Interviews : Dark Tranquillity

You know that feeling that you get when you just did something that is so awesome it just blows your mind until you realize it a couple of weeks later? That is what this night was for me. Dark Tranquillity is my favorite band. They are the band that got me into metal. And I got to interview the frontman, Mikael Stanne.

First off was an interview (coming soon, bitches!!) with Per, the keyboard player of Opeth that, subbing in for his sick bandmate Peter Lindgren, went awesome. I'm not going to get into detail here and ruin the suspense, but there are some parts that everyone that reads this will find interesting, to say the least.

Then came a bit of hanging out with DT's roadies, one of which just happened to be Hammer, the drummer from Kult ov Azazel and a diehard Buffalo Sabres fan (Lundqvist >Miller!!!), who, over Chipotle, showed that not all black metal musicians are closed-minded murdering nazi idiots. (+10 points if you can find the irony there!!!)

Then I went into the trailer and waited for Mikael to show. What came after was this:

So the new CD is a hell of a lot harder than Damage Done, were you going for a harder sound or was that just how it turned out?

I think that nothing really changes when we get into the studio, we do all the stuff beforehand. Like, all the production and everything is done before we get into the studio. But we knew we wanted to do a more difficult album, not straightforward. I think Damage Done was pretty straightforward and kinda to the point, so we wanted to do something more complex and different. You know, to keep it interesting to ourselves. But I think it’s definitely harder, and it’s much more uncommercial in a way.

Now, over your career you guys have gone from being blazingly fast and technical, to a more mid-paced, smoother sound on Projector and Haven, and now you’re back to being blazingly fast and technical. What’s influenced that?

I guess we just get tired of our own sound, or especially before Projector, we were just so fed up with the whole metal scene. Like in all the magazines people were just trying to take all the bands and just put them together in one giant thing called “melodic death metal." It was just so boring it’s like “Oh, it’s At the Gates, In Flames, and us or whatever, and we were something more than another band, you know? We just needed to get away from it, with all these bands everywhere that play the “Swedish style" music to hell, even if the band’s from Germany! So we just decided that we were going to do whatever we wanted, to forget about what the others were and to do something different. And that’s what we always do, in fact I guess we’ve kinda found our way back to what we really love doing, and we’ve learned so much from those different albums, and I think that a lot of different bands and a lot of new people are really open to new music, and it’s just something that has to be done. With every album pretty much.

Where are you guys going from here?

We have like 6 or 7 songs for the next album and it’s fantastic, but I don’t really know what direction it’s in because things will change so many times before it’s actually recorded. It’s… Oh, I love it! I listen to it all the time in the bus and going “Yeah!" You know? I’m writing lyrics for it. I don’t know, it’s really, really cool. The material is fantastic.

Throughout your existence, the topics of your lyrics have gone from odes to fall and poetic shit, and now it’s like scathing social commentary. What influenced that?

I think that when we started out we were so influenced by poetry and English novelists and other bands being really serious, we felt that all the thrash metal, speed metal, death metal were just so clichéd and so silly. Part of our plan to be different was to have totally different lyrics as well. But then I guess it kind of grew harder to be into that kind of lyrics, it didn’t really feel right. You know, as you get older, you kind of forget the stuff that you really need to write about. I had to get the stuff that is really real, that makes me want to scream, the stuff that really frustrates me. I mean I’m going to be singing these songs for years and years, it has to be something that really, really matters, that you just feel right screaming about it. Stuff that I stay up all night thinking about; it’s all about personal relationships and people, and ignorance, and just things that I see that I would just change. Because I can’t do something about it, I feel totally helpless, so it forces me to write about it and scream about it, it makes me feel a little bit better.

But there’s no directed rage towards like any particular part of society, like Christianity?

