 |
SONATA ARCTICA INTERVIEW : Interview with Tony Kakko - Vocals Interview Date: April 1 2007 Interview conducted by: Clare B. Listen to this Interview || mp3
|
RELATED LINKS : Interview with Tony Kakko, May 2003 Interview with Tony Kakko, April 2005 Interview with Henrik Kligenberg - Keyboard, Jan 2006 Interview with Jani Liimatainen - Guitar, Jan 2006
|
Just over a month before the release of their fifth studio album, "Unia" (Nuclear Blast), I am thrilled to be talking once more with Sonata Arctica composer/singer Tony Kakko, who always provides both a humorous and insightful look into the the band's world. Calling this time from New York before a free listening party for "Unia," Kakko, though bombarded with pre-release interviews, is still witty and delightful. Thanks to Nuclear Blast for getting the "Unia" album to me with such haste and for arranging the interview, and of course to Kakko himself for putting up with me in my flu-induced grogginess.
Finally, to any readers listening to the mp3, note that the telephone line gets clearer after a minute or two. Enjoy!
* NOTE: This interview has been edited for length and continuity. To any fans wanting a free copy of the full transcript, email me; subject line: “Sonata Artcica 2007 Interview.” *
TK: Hi, this is Tony calling from Sonata Arctica...Didn’t we meet in Toronto or something?
CB: Yeah, that’s right. You have a good memory.
TK: So I have the right face and name connected together.
CB: It’s a weird face if you can remember it [both laugh]! This [phone] line is really bad, so hopefully we can hear each other.
TK: Well, I can hear you.
CB: Okay, you’ll have to yell a bit.
TK: No worries. AHHH!!
CB: Cool. So how’s it going?
TK: Busy [laughs]. We’ve been doing interviews all day and the two following days and [this bit is lost because of the bad phone line]… a lot of work, but I’m enjoying it. This is fun.
CB: So you’re New York doing this listening party thing tomorrow. How do you think it’s going to go?
TK: I’m not sure [laughs]. It’ll be a party. I don’t know where it will go, but as long as the people show up, it should be fun.
CB: I’m sure people will show up [both laugh]. It won’t just be you and Henkka [Henrik Kligenberg, keyboard] sitting around waiting [TK laughs]. Have there been any responses yet to the album? [At this point, official promo CDs had not been sent out]
TK: I haven’t seen any responses yet [laughs]. Only from the people who have heard it, from a few interviews, and people have liked it.
CB: And what do you think of it?
| TK: I love it. For me, it’s the best album we’ve done. And I can say this with clear eyes, without being all weird about it. Of course, it’s a cliché to say, but it’s so different. It makes me smile, and that’s one big thing, and it can make me cry and [phone line gets fuzzy again]…people don’t understand totally that when you’ve been working with an album for half a year or so, you are really tired of the music you have there and you don’t necessarily want to listen to the album again and again and again. It would be natural for me and this has at least happened with the previous albums; I can listen to it a couple of times after it’s been mastered but then I’m like, ‘Okay, now I can maybe start listening to something else.’ But this album, it still makes me smile and I want to listen to it. |  |
CB: It is really different. It still feels like Sonata Arctica—
TK: [Laughs] Well, that’s a good thing!
CB: —But it almost feels like it’s driven by lyrics and the musical structure rather than really big melodies and sing-along kind of stuff. It’s weird. It’s good, but it’s weird!
TK: That’s good. Weird is really for me, one big thing. The music I’m listening [to] at the moment, it’s weird, is the best word I can use for it. It’s different from what people think I’m listening [to], like all the weird instruments and weird structures, they are making me happy at the moment [laughs].
CB: So what you’re listening to affects how your writing comes out? Who have you been listening to?
TK: Well, what I’ve been listening [to], around that time when I wrote the songs, it doesn’t really reveal [laughs] and tell you anything, because I listen to things like Ray Charles, Django Reinhardt, Johnny Cash [laughs]. Really different kind of stuff. And, well, the music obviously hasn’t got anything to do with those artists, but there are some artists I’ve been listening to earlier—well, Queen, they definitely have some weird stuff there that is not the most popular and well-known stuff. They had some really, really weird ideas and I’ve always loved those. My wife told me that now, with this album, I’ve been listening [to] my Queen a lot.
