thought some of ye fellas might be interested to check an interview I did with Mike Akerpeth yesterday. Raw version, nothing edited yet, compleet with typos and bad punctuation.
How excited are you feeling a couple weeks before releasing your new album? Does the excitement differ a bit from the previous times given the fact that Heritage will obviously be more different from Watershed than Watershed was from Ghost Reveries and so on…
Well, there’s not that many circumstances that make the album different than before. The writing the way that we work, it was similar. I wrote the stuff back home. I did start off on the wrong foot a little bit and wrote music that I didn’t feel was moving you know. I didn’t feel anything when I was listening to some of the songs, so I basically deleted two songs or something, and then started from scratch and ended up writing a song that’s called The Lines in my Hand which is on the record, and that song was just musically a pretty big departure from anything I’d done before, which was very refreshing for me, and made things very exciting, so when I started writing for real it was a pretty quick process and within 6 or 7 months I wrote eleven songs on my own and one song together with Fredrik. So everything was similar, I wrote it home in my house, in my own studio, and for me, even if I know it’s a very different sounding record It kind of makes sense because I kind of feel inside it’s the right thing for us if you know what I mean.
Do you remember when exactly, and under what circumstances you decided to make your next album sound the way it does?
One thing is that I’m completely fed up with how metal records sound these days, the actual sound production makes me gag almost, you know it’s so sterile and there’s almost no humanity left in most metal. Modern metal production is boring pretty much, and we also had records with heavy types of production, but it kind of fitted those records, while now it’s like I just reached a point when I couldn’t listen to that kind of stuff anymore. Besides, having a production like that, where you just basically put up a microphone in front of the drums, and put a microphone in front of the guitar, and an amplifier and record, and you don’t really spend time with post-production, stuff like that and editing, it’s going to sound a certain way. I think with this contemporary type of sound our record would have sounded pretty uninteresting, whereas with this earthy kind of sound, it has, like many people said, kind of a vintage feel to it.
I saw you state somewhere that you thought some fans might be a little bit upset about the direction your music is taking. Whereas my guess, obviously I can’t speak for everyone, is that most people who have gone so far down the road with Opeth feel comfortable with progressive rock influences in your music. What makes you feel that some people could turn their back on you because of Heritage specifically?
Well I don’t really know what they’re gonna think. It’s true, we’ve never been really part of a “team” in that sense. We have always done things our way for sure, but we have also worked in studios, with engineers who have been used to working with these metal types of productions and sort of unconsciously pushed us to adopt a certain sound. This new sound, I’m hoping that fans will understand it, I’m hoping that fans are not completely ruined by modern metal productions. Drums for instance, they sound all so padlocked on any of these modern metal records you know. It’s strange that bands are kind of pushing their drum sound to make it sound more and more like a drum machine, which is something I don’t really understand. So we took things back a little bit and tried to make the drums sound more humane. A lot of people have asked me if I’m worried that we’re going to lose some fans with this album, but I mean if the only thing you liked about Opeth are the death metal bits, then it’s not likely you’ve ever been a fan anyway, because we’ve never been “pure” in our approach of death metal. And people who were only in the death metal stuff we did probably left us a long time ago.
There are obviously going to be comparisons between Heritage and what you did with Damnation, almost ten years ago. My feeling is that Damnation was more like a trial balloon, to have a look at what you could achieve with this type of music, whereas Heritage now definitely feels like a new beginning.
Well Damnation was special because it was a little bit of an experiment as it is back then and also because we recorded two albums at the same time. And with Damnation I wanted to focus on the calmer sound, whereas Heritage I don’t think it’s a particularly calm record, even if it has calm moments, it’s pretty intense I think. On Damnation the whole purpose of the album was to focus on the mellow side of this sound, and Deliverance was slightly more heavy and extreme I guess. The only likeliness between these two albums is the fact that both have a slightly older type of production and both only feature the regular singing. And also the songs are a bit shorter, but I think that’s generally the only kind of comparison between those two records, as far as I’m concerned anyway.
How did the other guys in the band react when you told them where you wanted to lead Opeth from now on, to drop the death metal vocals and so on? Were you met with any sort of reluctance or did it all go very smoothly between all of you?
