interview from Metal Israel by skazm.copywriting
MI: Dark Tranquillity is my favorite band.
MS: Thank you.
MI: Im really looking forward to seeing you guys. Were a crazy crowd, in Israel. Youre not going to be disappointed.
MS: I cant wait. It will be quite cool. Im also really looking forward to it.
MI: OK, so one of the reasons youre my favorite band is because of your lyrical prowess. What are you reading?
MS: Everything. From pulp fiction paperback to Swedish poetry and hard science fiction. Pretty much everything I can get my hands on as long as its interesting and triggers thought. Not just for entertainment. Anything that gets you thinking, that kind of gets your creative juices flowing, so to speak, that triggers inspiration. It could be anything,
MI: Anything in specific?
MS: Like I told you, I read all kinds of different genres and literature. I can even get into some ridiculous fantasy, if its well-written for the hell of it, to kind of see different perspectives.
MI: I ask, because you (make very artistic) use of words, and I wanted to know, how much of it are you really trying to say something, and how much of it is just you being able to craft dark words together and just sound great, but youre not really trying to preach or say anything.
MS: Well, I never really try to preach anything. Perhaps there is some kind of message here and there. I dont want to be too full of stress or negative or anything like that. I try to add some positivity or tongue-in-cheek kind of humor to it. But most of the time theyre just kind of messages I shoot off to myself, try to poke a hole into my seemingly impenetrable wall of self-confidence and stuff like that because I know that Im just nobody and that I pretty much suck at everything, so I try to write about that, and how insignificant I feel sometimes, and how meaningless life can be. Just things that irritate me, things that I really hate about myself. More than anything its just kind of like a knock on the head, a wake-up call to myself saying like Get the fuck out of this hole and do something about it. And its actually healthy. It feels really good to write that off, to write it down and get it off my head and off my chest, to kind of move on. And sometimes after Ive written a song I kind of see (the situation) in a new light and I feel like Ive overcome those negative feelings, I feel better because of it. Its a (corporal?) work in progress, to try to be more sane and healthy.
MI: Theres nothing specifically I mean, when I read the lyrics to Nothing to No One and Inside the Particle Storm, I thought you were talking about nuclear war. Was it nuclear war within yourself?
MS: Its about desolation and how you can draw inspiration from pretty much nothing. Nothing to No One, for instance, is about the ultimate kind of shutting yourself down and shutting yourself off from everybody because you feel that youre not good enough to speak to someone or be part of someone elses life. Sometimes I can feel like that. I hate that, but sometimes you just cant get over that. And to get into Inside the Particle Storm, those are Niklas lyrics, and he really tried to be negative and channeled all that frustration and anger that hes felt over the years. Because of his not writing that much, he hadnt written in years, he just took all of that negativity and frustration into that song and thats what makes it amazing to me.
MI: OK Because you guys are a fount of inspiration for a multitude of bands globally and basically, people copy you a lot, what do you think of all of that?
MS: Well, I guess imitation is a great form of flattery. Its kind of cool that people look at us for inspiration and decide to form a band because they think our music is special. Thats amazing to me. But then again, when people are actually copying and kind of forget how to be original and they lose their identity because they want to sound like us or like some other band, thats kind of sad. But people will eventually get it and perform something new. Thats exactly what we did when we started. We took our main influences and tried to sound like a little bit of that band, and a little bit of that band, and form something new out of all of that inspiration and those influences. Thats a positive thing but it freaks me out and kind of blows my mind to think that there are actually people out there that look at us the same way that I look at my favorite bands. That just doesnt fit into my brain, thats just too much to handle for me. I think that thats so weird and so amazing, but its just hard to trust because its just too far out there.
MI: Well, youre going to play with a few of those bands in Israel. Theyre going to share the stage with you.
MS: Yeah! Alright, cool! Im looking forward to that.