CB: Aside from the music, the sound quality is very different as well.
TK: Quality, yeah. We wanted to make the whole album sound more organic, warmer in a way. It brings out the drums in a way that we wanted to have them and the guitars, basically—the really warm, heavy sound of the guitars. And we tried different kinds of mastering styles and this, what we have now, it’s the best.
CB: So you knew that something had to change in the sound?
TK: Yeah, well of course, the music was so different that we wanted to change [the sound]. I hadn’t always been happy with the complete result, you know, the mastering, how the sound has been, what it sounds [like] in the end. Mastering has made the whole thing sound a bit cold, in a wrong way—of course, we are Sonata Arctica, and it should be cold, but [laughs] anyway, you know. It changes too much, in my opinion, from what it sounds like when we record it, to mastering. And this time it didn’t happen; it actually sounds even better.
CB: In the past it’s been difficult to tell what Jani [Liimatainen, guitar] has been doing. You can hear him live, you can hear is guitar, but in the past [albums] it’s been buried a bit.
TK: I don’t know. We’ve had some kind of problems with guitar sound. Like, Jani has been doing one thing, and then the recording engineer has taken the whole thing in some direction and then the mixing guy has taken the whole thing in some other other direction again, and then in the mastering, it makes the whole thing sound really bright, and it really has not that much low end. And then you get what we’ve been having lately, on the previous albums, like the guitar sound. Jani has never been happy with the guitar sound, but this time after the mastering, he goes, ‘what did you do, there?! This sounds fucking awesome! This is great.’ It was the first time ever that he was really happy [with] the sound.
CB: So do you feel like this [“Unia”] is kind of a new start, in a way?
TK: Well, yeah. Or—well, I don’t know [both laugh]. A refreshing dinner or something [both laugh], because, well, the last two we got really tired with all this straight-forward thing. Like, a couple of the last shows we had in Finland, I was not on this planet anymore. I was thinking of completely different things and I couldn’t concentrate anymore. In my books, most of the songs’ sound were in the same vein, too much, so we wanted to try also some kind of different—something other to than drink. You know, I don’t want Henkka to drink too much [during] the shows [laughs]. Now he can’t do that, because he’s got something else to do, play difficult songs. This is also the health factor [laughs]. I’m just kidding [laughs].
CB: So your logo has also changed. Why?
TK: Yeah. We are still using the old logo as well; they are both being used side by side, so there’s no worry for the people who [have] taken Sonata Arctica tattoos. This old logo, we are dragging it along, uphill, as long as it takes us. We wanted to have something for the people—there are these older people. For some reason we seem to get contact with the older folks also, like, there are people who are 60 or 70 who get into our music. It’s weird, but it happens. And they’ve had trouble understanding what’s the name of the band because it’s so—I don’t know—Donald Duck version of Metallica-type thing [laughs]. That’s maybe the best words for it I’ve heard from anybody, and that was the guy who actually made the first logo. He said, ‘Yeah, I think it’s a good idea to change it a little bit, because this is total Donald Duck, this old logo.’ So we wanted to have something more [legible]…You should see, sometime, the original, the very first. Because Janne Pitkänen at Toxic Angel, he’s done some graphics for this album, and also the original logo, he was asked to do [the] Sonata Arctica logo before he even heard one note of our music. That was before “Ecliptica,” and that was really weird, Black Metal-ish thing. And then he heard one or two things and he said, ‘Okay, I take this back. This is not the logo’ [laughs] and then he made this original logo. Which we changed, by the way, after “Ecliptica,” a bit. If you look carefully, it’s a bit different on “Silence.” The “Ecliptica” is round. Well, I’m not sure if it’s “Ecliptica,” but the first single, anyway. I’m not sure if the change happened after the first single or after the album, I’m not sure. Anyway, the original logo was round in the middle.
