Arjen Anthony Lucassen is a Dutch singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist musician and record producer, best known for his long-running progressive metal/rock opera project Ayreon. Lucassen started his career in 1980 as the guitarist and backing vocalist of Dutch heavy metal band Bodine as Iron Anthony, before joining Vengeance in 1984. After eight years he left the band, wanting to go into a more progressive direction, and released two years later an unsuccessful solo album entitled Pools of Sorrow, Waves of Joy under the nickname Anthony. In 1995, Lucassen released an album uncredited to any artist called Ayreon: The Final Experiment, in which he sang, wrote every song and played most of the instruments. The album led to the creation of Ayreon; despite being relatively unknown at first, the project gained notable attention and praise with the release of its third album, Into the Electric Castle, establishing Lucassen as a notable composer of rock operas. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arjen_L...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b...)