MI: With the Fiction album, I just want to compliment you on it. I love it. You draw on a host of different styles for it. It sounds like when writing, youre specifically saying, Alright. This song is not going to sound ANYTHING like this song. Did you do that purposely?
MS: Yeah, absolutely. Going in, we wanted an album consisting of all different songs. Instead of having a certain theme to the whole album, we wanted the theme to be diversity. We allowed ourselves greater freedom, I guess. We told each other, Lets be more open this time around, lets explore the music we like instead of just discarding it if we feel its not good enough immediately. If someone has written a piece of music and we go, Nyaaaah, it doesnt feel right, and then like, we throw it away, but this time around we felt, Lets keep it a little bit longer and see if we can change it, alter it, whatever, to make it good. And usually we found out some of the best stuff on the album by doing that. And also we said, If the song has to have a certain feel to it, like an old melancholy feel or whatever, then lets stick to that instead of like putting some really melancholy stuff and some really aggressive stuff and you know, mixing that up. Go with the feeling of the song instead of just trying to mix everything up like we usually do. Cause on the inside its out of fear, like you feel like aaaagh its just going to be boring if we just keep playing slow, and its going to be boring if we just do a really fast song. But we said fuck that and see what happens if we just go with our gut feeling. It felt great to write this lively album and it felt great to record it. It worked out for the best.
MI: Its a great album.
MS: Well it was definitely a concentration(?) to have the songs be really different from each other.
MI: Before, you were talking about emotion and how the music is kinda sonic therapy for you, but personally, as a singer, how are you able to sing like that? How the hell do you pull it out of you? I wish I could sing like that, Im trying to do it and I cant even get near you.
MS: (laughs) I dont know. Its about You just gotta write about something that really makes you want to scream. Just to write something that I need to scream out of my system, and not just sing about it, yknow? And thats what thrash and death metal is to me. Feelings and emotions that you just cannot express in any other way. You kind of dig into those darkest fucking thoughts and then kind of channel that ultimate anger that you have throughout your day, but you kind of suppress it, and you need to find that and just scream it. Heh.
MI: Can you scream for me once? Can you just do one little growl for me once so I can say like Mikael Stanne did a growl for me?
MS: Noo. Well, I can do it later actually, Im not (coughs).. Im about to warm up before the show, Im not really ready. I need to do some warm-ups and do some exerciiise (says it funny, like 70s disco funk kinda) to really feel good (laughs).
MI: (still REALLY wants to know how he sings like that) How do you warm up? Whats your technique?
MS: (still laughing a bit) Well, I have just a couple of things, to get the breathing alright and to strengthen the abdominal muscles and stuff like that, just to make sure you have the right support. Good simple stuff, but I just learned it like two years ago and it helped me so much. Before that I constantly blew out my voice every other night and felt miserable. Throughout every tour we did I just felt miserable every single night because I couldnt speak, I just had to be silent. And stuff like that, yknow. But now it feels great and we just did each tour and every night was perfect. It helped me a lot.
MS: You were in the States now, no?
MI: Yeah, we were in the States, Canada and South America. We did seven weeks. We toured with Arch Enemy for a bit, we headlined for a couple of weeks, and then we headlined throughout South America, through Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia and Mexico. It was amazing.
MI: Were waiting for you here. With bated breath. Do you know anything about the Israeli scene?
MS: No. We know of a few bands, but Im not sure, not off the top of my head. Weve received a lot of letters and e-mails throughout the years from bands and from fans, stuff like that, but its always been hard and we never really heard from any promoters or anything like that from the Middle East. But we never really heard of any offers or anything like that before, so were really happy that now its finally going to happen. Its great.
MI: I actually tried to get in contact with Direct Management. They never even wrote me an e-mail back.
MS: Thats what they did. Now were actually managing ourselves nowadays so we dont really need them anymore. They were always kind of scared, yknow Aaagh, its an unexplored territory, we havent had any bands there before, so we shouldnt do it, and we were like, Well, hey, give it a try. And now were managing ourselves which means we can pretty much pick whatever we want to do right now, which is way better.