It’s all there, of course, but it’s there with myself. It’s all the different stuff that I do, the idiotic things that I get into, and the pointless existence that I tend to lead. What I see in my friends and the people that I hang out with and how easy it is to take a stand on something and turn it into something totally insane and stupid, it’s not hard to understand why there are wars. I mean just like, communicate. That’s what really fucks with me.

How much has the inclusion of Martin Brandström influenced the songwriting process since his assimilation before Haven?

Well he just brought a whole thing, where he doesn’t write that much music, and he’ll always change little things in each script and each bar, just a kind of repetition or whatever. I know he just brings so many different sounds, sometimes the rest of the guys will write stuff for him to play, and then he will put a spin on that, and then make it different the guitars change and everything else changes as well, so it’s totally integrated into the whole process of writing and putting things together.

Why the lack of clean vocals on the last 2 albums?

Just the music was so intense, and so aggressive that it didn’t really fit. Plus everybody else is doing them and that just takes the fun out of it. (huge grin) I don’t really see any need for it. It’s really melodic music and really passionate and intense music, and we don’t really need it. Who knows, but it didn’t feel right at all. With just such a limited range and you still have to make it sound bigger than it is in order to get it across with feeling and to do something with the lyrics, but it’s tough. It’s a challenge and I love it.

See, that’s what I thought you did awesome on Damage Done. It was more of a low, deeper growl, and then you’d go to a rasp, and then back to a growl, and you could tell that there was the actual passion and the actual emotion instead of the usual “Ugh, I want to die…" It’s just like “Dude. No you don’t! I’m not even convinced!"

No, exactly. That’s exactly what a band needs to do well, is that if something doesn’t feel right or honest, or with heart, you can listen to the lyrics a few times, do a few guitar solos, and then fuck it! It’s gotta be stuff that matters, in all music, no matter what genre it is.

Besides Character, what do you think was the best album of last year and why?

Ooh! Last year… there are so fucking many. I think, in terms of death metal or thrash metal, Naglfar from Sweden’s new CD, Pariah, is fucking fantastic. I love it. Man, what else? Opeth released Ghost Reveries last year, that’s still one of my favorites. Other than that, hell. Kreator’s new album is fantastic. It was a pretty good year, a lot of great songs, a lot of great Swedish stuff, like the new Candlemass album. It’s good. It was good for us too, because we were touring all the time and you really have the time to listen to new music, just burn all the new CD’s every night, and go through all the crap.

Were you irritated for getting passed over for the Swedish awards or Grammys?

No. Not at all. I mean, we don’t really get those things anyway, you know?

You did for Projector.

Well, we didn’t get it, but we were nominated. But yeah, still. There’s like 3 or 4 people in the jury, and the fans are what matter. We know that we have them, and they’re very cool, even over here…

You played your hometown twice in the past year. Which gig did you like better?

Oh! I think that the last one was better, though the first one was good, because it’d been such a long time since we’d played at home, but in the second one, we were just so pumped by the response that we received, I was in tears by the end of the show. I couldn’t even sing, I was really just so overwhelmed to get the reception that we did. It’s probably getting better in Sweden for metal and we were playing Gothenburg, and it’s so fantastic. People were lining up at 8 in the morning and waiting until 9 at night, to get into the show. It was unbelievable.

You think that you guys could sell out a huge venue, like In Flames did with Iron Maiden last summer?

(laughing)No way, no… only Iron Maiden sells out an arena in Sweden. But no, not like that…

You’ve been around for so long, spanning every definition of the genre of melodic death. You’ve won numerous awards. What’s left for you to do?

Tour all the other countries that I haven’t been to! And all the cities that we haven’t been to.. And make better music and record better songs! That’s what we always go for. We can do better and more. Every year since we started, we’ve gotten better and more interesting. We must keep getting better, to see where this will lead us.

What is the thought process when you go into the studio to record a new album?