Well they were pretty much on the same page. It was actually Martin Mendes who basically pushed me in this direction in the first place, because I played him these two songs that were the genesis of the new material, but that didn’t really thrill me back then. And he didn’t like it, you know. And he told me something like “look, if it’s what it’s gonna be, it this is the next step for us, then I’m not sure I’m with you.” You know, like he was disappointed basically. So that’s what pushed me, even if I could easily have reacted in a negative way, be angry, say stuff like “well then if you don’t like it why don’t you do it yourself motherfucker”, in fact I was more or less relieved, because of that, because I felt the same way, I just did not wanna view that kind of stuff, I was just a bit full of myself you know. So Martin Mendes was always pretty much on the same page as myself. He’d been only recording metal type of drums so far, except on some bits of Watershed, so he never really had the opportunity to showcase he was an all-round type of drummer, so he was really, really psyched about doing this record. Per, who is, excuse me was playing keyboard with us didn’t really say anything. Obviously he’s not in the band anymore, and Fredrik was the one who was most worried because he’d just gotten into the band, had been on only one record with us, so he was like “are you sure this is what you wanna do, and what about the metal fans and blah, blah…”, so I played him the songs and that’s where his doubts kind of ended, because he really liked what I had written, even if it was different. So everybody was more or less on the same page.
Now as a songwriter what are the fields, the aspects of progressive music that you needed to work on most in order to feel legitimate within this style?
Well, I like progressive music that is progressive in the true sense of the word, and I also like the style, progressive, progressive metal whatever, so you know I ‘m interested in music that pushes the boundaries and that is changing. If you’re going to call yourself progressive you can’t really stay the same for too long, I mean there’s a reason why we had some changes in the past, it’s because I’m always looking for something. Something new, or a way to develop our sound, well something basically. I’ve never been fully comfortable in a particular style, I always wanted to develop it, change it a little bit you know. That’s the type of music I’m looking for personally, for my own listening pleasure, and also it’s the kind of stuff I like to have in my head when I’m writing.
I think that the range of sounds and songwriting options has grown a bit wider than the organic elements (guitar, drums, keyboard) and you have frequently these rather unusual sounds like bells or pipes or whatever that feel very mysterious in a way, very progressive in fact. So how exciting was it to play around with sounds and maybe new ways of going about writing songs? Did you sometimes feel like a child at Toys’r’us?
Well the experimenting is something very important for the band, and it’s also very important, especially for this record, to have fun in the studio, we did have lots of fun recording Heritage. You get reminded why you became a musician in the first place, it’s a bit like magic to be honest and, you know, that how we want it to be. We don’t want the creative process to feel like work, we don’t want it to feel like a chore, we want it to feel like something that is our calling if you know what I mean. So we kind of let loose and just went with whatever we thought was cool, there’s no boundary apart from the boundaries that are set by our own tastes.
So can we call now Opeth a progressive rock band in its own right?
(laughs) I don’t know, well I think we’re a hard rock band that also has roots in death metal. I mean, even regarding Heritage, our roots are in extreme metal, I don’t think it would have been possible for us to write Heritage without that musical past. So we’re not turning our backs on anything we’ve done in the past, basically what we “are” is uninteresting, because it’s gonna change again I think. Progressive… something is fine with me.
When you are writing a song these days, does the flow of the songs, the transitions, occur to you as naturally as they did before or do you have to put a lot of thought into it, seeing as your music has always been quite complex of course but I feel there are more and more events and moods within a single song than before?
Well, it wasn’t harder to write these songs, and I can’t say that they are more complex than other songs I wrote in the past, but I honestly don’t remember much about the whole thing, I just played the guitar, wrote down some stuff, played whatever, piano, filled with some drumbeats until I came up with something, and once I had a part I kind of moved on. So it wasn’t difficult to write this album. I’d even say it was easy, the hardest part was just basically looking for a style of some sort, and once I had that style, which is obviously all over the place it was easier for me to write, much easier than I can remember how it’s been in the past. It was a quick process, in spite of the songs being quite complex-sounding.
Is the name of the album, Heritage, to be understood like this album is the sum of the musical heritage you received throughout your life, from the bands and albums that have meant much to you?
Well it basically reflects the inspiration for this album, which is ultimately taking place in older music, you know, the international musical heritage by bands, some that have been in many ways forgotten. Which stresses me out a little bit, it’s just like me when I talk with younger people and I tell them about Deep Purple and they go “who?” They really don’t know who that it’s, that’s amazing, it’s like how is that even possible, so it’s basically getting closer to those meaningful bands and also getting closer to the Swedish musical heritage with the folk music for instance, which is not heavily featured but all the same there is much more influence from this music on this album than on the previous records.
Can you name a few prog albums that did have a major impact on you, or even change profoundly the way you felt about music?
Wow… millions. Well maybe not millions (laughs). At least thousands. But lately I’ve been listening a lot to Joni Mitchell, who is… in a way like Iron Maiden or Kiss were to me in the early eighties. She impacted me like that, I kind of need her music in my life. But I’m playing records all the time, when I sit down, when I go down to my office in the evenings, I always have a few records with me and my coffee, and I sit here typing on the computer, listening to records. There is always pretty much something playing, so it’s impossible to say a song that meant especially much, but since I mentioned Joni Mitchell there is a song called “The Arrangement” from an album called Ladies of the Canyon, which I think is a masterpiece no less.