MI: What are your feelings about coming to Israel?
MS: >this answer wont be published until the Jerusalem Post article comes out<
MI: This is a bit of a strange question, but like I said you guys are my favorite band, and I read your lyrics. There are a few songs I'm nonplussed by...with the song Auctioned, I just don't get it. It seems like its about alienation and everything but what are you saying with it?
MS: Well, to me it's like when you lose control of your whole situation, when you feel like there's always someone else who decides what you should do. When you get stuck in a lousy job or something like that, or when you get stuck in a weird relationship, or you end up being dependent on someone else for money or for work or for whatever, and you just kind of lose yourself because you're just getting used in a system that you didn't create, or you didn't intend to be a part of. At the time, when I wrote it, I felt that I'd just gotten out of a long, serious relationship, and I just kind of lost myself and I lost some of my identity because I was only there to please someone else and it kind of felt weird, that you went on auction without even knowing it, you just got sold into something that you didn't know was going to happen, and it's just a weird, weird situation. And I think a lot of people are in that kind of situation, and I see it all the time, in my friends and people around me, and it's really fucking sad. But I'm not bitter anymore, y'know. I'm glad I'm not there anymore. So that's what it's about, losing that control. It's mostly about work, actually. I don't have that work ethic. I hate going to work and I've never really had a steady job my whole life. So I hate that, when someone else is just paying you to do some menial task that you don't really care about and you're like "What the fuck happened?" and you just get stuck in a rut that you can't get out of.
MI: (slightly overwhelmed with all that information) OK. Fabric.
MS: Which one?
MI: Fabric.
MS: Come again? It's hard to hear you.
MI: Fabric. I love that song. What's it about?
MS: Oh! Static?
MI: Fabric!!
MS: I'm sorry, it's kind of hard to hear you.
MI: Fabric! Like cloth! (laughs)
MS: (laughs) Hold on. They're soundchecking drums in the background, so I couldn't really hear you.
MI: (yells) FABRIC! like clothing... like...
MS: Fabric! Oh, there ya go.
MI: It could be my accent.
MS: I don't know my own songs, you know. Now I hear you. Fabric is about how lives are intertwined. In other words, it kind of comes from something we wrote about in our early demos and EPs, how the fabric of the universe is connected. I don't believe that at all but I sometimes like thinking about that kind of stuff, how things are connected, and we are connected to people, and six degrees of separation. There's something to that. No matter how far removed you want to be from society or from the rest of the world, there are all these things that tie you into reality or tie you into certain people in your life, and stuff like that. So that could be really frustrating, because you just want to be your own person and not just a part of a community or society or whatever. To me, sometimes you want to just go off the grid. But unfortunately it doesn't really work like that.
MI: It's funny. On one hand, you feel that you're alienated and that you feel lost and that you don't matter, but on the other hand you don't want to matter! You want to be off the grid.
MS: Yep, I know. And that's the conflict. All the time. Sometimes you just want to be insignificant, matter to no one and hide. Then again, we're in a band and we're onstage, of course we want to be important too. We want to be out there. We want to be seen. You know we're fucking exhibitionists to a certain extent. It's a constant struggle. I don't know. People around me seem to handle that really well but I don't. It's really like a huge source of frustration and obviously, inspiration as well. Then again, when I write lyrics, I usually feel really miserable. That's when I like to write, when I'm at my lowest point. That's when all those things come out. Usually I feel pretty good. I do like being part of a community and society and I do like taking part in everyday activities as long as it's not work related. don't mind that, but then again, sometimes you just want to stay away. It comes from touring as well, meeting people, there's constant fuss, you never get to be alone, you just want to shut off and hide in the bathroom for two hours. And cry for an hour or something like that. It's a constant power struggle, between being like a social good guy and being like a total fucking misfit and retard who hides in the shadows and takes detours just to not see anyone. I like the struggle. I like both sides of it. I like being the fucking loner and I like being the life of the party.