Usually like I said, everything is done in the rehearsal before, so when we go in it’s just a matter of filming, and just making sure we have thought of everything beforehand. This time around it will be different, we haven’t really decided yet. (The rest of the band seemed unaware of this, but Niklas Sundin, the guitar player, said with a smile that maybe Mikael had a “master plan"-Adam L) We’re gonna do it differently, like nothing we’ve done before, so we’ll see.

So you mean more melodic-type music?

No, just totally different. (laughing) We’re going to use a producer for the first time ever, and either that or we record it totally ourselves…

Why didn’t Fredrik Johansson stay through today as the guitarist?

He was more interested in hanging out with his girlfriend, and he didn’t want to tour, and he had a really cool job that he didn‘t want to leave that much. And we didn’t really get along all the time either. Though he’s a great guy, and great guitar player, but it was just that he had other priorities. We just couldn’t work together anymore, it was really sad. I miss him, you know? I mean he had to go, and it was all good, but still sad.

What’s your opinion of the melodic death scene now?

It’s a lot of great stuff, obviously! At least like 2 years ago, it seemed a bit silly because there were so many bands , everybody “claimed" to do it, but now, they’ve faded out, or gotten better…

The cream has risen?

Yeah! Yeah, it’s cool that we know all the younger, cooler, more prominent bands, and it’s a lot of good stuff…

What’s it like to be named as an influence?

Weird and really hard to grasp. I don’t really do much other than “Whoa! Thanks!" But other than that, it doesn’t make any difference, but of course it’s cool to be named as an influence, but I don’t know how to behave around people that do that other than “Look cool!"

Do you prefer to play the newer or older stuff on the road?

Usually the new, but then again we pick up the old stuff that we haven’t played in such a long time that it’s “newer" than the new songs. But I don’t know, everything. Whatever’s interesting for us and to the audience. As long as it’s the good stuff…

What are some of the “bad" songs?

(laughing) No! We don’t have any!

No! of course not! (laughing) Now I’m going to recycle some questions from the interview with Anders from In Flames. What do you think the bands would be like today if you left for In Flames and Anders Friden stayed?

I have no idea. It’s tough for me to say, very different for sure. I think that Dark Tranquillity really would be pretty much the same and In Flames would have been much, much different. But I don’t know. That’s probably more interesting for other people to speculate on. I don’t think that it would work, to be honest. I mean for the reasons that we parted ways with Anders, just because it didn’t work, so it would have never worked…

You guys are just great friends, but the music doesn’t work?

Yeah, kinda like that. Yeah, it was pretty early in our careers, we were just into different stuff, it was really different. But In Flames started and I was just here as the session vocalist, I was just helping out, it was just like fun writing the melodic music that Jesper was into which was a good thing for them as well. I did the album and I did a few shows, and I was ooh! Glad to be here, but I want to be with Dark Tranquillity, that’s what I do.

Now the latest question I’m asking bands from Gothenburg… There have been a myriad of extremely talented performers that were created in the soil of Gothenburg, you guys, In Flames, Arch Enemy, At the Gates, The latest is Henrik Lundqvist…

Huh? What’s that?

The goalie of the New York Rangers..

Huh? (makes flying over head motion)

Not a hockey fan?

Nah, I’ve been to a couple of hockey games in my life, that’s it. I’ve never been into sports at all, really, I probably had some traumatic thing in my youth where I got injured. I know a couple of names, but not that one. Is he from Gothenburg?

Yeah! He played with Frölunda for like 4 years and he led the SEL in save percentage and goals against last year, plays for the Rangers now…

(laughing) Cool!

How big is the NHL in Sweden?

The NHL is not big at all. The European hockey leagues I know a bit of because of the Swedish players, but other than that, I don’t know…

...and it still wasn't over. I got the photo pass and went back to the band's trailer and hung out with Niklas Sundin and Martin Henriksson before the show started. We hung out and talked for quite a bit, and I even taught Niklas a karate move. It was indeed an awesome night. And the rest of the story will continue with the forthcoming interview with Per from Opeth...