CB: I’ll have to look eventually [both laugh].
TK: This is [a] really important question, here [laughs]!
CB: Is the lack of double kick intentional, again, wanting something a little different?
TK: Well, we do have double kicks, there. Not a lot of them, but it’s not this normal, straight-forward ‘ta-ka-ta-ka-ta-ka’ [makes the sound of a rapid double kick].
CB: To accent, if it’s on one beat or kind of going with the guitars a bit.
TK: Yeah, it’s like that. Well, we wanted to take the tempo down a bit, not this 165 beat [double bass noise again], because we all got bored with then and also wanted to do something that is nice to play. Because Tommy [Portimo, drums], by nature, is not this really speedy guy who wants to be the fastest guy on the planet. He likes to play with feeling as well, so he’s really been happy with this tempo drop. It’s not huge, at least, in my opinion; what we kind of lose in the speed, we gain in mood and heaviness. It’s easier to write melodies when you’re not hell of really, really speedy. Like, I think the worst case has been “Wolf and Raven.” I like the melody, but it works much better when you slow the song down a lot [laughs]. It could also work as a ballad, really. But that song is really too fast [CB laughs]. It’s a pain in the ass to do live; you don’t have time to really sing it. It’s like screaming it through.
 |
|
CB: Would you ever consider doing that?
TK: That would be nice, really. And I like movie scores; that would be something excellent, really nice to do. Maybe I’ll get to do that one day, you never know. Actually I’m demo-ing already for something like that [laughs], like a movie. Some score. You never know if it’s going to go through or whatever, but the demos, it’s nice to try to do something like that.
CB: Well, you worked with the string—is it a quartet, I guess—on this album?
TK: Yeah. They are really only on one song, and the rest of it is synthetic or a sampled orchestra. But on the last one, “Good enough is good enough,” it’s real. It’s not a quartet, it’s more people—a string band [both laugh].
CB: How did you decide to work with these people? Was that an idea you’ve been wanting to do for a while?
TK: When I came up with this song—actually, the original song was, like, Rock/Metal/Progressive style, and I wrote “Good enough is good enough” for this “Idols” star finalist two years ago in Finland, but this song didn’t end up there. And also “Paid in Full” didn’t end up there because it was too good and I wanted to keep it for Sonata Arctica [laughs]. “Paid in Full,” by the way, was the first song I wrote when I heard that they would like to have one of my songs for the “Idols,” and I was like, ‘Hey! Let’s do that, it’ll be fun,’ and I wrote it the same day, “Paid in Full.” But then I decided that, ‘Hey, no, this is for Sonata Arctica.’ Then I wrote another two songs and one of them ended up on the album. When I made the piano version of the song [“Good enough is good enough”], like, in a ballad way, it was clear that, ‘Hey, okay now we need to have real strings here,’ because I’d been wanting to do that [for] a long time. Henkka heard me talking about this thing, and then he says, ‘I know this one guy in Kokkala,’ where he lives, and that he might actually ask them to do it. But they couldn’t do it, but they actually found another guy who did the arrangements for the strings, the notes and everything, like the score. Well, the guy who made the score, he knew good musicians who could do it, classical instrumentalists, and I didn’t really have to do anything but sit back and enjoy the ride. It was easy. I’m not really that educated that I would go and tell them something. Basically, if I heard something a little bit that didn’t go all that well, then ‘Could you do it again,’ and they did it again of course. But they are professionals and they know themselves, when they are not doing that good.
CB: Would you want to work with organic instruments again?
TK: Absolutely.
CB: What about an orchestra, if it were ever appropriate?
TK: If we had that kind of chance, then absolutely. It would be cool. Well, Nightwish is doing pretty efficiently this thing [laughs]. I can’t wait to hear what Tuomas [Holopainen, Nightwish keyboard/composer] has come up with. That will be interesting. Well, maybe in a smaller scale and use some weirder instruments. There are also some weird instruments in [the] “Unia” album; like in “The Harvest” song you can hear this bazuki solo. It’s a real instrument, and there are some other instruments—guitar-type instruments that I used.
