Lana Lane
The Dream That Never Ends

15.05.2007

Yet another tribute CD? – some might say. And they would be mistaken because U.S. progressive metal diva Lana Lane and her long-time husband and partner Erik Norlander are bringing out not one, but two cover albums, each pursuing a different musical direction, but each worth checking out. These CDs come as follow-ups to the “Live In St. Petersburg” DVD, which Lana and Erik recorded during their first visit to Russia. And moreover, all these releases, as well as the two artists’ entire back catalog have recently been made available in Russia by means of licensing. All this provides more than enough reasons to make a phone call to America and talk to the people behind this music. But this, of course, does not set boundaries for the issues we discussed during our conversation, especially as Erik turned out to be a great storyteller, which, of course, you already know from liner notes on his and Lana’s CDs…

It has become a tradition for Lana Lane to release “special” albums every two years. How did you first come up with the idea to do these special releases and do them regularly? Was it the record company’s idea, your fans’ idea, or did you come up with it yourselves?

At first it was the record company’s idea. In Japan in 1998 we had a really big breakthrough album called “Garden Of The Moon”. When the album came out, it kind of opened the flood gates for Lana Lane. We had a lot of fans coming to our concerts on the first Japanese tour, and we released a live album (“Live In Japan”), and there was a lot of demand for more Lana Lane. So the record label said, “Why don’t you record an album of ballads?” Everyone loves Lana’s voice so much, and on a ballad you really get to hear her singing, as she’s not committing to a heavy rock band so much. So it started with the idea of our Japanese record label. Then at the end of 1999 we had just finished another tour there and were having dinner with the record label. We all talked about what a great idea that first “Ballad Collection” was, and should we turn this into a kind of holiday tradition. We all agreed, and in 2000, the second “Ballad Collection” came out, then two years after that, “Covers Collection”, then two years after that, the “Winter Sessions” album, and now in 2006, the “Gemini” album and “Hommage Symphonique”.

This fall you have released three albums – “Gemini” (Lana Lane), “Hommage Symphonique” (Eric Norlander) and “Revolution Road” (Rocket Scientists). How do you manage to keep working at such a high pace? Do you ever have a break from music, or do you compose, record and perform music 24 hours a day?

You know, I treat my music like a job. Everyone else has a job, and I go to studio every day just like workers at a post office or a bank do. I treat my production work the same way. I have a lot of talented people that I work with, and that makes it easier for me to record and produce music. As to the three releases coming out simultaneously, the Rocket Scientists album actually was started quite a while ago. We were able to finish it earlier this year, over the summer, and then we waited a little while to release it because of some promotion issues. We wanted to make sure it’s coming out at the right time. The “Gemini” and “Hommage Symphonique” albums were recorded simultaneously later in the summer, of course, with the idea of releasing them for the holiday season. Those were released almost immediately after they were recorded. It seems like all three of these albums are coming out simultaneously, but really they were recorded over all of 2006.

What is more demanding – to perform and record your own songs or to do cover versions?

They’re both challenging in their own ways. With original music, there are no rules, you do whatever you want, but of course, you have to do something great, you have to get the right sound and play it very well. With cover versions, usually we do a recording of a classic song that everybody knows, and you have a big responsibility to live up to that great original version and hopefully bring your own personality to it as well. In that sense, a cover version is very difficult to record. I think each of them brings its own unique set of challenges, and I wouldn’t say that one is easier than the other, or that one is more difficult. Obviously we’re taking both of them very seriously.  

If we compare the two Lana Lane cover albums, the first one contains mostly hard rock classics, but the second one is a bit softer, there are songs by Pink Floyd, Jefferson Airplane, Moody Blues. What made you change the spectrum of artists you’re covering this time?

