Uniting former musicians from Dream Theater, Yngwie Malmsteen, David Lee Roth and Guns N’ Roses, a new progressive metal supergroup is calling itself the offspring of the music god.

“The only egos that are involved is the confidence of knowing what we bring to the table and knowing who we are. And that’s not egos, just confidence,” vocalist Jeff Scott Soto said by phone recently from his Los Angeles home days before Sons of Apollo was to fine-tune its live set from Florida to Belize aboard the rock fans’ excursion Cruise to the Edge.

Sons of Apollo, which performs Sunday at the Forge in Joliet as the last of eight stateside tour dates, is the latest project by Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy (drums, vocals) and Derek Sherinian (keyboards), with Billy Sheehan (Mr. Big, David Lee Roth, Steve Vai) on bass, Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal (Guns N’ Roses) on guitar and Soto at the mic.

Portnoy, a founding member of Dream Theater, which he was with for 25 years and for which he wrote much of the lyrics, and Sheehan have put their other group, the Winery Dogs, on hold to tour in support of Sons of Apollo’s “Psychotic Symphony” (InsideOutMusic/Sony Music). Released in October, the album debuted on Billboard’s Heatseeker chart at No. 1 and on the Rock Chart at No. 10 and was deemed an “impressive debut disc” by Loudwire but “a forgettable effort” by Metal Injection.

The album opens with the 11-minute track “God of the Sun” and closes with the 10-minute “Opus Maximus” that Sherinian has admittedly called a “self-indulgent beast of an instrumental.” Other cuts include “Coming Home,” which Portnoy and Sherinian have called the “metal ‘Humpty Dance,’ ” the Deep Purple-inspired “Divine Addiction” and Sherinian’s solo “Figaro’s Whore.”

Soto got his start at age 18 with Malmsteen’s debut album, “Rising Force,” and first met Sheehan when Sheehan’s band Talas supported Malmsteen on tour in the ’80s. Fast-forward a few decades to find Soto and Sheehan touring together again when Soto’s own band supported the Winery Dogs on tour in South America in 2016, and that’s when, Soto says, Portnoy started considering him for his latest supergroup.

“I gotta trust somebody with a career and track record like Mike Portnoy,” Soto said of the second-youngest person, after Rush’s Neil Peart, to be inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame. “Mike set the tone very early on for being the overseer of the band from the whole creative process through marketing and product management. All of those decisions were entrusted to Mike, and we followed his lead.”

Doing so initially, however, involved a bit of a learning curve, with Soto admitting he wasn’t used to such a collaborative songwriting process, nor was he totally convinced he was right for the job.

“The creation all started with Derek, not your average ordinary keyboard player. He writes and plays like a guitar player, so it sounds like something a guitar player would come up with,” Soto said of the artist named “King of the Keys” by Guitar World magazine. “From that it was Mike, Derek and ‘Bumblefoot’ who went into the studio and carved this out together. In 10 days they came up with this massive piece of music. They were sending me one song a day when I was finishing my tour with my band Soto last year.

“I was listening to everything, going, ‘Where do I fit into this equation?’ It was a bit nerve-wracking because it sounded so insane and incredible I really wondered if I was the right guy in terms of will what I come up with fit with this. I just went for it, my normal process of when the song is hitting me, what I’m feeling.”

Soto, who also tours with Trans-Siberian Orchestra, knew he was meant to front the Sons, though, upon feedback for his lyrics for “Signs of the Time,” the first single, and “Alive.”

“Those two were pretty untouched. My lyrics and melodies I did at home remained,” he said. “When I got the enthusiasm from Mike, I knew I was in the right ballpark. When we got together, even more so the confidence started building based on all the ideas we were bouncing off each other.”

While Soto wasn’t in the studio for the music-writing process, he was involved more than expected on the lyric-development side.

“I don’t usually work with others in the bands I’m in when it comes to vocals, melodies and lyrics,” said Soto, whose other band W.E.T. releases it third album in March. “They pretty much trust that’s my department, and I come up with what I feel is the strongest for the band and the material. But with this we actually did work on it together.”

The process wasn’t exactly a welcome change at first for the seasonally solo Soto, who had a brief stint with Journey, released one album with Journey’s Neal Schon for the supergroup Soul SirkUs and supplied the vocals for the singer of the fictional band Steel Dragon in the 2001 Mark Wahlberg movie “Rock Star.”

“Not that I was against it, but I hadn’t done it so long, and I’m not really one for taking other people’s ideas and criticisms. I wasn’t used to someone saying, ‘Nope, that’s completely crap, we gotta change that.’ But it’s not about me, it’s about what’s best for the band.

“A lot of my ideas stayed in there, and they added what they thought was strong or was missing, and that was it. A pretty easy process,” he said. “Once everybody felt each other out and the whole friendship started forming, it was all about the respect of, ‘Hey, that guy came up with something cool, so let’s run with it.’ ”

That respect for one another, he said, is palpable on the album and onstage.

“You can hear it, you can feel it, and when you see us live, you are going to be able to see it,” he said. “When you step back and listen to this Frankenstein we created, it’s pretty incredible we were able to put everything we wanted all together and make it as strong as it came out. Once I got used to the process, I welcomed it. And I look forward to it on the next album we do together.”

Come June, Sons of Apollo starts a European tour. It wraps up in September at Bulgaria’s Roman Amphitheater, which dates to the first century, performing two sets, one being covers, with an orchestra to be recorded for a CD/DVD release.

“It will be a special homecoming for me of sorts,” said Soto, whose wife of six years hails from Bulgaria.

With plans beyond that for a second studio album, Soto said, the Sons of Apollo is not planning to be just a one-off project.

“We all went into this with the commitment that this is a real band,” he said. “We’re not just throwing it out there and seeing if it sticks.”

Vickie Snow Jurkowski is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.