CB: You played them?
TK: No, I didn’t. It was [some incoherent name]. You will find his name on the album cover [laughs]. He is a really professional guitar player. Jani even approved it, because he has all these weird, weird instruments. You get some kind of weird feeling.
CB: How did the title “Dreams” [“Unia”] come into it? It is because it’s weird? Or was it a reference to “My Dream is but a drop of Fuel for a Nightmare?”
TK: In a way, I think. I had four or so different names—always you have this working title for whatever you are doing, and then you start thinking what’s going to be the actual name for the album. And it changed a couple of times. The last time we changed [it] was around Christmas, when I had already approved that ‘This is going to be it,’ I noticed that, ‘Okay, it’s not going to work because people are going to get some double meanings out of it and will get the complete wrong idea of the band.’ I’m not going to explain it because then people will see it and hear it and know it [laughs], and it’s all wrong. But already, at that time, some of the booklet material had been made and they are about our dreams, but in another way. They are where we want to end up, what would be our dream to have in the future. That kind of thing. “Unia” was the only way I could change that without ruining the artwork with the booklet.
CB: So it’s life dreams, not dreams—
TK: Yeah, not like what you have when you’re sleeping. But also, “My Dream is but a Drop of Fuel for a Nightmare,” good thing you mentioned that, because this is maybe the first song ever that I would really like to explain to everybody a little bit, because the lyrical content is weird, to put it [in] one word [both laugh]. I had an idea to write about bad omens that you can have in dreams. Well, you know this dream that you have in which all your teeth are falling out it would mean that somebody close to you is going to die—like, bad omens. So I went into [a] library and took out all the books I could find concerning this and talking about this, bad omens—and dreams generally. And I took some of the bad omens and combined them really freely together and created the lyrical thing there, from those. So it’s about bad omens in a dream. And the main thing maybe there is to say that if you believe your dreams, then you are also afraid of your own shadow; you should not maybe believe. Weird, like I told you [both laugh].
CB: How did your writing process change? It sounds like some things were really intentional, like you wanted it to be weird and you went out and researched dreams, omens and premonitions and stuff. The music is so different that maybe the writing process was different too?
TK: Yeah, well I told you already about this “Idols” thing and how I started writing for someone else and not for Sonata Arctica, and that was really a liberating feeling. And I thought I could come up with really different ideas and styles and songs, different type[s] of songs with that method. And I never gave it up. I wrote the whole album in the thought that ‘I’m writing for someone else, not for Sonata Arctica.’ On previous songs I’ve written like, six, seven songs and then noticed that I’m missing all the double kick songs [laughing] and then I have to write them. So this time I didn’t go there, and this is why there is no normal “Blank File,” “Wolf and Raven,” “Victoria’s Secret” songs there. Well, we have kind of a “Victoria’s Secret” [laughs], but no “Blank File,” anyway. I didn’t want to write one because there has to be one. It would have been like cheating myself. Maybe in the future, we can have some on the next album, but on this album I didn’t feel like writing [one]. Well, it was [a] natural process, the way they came out. I didn’t want to change them too much. In a way, this is like something close to what would be my solo album in a way, maybe. Not sure. I might go even further with my solo thing. It would be more different, of course, because with Sonata Arctica, on this album, of course, the guys are playing and are doing their own stuff.
CB: Would you ever do a solo album?
TK: Yeah, I have a dream, but at the moment I have other projects, like I told you, that are keeping me busy. I should do some music for the game, the computer game [“Winterhearts’ Guild”]. Actually, “The Worlds Forgotten, the Words Forbidden” song, which is on the album, I originally wrote it for the game, but so many people told me, ‘Isn’t it a terrible waste to put one song in only for that game,’ and then when they told me, the game people, that ‘This is not exactly what we are looking for,’ but this would be good in the end of the game when the credits [are rolling], it would be there as background music, and I was like, ‘Hm, I’d really like this song.’ It would have been also that somebody would have cut that song out of the game and it would have been available for everybody on the internet anyway.