How much of an influence is the Swedish band Landberk on you? I remember at the time Damnation was released it felt to me like an album like their Riktigt Ätka might as well have been the next Opeth album, except for the lyrics in Swedish of course.
Oh they are an amazing band, I am very good friends with Reine Fiske, the guitar player and Stefan Dimle the bass player, and those two wrote most of the songs. They have been a big influence for me musically for a long time, but they obviously split up in 1997. And they went on to found a band called Paatos which was also a fantastic band. I’m talking to Stefan, I’m trying to make them reunite. I think they were an amazing band, but they’re very, very obscure, not many people know about them.
You have pretty long piano sequences at the beginning and at the end of the record this time around. Pretty gorgeous too I must add. Can we understand these pieces as the front door and the back door of the album, making people feel that Heritage is a world of its own and that there is sort of a cryptic ritual you have to go through when entering or leaving?
That’s a nice way to put it. As a matter of fact, the sequencing of songs is very important to me. The “Heritage” piano song was always meant to be first. The last song however was supposed to have vocals on it. I wrote it for Nathalie Lorichs who sang “Coil” on the last record, but she felt it was a bit too complex or something, so she never really tried to sing it, and I just basically forgot about that song, and then at some point I picked it up again and listened to the instrumental version and felt like “wow I really like this song”, so when we decided that we wanted to put it on the record as an instrumental, it was obvious that it was going to go last, because it sounds like some type of farewell.
Is Heritage in fact a concept album of some sort or not at all?
No, it’s not. It’s not a musical concept and it’s not a lyrical concept.
How much of the lyrics are related to the History of Sweden, because it seems like songs like “Famine” or “Häxprocess” do refer to chapters of medieval history.
Not really. The thing is, with titles like “Famine” and “Häxprocess” you can have a very good imagination and it’s got a feeling with any lyrics that I wrote, if you know what I mean. You can use these kinds of words if you’re talking in a cryptical manner, which I tend to do, and in metaphors. You can basically put that title to any song. It has no real link to Swedish history, it’s basically all from my own imagination I would say.
A word about the lyrics in general. I have the feeling that you have evolved from an approach that at first was maybe more of a conservative, romantic nature, to something more abstract on later albums, and now you seem more and more interested in storytelling, which sort of connects with the song being more divided into chapters. So generally how would you describe the evolution process your lyrics went through in the course of the years?
Well, in the beginning I was just writing nice words and pieced them together to have something to sing, it wasn’t necessary that they would have to mean something. And to a certain extent on the second album there are songs like “Black Rose Immortal” which is… I mean, I don’t even know what they’re about to be honest. I just wrote those songs and at the time I felt they had some sort of implication in my head, but I mean I wasn’t really going anywhere with those lyrics. If I had lyrics that somehow fitted the songs, even if I didn’t really know what they meant, I wasn’t really worried about that, I could use them anyway. But it’s growing increasingly difficult for me to write nonsense lyrics. I need to write something that means something at least to me. I sometimes wish I could still write meaningless lyrics (laughs), because they are second to the music anyway, but I can’t do this anymore, I have to come up with a personal meaning, otherwise I can’t deliver the vocals in the way I need to. It’s hard for me to write about other people, I mean writing lyrics is difficult in general but it’s much easier when I write about my own thoughts because there are no questions about that. There is only some kind of truth which is easy to uncover if you just poke at yourself.
How do you feel about the way other extreme metal bands of your generation evolved, like Ulver, Enslaved and such, or even looking at what Ihsahn from Emperor is doing these days. Do you think it makes a statement for young metal bands of today that trying and break away from the academic bounds of their styles is probably the best way to last in the scene, and to feel accomplished as a musician?
Yeah, you know, these guys… we’re roughly the same age, and I guess they just got fed up with what they’d been doing, and I know that Kris from Ulver, I don’t know him personally but he seems to be a seeker in that sense, he is always seeking something new, and Ihsahn is much the same way, he and I have many influences in common, and he’s also one of those musical seekers. And the Enslaved guys, they’ve been into the progressive rock for years as well. They’re constantly evolving, which I think is extremely refreshing. What I don’t understand is bands from my generation that are still the same, that have been doing the same kind of stuff year in and year out. It feels like “wow! How much inspiration do you have for this type of stuff.” But it’s also something I’m admiring of in a way. That you can stay the same. For me it’s just impossible. I feel if you’re a musician and don’t change, it’s something odd. I mean look at Lemmy from Motörhead. This band wouldn’t change for decades and they couldn’t now, but Lemmy himself has had a long career and he has gone through changes before, a lot. I have one of his first recordings with Sam Gopal from the late sixties. He sings beautifully on that record, it’s like a jazz record pretty much. And obviously he did Hawkwind for a bunch of years and other stuff, and then Motörhead. It’s not like he woke up one day bored as a teenager and launched Motörhead.
