So are there any plans to go out on tour later in the year? We have no dates booked in the UK at the moment, but we’re looking to maybe get out somewhere towards the end of this year, or maybe even early next year, but it depends a little on how the record sales do, and whether the booking agents are willing to take us on. We’ve had some interesting offers for the summer, but we had to decline a lot of them due to family situations. Oskar and Rikard just became fathers, also Stefan has just become a father, and in a few more weeks, Daniel the drummer is due to become a father, so we had to take these things into consideration when booking gigs. We’ve actually only got five gigs booked so far, but we’ve been working hard on the album, and before that, we were working constantly for almost six years with the old band, touring, recording albums and doing rehearsals and things, so this is a well needed break. Me for example, I haven’t had a real holiday since 2004. We’ve always been booked up in the summer doing festivals, so this is the kind of break we actually need, for personal recreation and things. We will have to get used to working again slowly, and we want to be taking care of our families at the same time. So was it being out on the road that was the hardest thing to deal with as a hard working touring band? Actually no, it was the time spent at home was the hardest. When you come back from a long tour, and you only have a couple of weeks before you go out again, you just want to sit and relax, but you get people calling you up and wanting you to have dinner because you haven’t seen them in a while. It does sound strange saying that when I got back home, I didn’t even want to go out and see my friends, because I was just so tired of people in general, so I just wanted to be alone. It’s hard for people to understand unless they’ve been through it. I know it just sounds really horrible to say that I didn’t want to see my friends, but I just didn’t want to see anyone. This time we want to do it a little differently. Yes we will still go out and tour, but we don’t want to tour so hard, so we can still spend time with our friends and families without wanting to just be left alone. So have you any tracks on the album that you’re particularly proud of? To be honest, once we’d finished recording it, I was really tired of the whole shit, and I didn’t want to listen to it, if you know what I mean? After listening to it over time though, the whole album grew on me, and it’s hard to pick a particular favourite. I must say songs like King Of The Sun, Brother Judas, First To Fight, and also St Patrick’s Day we the songs I really started to enjoy. I will Rule The Universe also turned out much better than I thought it would. I really kind of like them all.
A lot of the lyrics seem to have a historical theme to them, how did those come about? Well when we started the band, we wanted to get away from writing about war, as that was very much what we did before. Then Nils joined the band, and he is very interested in history and stuff like that, and seeing as he writes all of the lyrics, he gets to decide what it’s all about. One of my favourite songs lyrically is actually Lucifer’s Court which is about an old SS soldier in Germany that was active before the Second World War, and he was actually a treasure hunter. He was sent out, I think by Himmler, to look for the Holy Grail, and the Lost Ark, and as far as I know, the Indiana Jones movie was loosely based around this character, and he wrote a book called Lucifer’s Court, which was about his treasure hunting. I didn’t know any of this, so I found it really interesting, and then you read more about it and come to Indiana Jones, and it gets even more fun. I learned a lot of things writing this new album, and stories that no one has ever heard about. When you go a little deeper into history, there is a lot there that you don’t know, as little bits often get lost in the main story, and they’re not written in the main history books. Did you guys find it hard to write the music to start with, as Joakim had been the only songwriter in Sabaton? No not really. I started playing some riffs on a guitar, as I put the guitar away for some time, so it was good to get that out again. We’d never really tried it though, but we all had some good ideas to pay with. Rikard, Daniel, Oskar and I have known each other for eight years now, and we all listen to music when we’re at home. So when we got together we all sat down and each started making suggestions like borrowing something from a totally unrelated genre like prog rock or something. I could write a whole song as an instrumental, and Oskar would have some very good ideas of how to change it around and make it sound completely different. We learned a lot about each other when we started writing together. With Sabaton it was like “here’s a new song, play it like this and it will be fine” but with the new band we’d all have ideas, and everybody was involved. We found it much better that way. What about when you’re not playing or writing? Apart from spending time with your family, is there anything that you really enjoy doing when you have some time off? I like to just go out and hang around a lot. I don’t have a lot of extensive hobbies, and I’m not one of these people that like to go travelling a lot, as I did that for many years as my job. I just like to take things easy, so I guess the most exciting thing I do is go fishing. I like the peace and quiet.
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Firebrand Magazine