CB: On Henkka’s studio diary he said that there were more songs that you had written that what ended up on the album.What happens when you cut out songs? Do they just go into the garbage, or do you recycle them or combine two songs together, are they bonus tracks…?
TK: Yeah, all of that actually happen, sometimes. None of the songs are totally tossed away; there are some songs I might break pieces and use in other songs. But with this album, I think we recorded some parts for like 20 songs. Two of them were cover songs, then there are two or three songs that Tommy has played the drums [for] already, but I didn’t have time to write the lyrics or something like that because we really needed to concentrate on making a great album rather than making a hell of a lot of songs [laughs]. And this album already has more songs than we had with [the] previous two [albums]. So we decided to give it a little breather, wait and maybe release the remaining songs that we have as an EP or something later on.
CB: So how do you decide what songs get thrown away or put on hold or whatever? Is it just the songs that are the most complete and the strongest-sounding?
TK: Yeah, basically [laughs], what were complete. There is this one song that is otherwise complete but I haven’t sung it because I didn’t have any lyrics. I was not in the state of mind to write any more lyrics; I was really tired of it. So I decided that I’d give it a break and maybe around Christmas this year we might release an EP or something with the remaining songs, providing we have time to do that. But anyway, we are going to release them. But the songs that ended up on the album, they were the ready ones, so we decided they were the best for the whole thing. But the next difficult thing that we faced was the matter of thinking what songs would be the bonus tracks for places like Japan—of course [Japan] needs a bonus track—and then we wanted to have one in Finland, and in the U.S., North America generally, you have this Gary Moore cover, “Out in the Fields,” I think that’s the bonus track here. That was really, really difficult and we needed a bit of help from people, like Tuomas from Nightwish, he had the album and he kind of helped a lot there because he was able to be objective, really in what are the good songs because I love all of them and I could not choose, myself.
CB: Would you still consider doing this 10-year-anniversary-DVD-history thing?
TK: Yeah, in 2009 I think it’s going to be. Like, 10 years since the first album was released, since we’ve been Sonata Arctica as Sonata Arctica. That’s the idea at the moment; you never know what’s going to happen. With [the] previous tour, the spot on the horizon keeps on going and we ended up touring [for] two years, 150 shows. At the moment it looks like we’re going to end the tour late 2008 in Europe, but well, you never know. We’re going to play the U.S.A. at least two occasions.
CB: You’re coming here in the fall…
TK: Yeah, and then early next year, that’s the plan at the moment but it’s not confirmed yet. It’ll be on the site as soon as [it’s confirmed]. There are some other options too, you know; we might be supporting somebody or something else.
CB: Like a packaged tour?
TK: Yeah, that kind of thing. It’s under consideration, but anyway we’re coming here more than once. That’s why bands are bands, and that’s what bands are supposed to do: tour. It’s good to be home after that, when you’re touring, you enjoy being home.
CB: Speaking of touring, since Jani isn’t going to be doing this thing in the fall, how did you choose Elias Viljanen as your touring guitarist?
TK: Well, he was supporting us with his own band—you have the link on our website, I think. You can hear some demos. He was supporting us on, I think, two shows in Finland a couple of years ago, two years ago or something. It was really great, he was really impressive, like [a] Steve Vai-type, really good instrumentalist and we had demos from three different guitar players and we invited two of them to come to Kemi and we figured that Elias might be our guy. He’s really concentrated and committed to playing real well, and he has a kind of a past as a musician and band member, he knows what it’s like in a way. But then, in the end, which is going to be refreshing is that he has never been able to play outside Finland, so it’s this refreshing thing like Henkka coming to the band. Like, having somebody there with you who has never been to Japan, to [the] U.S.A. and so on. First time for him, for many, many different things and it’s nice to see, because we have been in many, many places ourselves already many times. It’s like getting a child, you know [both laugh], living your childhood again [laughs].
CB: Obviously you’ve had Henkka coming and you had to get used to him onstage and whatnot, but Jani has always been there. How do you think playing with a different guitar player will be?
