Kings Machine", joining forces with former "Touched" guitarist Dave Barilla.

Armed with a four-track and hunger the two wrote over 15 songs before finding suitable players; drummer Todd Silverstone and bassist /keyboardist Brian Hollenbeck.

The newly formed band immediately found themselves opening for such rock icons as David Lee Roth, Great White, Slaughter and Cinderella and released a four-song EP simply called "sampler plate EP" in early 1994.

The band recorded a 24 track digital recording with a multi-camera shoot for a local cable rock TV show called "On the Rocks", produced by renowned FOH engineer Sandy Marks.

Shortly before recording began for the band's first full-length album, drummer Todd Silverstone left the group to join former TOTO vocalist Fergie Frederiksen.

Silverstone was replaced two weeks before the band went into the studio to record their 1995 album "A State of Mind" with drummer Brian Waterman.

King recorded the band's first full-length release in his home studio wearing both engineer and producer hats.

The band had also recorded another full-length album's worth of material that has never seen the light of day outside of the live shows.

A British/American Progressive Metal band: 1997–2003

In 1997, King was asked to demo up a few songs for British band Balance of Power Balance of Power had already released one album "When the World Falls Down" in 1996 via Point Music/Metal Heaven into Europe and via Pony/Canyon Japan.

The band was getting a nice advance from each label which totaled $50,000 plus publishing The band offered King a weekly fee of $1500 a week to record and tour plus performance royalties and expenses, and King said yes!

The band immediately flew King to London, England and they recorded all the vocals for their second album "Book of Secrets" in ten days' time.

This was quite a turn around album for Balance of Power since they had just replaced their guitarist Paul Curtis with Pete Southern, and the direction became much heavier and more progressive with both King and Southern on board, taking the band far from their AOR roots.

The band hired "the voice of the BBC Rob Brown" for narration segments on the concept album and drummer /producer Lionel Hicks flew out to Minneapolis to mix the album with King, since he liked what King had done with the demo mixes.

They mixed the album in Logic recording studio's where King had mixed the first Gemini record with Brian Bart assisting at the board.

Both Labels loved the change, and so did the media and the fans.

"Book of Secrets" getting extremely high marks in all the reviews getting "album of the month" and even covers on several of the largest magazines in Europe.

After a couple of major lineup changes, TKM was reconfigured into a glorified cover band and fell apart when King was touring in Europe with Balance of Power in 2000.