MI: Dark Tranquillity is my favorite band.
MS: Thank you.
MI: Im really looking forward to seeing you guys. Were a crazy crowd, in Israel. Youre not going to be disappointed.
MS: I cant wait. It will be quite cool. Im also really looking forward to it.
MI: OK, so one of the reasons youre my favorite band is because of your lyrical prowess. What are you reading?
MS: Everything. From pulp fiction paperback to Swedish poetry and hard science fiction. Pretty much everything I can get my hands on as long as its interesting and triggers thought. Not just for entertainment. Anything that gets you thinking, that kind of gets your creative juices flowing, so to speak, that triggers inspiration. It could be anything,
MI: Anything in specific?
MS: Like I told you, I read all kinds of different genres and literature. I can even get into some ridiculous fantasy, if its well-written for the hell of it, to kind of see different perspectives.
MI: I ask, because you (make very artistic) use of words, and I wanted to know, how much of it are you really trying to say something, and how much of it is just you being able to craft dark words together and just sound great, but youre not really trying to preach or say anything.
MS: Well, I never really try to preach anything. Perhaps there is some kind of message here and there. I dont want to be too full of stress or negative or anything like that. I try to add some positivity or tongue-in-cheek kind of humor to it. But most of the time theyre just kind of messages I shoot off to myself, try to poke a hole into my seemingly impenetrable wall of self-confidence and stuff like that because I know that Im just nobody and that I pretty much suck at everything, so I try to write about that, and how insignificant I feel sometimes, and how meaningless life can be. Just things that irritate me, things that I really hate about myself. More than anything its just kind of like a knock on the head, a wake-up call to myself saying like Get the fuck out of this hole and do something about it. And its actually healthy. It feels really good to write that off, to write it down and get it off my head and off my chest, to kind of move on. And sometimes after Ive written a song I kind of see (the situation) in a new light and I feel like Ive overcome those negative feelings, I feel better because of it. Its a (corporal?) work in progress, to try to be more sane and healthy.
MI: Theres nothing specifically I mean, when I read the lyrics to Nothing to No One and Inside the Particle Storm, I thought you were talking about nuclear war. Was it nuclear war within yourself?
MS: Its about desolation and how you can draw inspiration from pretty much nothing. Nothing to No One, for instance, is about the ultimate kind of shutting yourself down and shutting yourself off from everybody because you feel that youre not good enough to speak to someone or be part of someone elses life. Sometimes I can feel like that. I hate that, but sometimes you just cant get over that. And to get into Inside the Particle Storm, those are Niklas lyrics, and he really tried to be negative and channeled all that frustration and anger that hes felt over the years. Because of his not writing that much, he hadnt written in years, he just took all of that negativity and frustration into that song and thats what makes it amazing to me.
MI: OK Because you guys are a fount of inspiration for a multitude of bands globally and basically, people copy you a lot, what do you think of all of that?
MS: Well, I guess imitation is a great form of flattery. Its kind of cool that people look at us for inspiration and decide to form a band because they think our music is special. Thats amazing to me. But then again, when people are actually copying and kind of forget how to be original and they lose their identity because they want to sound like us or like some other band, thats kind of sad. But people will eventually get it and perform something new. Thats exactly what we did when we started. We took our main influences and tried to sound like a little bit of that band, and a little bit of that band, and form something new out of all of that inspiration and those influences. Thats a positive thing but it freaks me out and kind of blows my mind to think that there are actually people out there that look at us the same way that I look at my favorite bands. That just doesnt fit into my brain, thats just too much to handle for me. I think that thats so weird and so amazing, but its just hard to trust because its just too far out there.
MI: Well, youre going to play with a few of those bands in Israel. Theyre going to share the stage with you.
MS: Yeah! Alright, cool! Im looking forward to that.
MI: With the Fiction album, I just want to compliment you on it. I love it. You draw on a host of different styles for it. It sounds like when writing, youre specifically saying, Alright. This song is not going to sound ANYTHING like this song. Did you do that purposely?