TK: I hope it’s going to be okay. Of course, we have only rehearsed with Elias so far, so you never know. You really get to know a person when you’re on the road for a month or so, what the guy is like; what he’s like when he’s drunk, what he’s like when he’s sober, what he’s like when he’s tired, what he’s like when he’s happy. There are many sides to everybody. It should be fun.
CB: Since the piano and Hammond organ worked so well on “Reckoning Night,” was it an immediate thing, you just knew you would use those things again on this album?
TK: I love the Hammond organ. I don’t know how to play it and personally I would not use that song when I would do it [keyboards], but Henkka has a really good touch for that instrument—so absolutely. It was clear from the start and I would even compose, in the songs, some parts that, ‘Now, here, you put your Hammond organ. This is a Hammond organ part.’ So, absolutely [we] wanted to have it. It’s—well—organic like I’ve said many times. It’s a real instrument, the organ, and it sounds good.
CB: What about the choirs? The whole band did all those crazy choirs on the last album [“Reckoning Night”], so was the band again doing all sorts of back up things this time?
TK: Actually, this time it happened so that there are four songs on the album that I have real choir. I found this choir from nearby where we live in Tornio, this girl choir, something like 20-something people there, and they did some choiring [both laugh] on four songs, and it was really good. And all the rest of the vocals, even some of the female-type things there, they are done by me. I did all the vocals at home; it was easier that way because everybody was working at home. Like, Henkka was recording at home in Kokkola and Tommy, he’s not much of a singer anyway [both laugh], so I just thought I wouldn’t even bug him with this whole thing. And then Marko [Paasikoski, bass] was recording his own things at home. It was easier for me to record my parts, and every part, at home. I still managed to make it sound good, and big, I think, in my opinion, at least.
CB: Yeah. I guess a lot of your vocals are improvised? You’ll have a basic idea of certain things and then—
TK: Yeah, I just try out a lot of different things. They just come. If I cannot come up with the original idea, some kind of melody line, then I can build a lot of different things around that, like harmonies. Many of the vocals there are based on harmonies. Which is going to be kind of challenging in [a] live situation. I just have to find a way, find the right line to sing, there.
CB: How do you think these songs will go over live? Not just in terms of performing them, but audience response. Because they aren’t those “Blank File” kind of sing-along—some of them could be sung along with—but things that are very vocally driven, how do you think those will work in a live situation?
 |
TK: We’ll see [both laugh]! I don’t even want to worry about that. We’ll come up with something. It’ll be entertaining for everybody, I’m sure. Don’t you worry about it [laughs]. We might rearrange some things. Well, it’s good to give a breather for the fans as well, you know. ‘This time, you don’t have to sing; just listen. Enjoy the ride. The next song you have to sing totally, then!’ [Laughs] Because we’ll be playing the older songs live, so they’ll get to sing [and have] their voices ruined, totally. |
CB: When you’ve composed the songs, how do you show them to the rest of the band? Do you do a rough recording or do you actually write out all the parts?
TK: No, no. I make a demo. I’m not really educated in a way that I could write notes of everything. And also, well, for example Tommy, there’s no point writing drum notes for him—even if I knew how to do those—because he doesn’t read them. It’s easier to kind of give him the drum tracks to record over a demo version of a song.
CB: Is it a MIDI thing? Do you use programmed drums or do you actually play everything?
TK: Usually I play—of course, it’s a combination, of course; I use MIDI to kind of control the arrangements. It’s easier to change a lot of things if you use the MIDI. I use MIDI a lot. Of course, if you want to change one note, it would be terrible, like ‘Ahh! Now I have to play that many things again,’ when you could just ‘click, click, click.’ It makes composing and arranging much easier. The difficult thing is to learn to play that thing live with the band. But it’s no problem.
CB: Everybody else puts in their own two cents, musically; everybody will interpret what you’ve written. But, say, lead melodies for guitar or keyboard, how much do Jani and Henkka—or anybody—how much do they write of their own parts once you’ve actually finished a song?
