This has prolly been discussed here (but hey, I've been gone a while) --- I wanna get some input.

I totally love Savatage ! These guys are awesome and very talented - my style of music all the way.... there are hints of Christianity and faith, but they're not professing. Are they, are they not ? Is there Christian influence in the band ?

how many albums they got ? still together ? any other info ?

Savatage has a lot of Christian thought and imagery in their work. Most of the albums are written, at least in part by Paul O'Neill who is a professing Catholic. Most, if not all of the members, are part of the Transiberian Orchestra. Again Paul O'Neill has witten much of the music and there is a lot of spirituality in them as well. There are some songs that require a complete listen to gain their context or they sound pretty off for Christians. I don't know for sure how many albums they have done, but I have 6 albums by them and 6 by Transiberian Orchestra.

I do not know how many of the band members are Christian, but lyrically they are pretty clearly influenced by Paul O'Neill's faith. BTW, I love their music as well.

I don't think I have heard a single album by this band. I had a TSO Christmas album and didn't much care for it (but I am not really a fan of Christmas music).
I also had no idea that they had any hints of Christianity in their lyrics.
My interest is piqued.
What album(s) has the best lyrics?

Dead Winter Dead is one of my favorites. Here is the story, included on Wikipedia:

Story
^[2] In the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, there is a town square surrounded by buildings that were constructed during the middle ages. The square has a beautiful stone stone fountain at its center and at one corner there is a thousand year old church with a gargoyle carved into its belfry. Now this gargoyle, for the last thousand years, has spent all his time trying to comprehend the human emotions of laughter and sorrow. But even after a millennium of contemplation, these most curious of human attributes remain a total mystery to our stone friend.
Our story begins in the year of 1990; the Berlin Wall has just fallen, communism has collapsed and for the first time since the Roman Empire, Yugoslavia finds itself a free nation. Serdjan Aleskovic cannot believe his good fortune to be alive and young at such a moment. The future and the happiness of all seem assured in what must surely be "the best of times".
However, even as Serdjan celebrates with his fellow countrymen, there are little men with little minds who are already busy sowing the seeds of hate between neighbors. Young and impressionable Serdjan joins some of his friends in a Serbian Militia Unit and eventually finds himself in the hills outside of Sarajevo firing mortar shells nightly in the city. Meanwhile in Sarajevo itself, Katrina Brasic, a young Muslim girl, finds herself buying weapons from a group of arms merchants and then joining her comrades firing in the hills around the city.
The years pass by and it is now late November 1994. An old man who had left Yugoslavia many decades before, has now returned to the city of his birth, only to find it in ruins. As the season's first snowfall begins, he stands in the town square, looks toward the heavens and explains that when the Yugoslavians prayed for change, this is not what they intended.
As the old man finished his prayer, the sun begins to set and the first shells of the evening's artillery barrage are starting to arc overhead. But instead of heading for the shelters with the rest of the civilians, he climbs atop the rubble that used to be the fountain and taking out his cello, starts to play Mozart as the shells explode around him. From this night forward he would repeat this ritual every evening. And every evening Serdjan and Katrina each find themselves listening to the thoughts of Mozart and Beethoven as the drift between the explosions across no man's land.
Though the winter does its best to cover the landscape with a blanket of temporary innocence, the war only escalates in violence and brutality. One day in late December, Serdjan on a patrol in Sarajevo, comes across a schoolyard where a recent exploding shell has left the ground littered with the bodies of young children. It is one thing to drop shells into a mortar and quite another to see where they land. Long after Serdjan returns to his own lines, he cannot get the faces of the children out of his mind. Realizing that what he has been participating in is not the glorious nation building that their leaders had described, but rather a path to mutual oblivion, he decides right then and there that he can no longer be a part of this, that you cannot build a future on the bodies of others. At the first opportunity, he resolves that he will desert.
Sitting in his bunker on December 24th, he listens to the sounds of Christmas carols from the old cello player mingling with the sounds of war. Katrina, on the other side of the battlefield, is also listening. It had just stopped snowing and the clouds had given way to reveal a beautiful star-filled sky when suddenly the cellos player's music abruptly ceases. Fearing the worst, Serdjan and Katrina both do something quite foolish and from their respectives sides, start to make their ways across no man's land toward the town square. Arriving at the exact same moment, they see one another. Instinctively realizing that they are both there for the same reason, they do not start to fight, but instead, together walk slowly to the fountain. There they find the old man lying dead in the snow, his face covered with blood, his cello lying smashed and broken at his side.
Then without warning, a single drop liquid falls from the cloudless sky, wiping some of the blood off the old man's cheek. Serdjan looks up, but he can see nothing except the stone gargoyle high up on the church belfry. Overcome by what he has seen this night, he decides that he must leave this war immediately. Turning to the Muslim girl he asks her to come with him, but now all she sees is his Serbian uniform. Pouring out his feelings, he explains that he is not what she thinks that he is. Eventually winning her to his side, they leave the night together.

Paul O'Neill is the man responsible for Savatage continuing on past the mid eighties. They were virtually broken up and doing a few last dates to fulfill obligations when O'Neill saw them and convinced the Oliva brothers to keep Savatage alive. He co-wrote all of the albums from Hall Of The Mountain King on, and was a huge influence on Jon Oliva's use of religious imagery in his own lyrics. He cleaned up their language and moved them in a more progressive direction musically.

Paul O'Niell might be a Christian. He certainly had a Christian upbringing, but none of the other members are, to my knowledge. I would not recommend them for a "Christian music only" person, but for those looking for clean lyrics and Christian imagery would probably be happy with Edge of Thorns, Handful of Rain, Dead Winter Dead, Wake of Magellen, and Poets and Madmen. HOR is my personal favorite out of those.

There is no more Savatage, and likely never will be. TSO and Jon Oliva's Pain are as close as you can get anymore. There's a lot of speculation as to why, but the bottom line is TSO makes the guys money and Savatage doesn't.

Thanks for chiming in TT, I will see if I can find some of those albums you listed and see if they tickle my fancy.

Awesome ! Thanks for the excellent info. I really like this band, and as far as I'm concerned, if a band has clean lyrics and those lyrics aren't promoting aberrant junk... then they're welcome in my collection.

I used ta be a strict Christian music ONLY kinda guy, until I reasoned that many Christian bands don't even have all Christian members.

I absolutely love Transiberian Orchestra (TSO)'s album Beethoven's Last Night. I highly recommend that as a place to get acquainted with the style of music these guys (Savatage and TSO) put out. The story is great, but is one of those that you have to read the book to get the story while the music is going as there are many narrations in that do not become evident in the music and really add to the experience of the album as a whole.