MS: Yeah, absolutely. Going in, we wanted an album consisting of all different songs. Instead of having a certain theme to the whole album, we wanted the theme to be diversity. We allowed ourselves greater freedom, I guess. We told each other, Lets be more open this time around, lets explore the music we like instead of just discarding it if we feel its not good enough immediately. If someone has written a piece of music and we go, Nyaaaah, it doesnt feel right, and then like, we throw it away, but this time around we felt, Lets keep it a little bit longer and see if we can change it, alter it, whatever, to make it good. And usually we found out some of the best stuff on the album by doing that. And also we said, If the song has to have a certain feel to it, like an old melancholy feel or whatever, then lets stick to that instead of like putting some really melancholy stuff and some really aggressive stuff and you know, mixing that up. Go with the feeling of the song instead of just trying to mix everything up like we usually do. Cause on the inside its out of fear, like you feel like aaaagh its just going to be boring if we just keep playing slow, and its going to be boring if we just do a really fast song. But we said fuck that and see what happens if we just go with our gut feeling. It felt great to write this lively album and it felt great to record it. It worked out for the best.
MI: Its a great album.
MS: Well it was definitely a concentration(?) to have the songs be really different from each other.
MI: Before, you were talking about emotion and how the music is kinda sonic therapy for you, but personally, as a singer, how are you able to sing like that? How the hell do you pull it out of you? I wish I could sing like that, Im trying to do it and I cant even get near you.
MS: (laughs) I dont know. Its about You just gotta write about something that really makes you want to scream. Just to write something that I need to scream out of my system, and not just sing about it, yknow? And thats what thrash and death metal is to me. Feelings and emotions that you just cannot express in any other way. You kind of dig into those darkest fucking thoughts and then kind of channel that ultimate anger that you have throughout your day, but you kind of suppress it, and you need to find that and just scream it. Heh.
MI: Can you scream for me once? Can you just do one little growl for me once so I can say like Mikael Stanne did a growl for me?
MS: Noo. Well, I can do it later actually, Im not (coughs).. Im about to warm up before the show, Im not really ready. I need to do some warm-ups and do some exerciiise (says it funny, like 70s disco funk kinda) to really feel good (laughs).
MI: (still REALLY wants to know how he sings like that) How do you warm up? Whats your technique?
MS: (still laughing a bit) Well, I have just a couple of things, to get the breathing alright and to strengthen the abdominal muscles and stuff like that, just to make sure you have the right support. Good simple stuff, but I just learned it like two years ago and it helped me so much. Before that I constantly blew out my voice every other night and felt miserable. Throughout every tour we did I just felt miserable every single night because I couldnt speak, I just had to be silent. And stuff like that, yknow. But now it feels great and we just did each tour and every night was perfect. It helped me a lot.
MS: You were in the States now, no?
MI: Yeah, we were in the States, Canada and South America. We did seven weeks. We toured with Arch Enemy for a bit, we headlined for a couple of weeks, and then we headlined throughout South America, through Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia and Mexico. It was amazing.
MI: Were waiting for you here. With bated breath. Do you know anything about the Israeli scene?
MS: No. We know of a few bands, but Im not sure, not off the top of my head. Weve received a lot of letters and e-mails throughout the years from bands and from fans, stuff like that, but its always been hard and we never really heard from any promoters or anything like that from the Middle East. But we never really heard of any offers or anything like that before, so were really happy that now its finally going to happen. Its great.
MI: I actually tried to get in contact with Direct Management. They never even wrote me an e-mail back.
MS: Thats what they did. Now were actually managing ourselves nowadays so we dont really need them anymore. They were always kind of scared, yknow Aaagh, its an unexplored territory, we havent had any bands there before, so we shouldnt do it, and we were like, Well, hey, give it a try. And now were managing ourselves which means we can pretty much pick whatever we want to do right now, which is way better.
