JUDAS PRIEST frontman Rob Halford has spoken to Greg Prato of Billboard.com about the songwriting process for their new album, which will tell the story of the 16th century French prophet Nostradamus.

"We're writing right now," Halford told Billboard.com. "I'm here in the Midlands near Birmingham, with Glenn [Tipton] and K.K. [Downing]. The ideas are just so strong — we've already been putting down the music. It's incredibly exciting and inspiring to be involved. We're getting incredible results at these early stages.

"It's going to be a monumental task," Halford continued. "We've written about characters in our music over the decades — 'Loch Ness', 'The Sentinel', 'Sinner'," Halford said. "It's just like a natural progressive step for us. The exciting thing is that we're going to be performing the whole piece live on stage when we go out, hopefully in early 2007."

An album title and song names haven't been chosen, but Halford predicts the most musically challenging PRIEST release yet. "There's going to be some new dimensions of sound brought into this," he said. "We're trying to cover a lot of territory, but this has got to be seamless. This has got to take you through a journey of this man coming into existence, and going through his experiences of first knowing that he's got these abilities to have prophecies and visions. And then in the real world, the circumstances that he experienced just as a regular man — living in Europe in the 16th century."

Read more at Billboard.com.