How connected are you these days to the social and political happenings in Sweden? There are long stretches of time where you are practically living out of a suitcase, do you sometimes feel like you’re losing track of the difference between being home and being anywhere on the planet?
Maybe a bit, that’s a very good question actually. I feel like I’m growing a little detached from Swedish society these days. But I think it’s something that would have happened despite me travelling so much. You know, when you travel the world like I do and spend a lot of time between two airports, there comes a time when there is no difference between going to New York City and going to Gothenburg (laughs). So the whole view that Swedish people have, the view of the world and the political view, can sometimes seem a bit naïve, and narrow-minded, and slightly stupid sometimes. And I’m like “how on earth can you talk about these kinds of things when you don’t know shit about it. You haven’t seen what’s going on in other countries. You haven’t seen anything. But you just keep talking about it anyway.” And it’s a bit the same with our politicians, they promote a very shallow world view and they’re just shoving shit down people’s throats, taking advantage of the fact that in Sweden, people still trust the government to a large extent. A majority of people believe that if the government tells you something, that’s true, and you should follow otherwise you’re an outsider, and you don’t wanna be an outsider in Swedish society. You wanna stay clean. And you wanna be just completely medium. If you’re too good at something you’re gonna get shit for it, and if you’re too bad at something you’re gonna get shit for it, so you gotta be somewhere in the middle. And if you’re not, people kind of frown upon you. And for me, because I’m travelling so much, my views have changed a lot over the years, so I feel a bit detached from Swedish society, yes I do.
Again as a Swedish citizen are you worried about the consequences of what happened in Norway? Do you think it will fuel some kind of social unrest, and strengthen the nationalistic movements, which are becoming more influent politically in Sweden – a usually pretty “neutral” country – as we saw in recent months?
Yeah. I think it’s bound to get worse. Sweden is perceived like you said as a neutral country, which confirms what I just said, that we want to be in the middle. We don’t really want to stand for something, we don’t want to attack other countries, yet we don’t want to not attack them either if you know what I mean, in terms of whatever injustices are going on over the world. And what happened in Norway is also a sign of what is happening in the whole of Scandinavia, which is very worrying, because some of these political parties, which have right-winged type of doctrines and opinions, are gaining strength here, in Norway, in Sweden, in Finland and also in Denmark. It also says a lot about how political life is being handled here, because a lot of people just have been unable to make their voices heard, and yet feel like they’re being neglected. That is the reason why we see a rise of these parties that can be called “displeased” parties. In Sweden we have a party that comes from a fascist background, which is in government now, not in control mind you, but it’s got 6% of the votes or something, which is a lot. We see a lot of social movement these days across the world, obviously in the Middle East as well, which is ultimately a good thing I think, but can also lead to terribly reckless behaviours that undermine the greater purpose of these pleas for more freedom.
Any news of Comus?
Oh, no I haven’t talked to them in some time, but we are trying to get them on to play a few more shows. I know that they’re writing for a new album and I know that they have played a couple new songs. I think they should take their time, you know they’ve been waiting since 1974 so what’s another year now. Obviously I’m quite psyched to hear what they’re gonna do next musically of course. That reminds me I need to send Roger an e-mail today. First Utterance was very influential for me, I can’t remember when I bought it, some time in the mid-nineties. I was shocked by it. It was a beautiful thing for me, coming from a death metal background, to hear a psychedelic folk album with much the type of lyrics that I was into, you see. It was just beautiful poetry to me, and the music was just mad. That was exactly what I was looking for, I had never heard any music like that before doing Orchid. It’s a unique band and a unique record. I would never try to copy them, besides that’s impossible, you need to be Roger Wootton to write stuff that is as good as Comus in the same style. I could never be that, but they’re continuing to inspire me and I still listen very frequently to the album, and also to the second album To Keep from Crying. I would never try to do something similar, but I would love to do something with them, Roger and Bobbie.
Before we close this interview just a word on Storm Corrosion. Don’t you wish you had kept that a secret a little while longer so you don’t get people asking all the time about how far you are with it, like I just did?
(laughs) Yeah, actually I think it was Mike Portnoy who said something about us, and now he’s not involved anymore, because there are no drums. But we have recorded six or seven songs that are ready, and to be honest I thing they sound amazing. So with all the recording and negotiating ahead of us we’re looking at a release next year. But I wanna keep it under the radar a little bit. We’re not gonna make it a big affair anyway.