TK: Well, I sometimes have some ideas for Jani for how the riffs should go, but mostly—no [laughs], and I give him free hand. I might have some ideas in a way that they should be in [a] certain way, a bit, like—if you record something, ‘It should be maybe a little rougher,’ or whatever, and then he changes that. Often he comes up with really, really good ideas that, ‘Oh, I never would have thought that, that’s excellent!’ And of course, the solo parts, I’m not going to touch those. Although, well usually because I’m, like, the father of the song [laughs], I might have some idea of what kind of sound it should play, like with a clean sound or acoustic guitar or something like that. Well, usually I might work [for] months and months with one song before I introduce it to the guys, so I have a really good idea of what I want to have there; the different thing is for me to kill my darlings, you know, it’s a difficult thing, like ‘Ahh! It’s not going to work, but it’s breaking my heart to take it out!’ [But] you need to do that, sometimes.
CB: “Ecliptica” and “Silence” both had old songs on the albums, and then “Winterhearts’ Guild” you said was written in a month and a half. Were these last two albums written pretty quickly?
TK: Yeah, these last two albums were quick. I had some rough ideas but the hard work and most of the songs were completely written from zero to 100 [laughs] within one month or two months. And it’s killing me, basically; it’s really hard to kind of write a song that fast and then be certain that you are going to be happy with it after it’s recorded, because you always come up with some ideas that you could change. Even now, if I start playing around with any of the “Unia” songs, I might come up with some different, second opinions and different sort of ideas for certain parts. This is what happens a lot when you record too fast, that you are not completely happy with the arrangements [and] that you might find better ways to do it. But, well, diamonds are made under pressure. Or something like that [laughs]. After a few days, there’s only so much you can do with your song in a recording phase. It’s a lot of pointless work, unless of course you are building something huge there, which of course is different, but if it’s a basic song, spending a month [on] one song is pointless. You should do that in the rehearsals, rather than in the studio. But the “Unia” album, I had some songs ready already in the beginning of [the] “Reckoning Night” tour, so two years ago or something like that.
CB: Which songs?
TK: “To Create a Warlike feel” is one of the songs. It’s going to be a bonus track in Finland, at least, and some kind of limited version in Europe. You should find it out; it’s a really good song. I rewrote the whole song, I think, three times from scratch. I just put aside the old song and started writing it again from my memory, from how I remembered it, and [it] changed every time. I think the final product is really, really good. And “Caleb” was one of the songs I had in mind a long time ago. “For the Sake of Revenge,” I remember having that demo with me last time we were here in The States. It was a slower process and I enjoyed it a lot. This time, we actually had time to rehearse [laughs] before [the] recordings.
CB: What’s the meaning of the title “For the Sake of Revenge?” Did the song come before the live thing?
TK: [Laughs] No, no. I just started writing the song, and when I was writing the lyrics at the same time—which is the ideal way of doing it, writing the music and lyrics at the same time—it just came, there, ‘For the Sake of Revenge…’ It fit, there, perfectly. And I thought, ‘Hell, I’m not going to let the live album name ruin this for me. It’s too good of a title to leave out just because it’s been used previously.’ I know the problem will be if we release “For the Sake of Revenge” as a single [both laugh], and then everybody will be totally confused [laughs]. We should maybe do that just for the hell of it. The DVD title came when we were actually in Japan on that tour and we had this saying that anything you did, like ‘I’m going to have a beer,’ and then you say [in a low, menacing voice] ‘…For the sake of revenge!’ for whatever you were going to [do], but you did it for ‘revenge.’ In Finnish, it’s “kostoksi,” for the sake of revenge. And then I sat down in the train there, in the Bullet Train, and I thought, ‘Hm, for the sake of revenge. That would be a cool title for the live DVD.’
CB: Cool! Well, any parting words?
TK: [laughs] I just hope to see everybody on tour. Last time was a party, really excellent for us, and I can’t wait to come back.
CB: Good luck with the album!
TK: Alright, take care, Clare.
Thanks again to Nuclear Blast and Tony Kakko. Interview Conducted by Clare B.