MI: What are your feelings about coming to Israel?
MS: >this answer wont be published until the Jerusalem Post article comes out<
MI: This is a bit of a strange question, but like I said you guys are my favorite band, and I read your lyrics. There are a few songs I'm nonplussed by...with the song Auctioned, I just don't get it. It seems like its about alienation and everything but what are you saying with it?
MS: Well, to me it's like when you lose control of your whole situation, when you feel like there's always someone else who decides what you should do. When you get stuck in a lousy job or something like that, or when you get stuck in a weird relationship, or you end up being dependent on someone else for money or for work or for whatever, and you just kind of lose yourself because you're just getting used in a system that you didn't create, or you didn't intend to be a part of. At the time, when I wrote it, I felt that I'd just gotten out of a long, serious relationship, and I just kind of lost myself and I lost some of my identity because I was only there to please someone else and it kind of felt weird, that you went on auction without even knowing it, you just got sold into something that you didn't know was going to happen, and it's just a weird, weird situation. And I think a lot of people are in that kind of situation, and I see it all the time, in my friends and people around me, and it's really fucking sad. But I'm not bitter anymore, y'know. I'm glad I'm not there anymore. So that's what it's about, losing that control. It's mostly about work, actually. I don't have that work ethic. I hate going to work and I've never really had a steady job my whole life. So I hate that, when someone else is just paying you to do some menial task that you don't really care about and you're like "What the fuck happened?" and you just get stuck in a rut that you can't get out of.
MI: (slightly overwhelmed with all that information) OK. Fabric.
MS: Which one?
MI: Fabric.
MS: Come again? It's hard to hear you.
MI: Fabric. I love that song. What's it about?
MS: Oh! Static?
MI: Fabric!!
MS: I'm sorry, it's kind of hard to hear you.
MI: Fabric! Like cloth! (laughs)
MS: (laughs) Hold on. They're soundchecking drums in the background, so I couldn't really hear you.
MI: (yells) FABRIC! like clothing... like...
MS: Fabric! Oh, there ya go.
MI: It could be my accent.
MS: I don't know my own songs, you know. Now I hear you. Fabric is about how lives are intertwined. In other words, it kind of comes from something we wrote about in our early demos and EPs, how the fabric of the universe is connected. I don't believe that at all but I sometimes like thinking about that kind of stuff, how things are connected, and we are connected to people, and six degrees of separation. There's something to that. No matter how far removed you want to be from society or from the rest of the world, there are all these things that tie you into reality or tie you into certain people in your life, and stuff like that. So that could be really frustrating, because you just want to be your own person and not just a part of a community or society or whatever. To me, sometimes you want to just go off the grid. But unfortunately it doesn't really work like that.
MI: It's funny. On one hand, you feel that you're alienated and that you feel lost and that you don't matter, but on the other hand you don't want to matter! You want to be off the grid.
MS: Yep, I know. And that's the conflict. All the time. Sometimes you just want to be insignificant, matter to no one and hide. Then again, we're in a band and we're onstage, of course we want to be important too. We want to be out there. We want to be seen. You know we're fucking exhibitionists to a certain extent. It's a constant struggle. I don't know. People around me seem to handle that really well but I don't. It's really like a huge source of frustration and obviously, inspiration as well. Then again, when I write lyrics, I usually feel really miserable. That's when I like to write, when I'm at my lowest point. That's when all those things come out. Usually I feel pretty good. I do like being part of a community and society and I do like taking part in everyday activities as long as it's not work related. don't mind that, but then again, sometimes you just want to stay away. It comes from touring as well, meeting people, there's constant fuss, you never get to be alone, you just want to shut off and hide in the bathroom for two hours. And cry for an hour or something like that. It's a constant power struggle, between being like a social good guy and being like a total fucking misfit and retard who hides in the shadows and takes detours just to not see anyone. I like the struggle. I like both sides of it. I like being the fucking loner and I like being the life of the party.
