Pain of Salvation – Interview D
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Pain of Salvation – interview at The Rock, Copenhagen, March 10, 2007 (full transcript) SRFM: Ok, so I have my intermistic recording device… DG: yeah… SRFM: … running. Well, er, is this your first job on the tour or have you been touring for a while now, or..? DG: This is the last, actually… SRFM: The last actually? DG: Yeah… Which I’m happy about because I’m sick now. [Laughter followed by a murmur of voice] Claudia (tourmanager): Who’s that guy? [Laughter from DG] SRFM: I’m Søren from heavymetal.dk Claudia: uh-huh! DG: [Laughs] Oh-oh… SRFM: Are you Claudia? Claudia: Yeah… SRFM: Hello… I’ve been trying to text you all through my… Claudia: Yeah, yeah… You’re the late one, right? SRFM: Yes… Claudia: Ok, so we have a cross-over interview, so you’re not allowed to start without him… [another interviewer enters] SRFM: Ok, I’m sorry… DG: [Laughs] Claudia: Who let you in? SRFM: Er, I got in through the back… Claudia: Uh-huh. SRFM: So er… DG: [Laughs] FH: Calm now… SRFM: I tried to phone you a while ago, but you didn’t take it… Claudia: No, I don’t want to talk anymore… Sit over here? So that’s Daniel and Fredrik… The thing is, we have to… his voice… MR (other interviewer): That’s cool.. Claudia: That’s why we’ll have to do…… SRFM: Two at a time… Claudia: a cross-over… MR: What do we do? Claudia: Ask questions SRFM: We have to share the interview. MR: That’s what I was wondering DG: Yeah, of course, come on… Claudia [directed at SRFM): You want something to drink? Coke, water… SRFM: Er, no I’m fine… Claudia: Good for you. You? [directed at MR] MR: No, I’m fine, I have my water… (?) Claudia: Yeah, good boy… DG: [laughs] MR: How do we do this? One for you, one for me? I don’t know… SFRM: Yeah, how much… [indistinct talk in the background] Fifteen minutes? Ok. Let’s just take turns then. DG: Pop them out, see what happens… MR: There are probably a lot of the same questions. DG: Ha ha, yeah, there usually is. MR: [Directed at SRFM] Did you already ask something or were you in the middle of anything? SRFM: I asked one question about touring, and then I was interrupted by the tour manager… [Laughter and noise] MR: I’m just going to ask what does it feel like, now that the new album is out, and how are the responses you’ve got so far? DG: Responses have been very good, surprisingly good, actually. Even in Sweden for the first time – if that counts for something. Had very good reviews… I mean, we’ve always had a lot of very good reviews, but now we have reviews in places that didn’t even review us previously. FH: Much more media coverage, than… DG: Yeah. So… We don’t know why that is, but we just think it’s good. MR: Yeah, definitely. DG: I guess that you feel that for every album you release those albums are forever released, you know. And I can feel that our first album, Entropia, didn’t get the appreciation and attention that it deserves. And we cannot change that – we cannot release that album again. So, for every album you release, you only have one chance for that album. So, even though we are getting more and more successful, you still feel sorry for the album that didn’t, you know, get there. SRFM: The music on the new album is slightly less complex than the previous two efforts… DG: You might think! [Looks pedagogical and laughs] SRFM: Yeah, well I mean it’s more song oriented than the last two… DG: Oh… SRFM: … Is that a deliberate move to make it more in tune with The Perfect Element pt. 1 or…? DG: Not so much that, but, I mean…. The album is at least as or maybe even more complicated and intricate than the previous albums, musicwise, but hopefully, when you listen to the album, that is not what you are going to notice… SRFM: Mm. DG: The first thing that’s going to meet you is hopefully kind of the surface of anger, frustration and energy… Kind of a raw, blunt energy, somehow. And the cause of… I have always been a fan of hiding the complex stuff away into the deeper structures, instead of having it flashing on the surface. But even more so on this album, since it is the kind of social and political album that it is, you want that to be in focus, instead of complexity. Then if you want to delve deeper, after a while, as a visionary [?], you have that possibility. You can… I mean, as soon as you start trying to play this stuff, then you’re going to notice that, “fuck…” [Laughter around the table.] MR: Well, actually, in a way that answers one of my questions, so er.. I would like to ask just a little bit more about the whole process of creating this album: When writing, when recording, when mixing, I mean how was the whole thing? I really love the sound of it, and I think it is the best produced Pain of Salvation album so far. DG: Oh, that’s pretty cool… MR: My passion is in music production and stuff like that, so… I really think it is the best on this album. DG: Erm… The thing is, we abandoned expensive studios and expensive guitar amplifiers, and I created a home studio – set up with a Logic system with a Macintosh computer, and we recorded with Line 6 amplifiers. [Imitates a drum roll and a cymbal crash] Don’t tell anyone! [Laughter around the table] I mean, the thing is, the most important thing, I think, when you’re creating an album and mixing and making the sounds, is the vision that you have. And with a home studio, you can still create exactly what you want to do, but it’s going to take much more time, you’re going to have to spend much more effort, because it’s not as easy as just plugging things in and it sounds good instantly. So you have to really work on everything. In a completely different way. So, we used Line 6 amplifiers, but it’s been a very tedious process of making the sound as I want them to sound… MR: Ok. DG: You can definitely not use the default sounds and you have to, you know, use cabinets and… it’s… Yeah. I have to say, it’s been a tedious process altogether, both writing it and recording it, and it’s been interrupted by a lot of other things happening, so it’s not been like…. Well that is one of the advantages you have when you go into an expensive studio – it can only take so much time, and then, you know, you don’t have anymore money! When you’re at home you can [do?] things exactly the way you want to, but you also have that possibility that you can be interrupted, and you can postpone things and say, you know, “let’s take a break for 3-4 weeks, and then get back to it” and stuff like that. And … [?] the pressure is still on you during that time. You will end up spending a lot of time with that same pressure on you all the time without actually reaching to the point where you can just let go of that. SRFM: You said before that the new album is very political in the lyrics. How important are the lyrics… in the music? Do you want people to only, so to speak, dwell in the lyrics, or are the lyrics a way of getting attention to the music or… which is more important in general? DG: Well, to me of course, I mean… If people only want to hear the music, uhm, it’s up to them. I wouldn’t say that they’re doing anything wrong. Er… Personally, I don’t understand how you could ever do that, how you could ignore, you know, such a big part of the full product. I could never do that myself. It’s not even an option for me. I tend to notice that the songs and the albums that I like the best always revolve around something that feels really close to whoever wrote it, and… you know. Something that grips me, or something that makes me think… SRFM: Something that is personal, so to speak. DG: Yeah, exactly, something that has blood and sweat inside. And I can’t see how anything can have blood and sweat inside, if you’re not writing about something that you care about. So, to me, I guess it’s just like… If you write a book, it’s a story but it’s also something that you want to say. There is some sort of message that you want to convey with writing that book, probably. And I guess you could read the book and only read what’s happening, and then “oh, that’s an interesting line of events”. But to me it’s impossible not to ask the question, so… what’s… what is the writer trying to tell me here? What’s… what’s his reason for writing this al… this book, or in our case, the album? So…. to answer your question very briefly [laughter], yes, the lyrics are very important.