I’m glad you’re noticing that. We make it a point to try not to repeat ourselves. The first “Covers Collection” album, as you said, contained hard rock songs and some progressive rock songs like “The Wall” by Kansas, and “Soaring” by Aviary. For this “Gemini” album, we made it a point to stay away from hard rock and even progressive rock, and we did all the classic rock songs. In that way, it’s not simply “Covers Collection” part 2, it’s something entirely different. I think if you listen to the first “Covers Collection” and enjoy all that hard rock music for what it is, and you should listen to “Gemini” in a completely different way for all the classic rock music.

And how did you pick up songs for “Hommage Symphonique”? Is it a kind of tribute to the bands that influenced you the most, or is there any other concept behind this album?

It’s not really a tribute album. It’s a collection of the songs that I grew up with, the songs that really influenced me the most as the keyboardist and a musician in the progressive rock genre. These are songs that I wanted to do cover versions of for years, but within the context of the Lana Lane project it wasn’t really right to do them. It would be kind of silly for Lana to do something like “Pirates” by Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and it wasn’t really right for Rocket Scientists to do them either, just because of the sound and the feel of that band. I waited a long time to make this album, it is something I always wanted to do, and finally in 2006 I had the opportunity to do it. It’s really an honor to record those songs, and I had a great time doing this.

Judging by the tracklists of these albums, you are mostly into the music of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But what do you think about the contemporary rock and progressive rock scene? Are there any young bands you like?

Obviously there are a lot of great bands in the world nowadays, younger bands. But I think one gets influenced by the music that he or she grew up with very much. When you’re 12, 16 or 18 years old, you’re very much a sponge, and you absorb all of the music that surrounds you at that time. I think because of that phenomenon the music from the 1970s and early 1980s is more important to me than the music I hear now. It’s not to say that music now is not as good, or that it is not as important, but the older music had a greater impact on me. I can certainly listen to bands like Porcupine Tree or The Flower Kings and enjoy what they do, I can even listen to Dream Theater or “middle-age” bands like Rush or Marillion, and I can certainly enjoy that music, but I think the older music just has a little more magnetism to me because of the time when I first heard it.

A very important part of your releases is the cover artwork which is always beautiful and very unusual. How do you work with cover artists? Do they come up with ideas on their own, or do you suggest what should be on the cover and how it is supposed to look like?

We have this very great fortune to work with Jacek Yerka from Poland, a brilliant surrealist painter. We always use his ideas, we don’t say, “We are making this kind of an album, now go and paint something for us.” It’s always his vision that he’s paining. We have a very nice collaboration.

The line-up on your albums and tours is always changing. Why do you prefer bringing new people into the band than having a stable line-up?

(laughs) That’s a good question. It’s not necessarily our wish to be changing all the time, but the logistics of recording and touring in different countries sometimes means that the same people are not available. For example, in 2001 we started touring Europe very heavily. And you have to think that for a bunch of musicians from California to come to even the closest place in Europe, such as Amsterdam, Paris or London, it’s still a very expensive plane ticket. If you bring six people and the crew, it’s a lot of money, we’re talking about thousands of dollars just to get everyone there, and then you start the tour with all the expenses of the tour. So in 2001 we had the idea of forming a European band, so that when we were touring Europe, just Lana and I would go over, and then we would meet up with our European band and tour around the continent. We’ve done that for the last five years, and it has worked out very well. Then for concerts in the United States we generally use American musicians. In many ways, it’s a question of practicality. We didn’t wanna let money stand in the way of us touring or not touring, we just wanted to get out and play as much as possible.
As far as recordings go, it depends on the album, of course. Sometimes we’re after a different sound on one album than we had on the previous album. Maybe for one album we wanted the guitar to be a little more bluesy and classic rock, and on the other album we wanted the guitar to be a little more metal and neo-classical sounding. In that sense, all the time we will bring in different musicians to create different sounds.

I suppose that it’s not difficult to find new people in Los Angeles, because you are very well familiar with the music scene there. But how do European musicians get involved in your projects? How did you bring in such people as Helge Engelke (Dreamtide, Fair Warning) or Kristoffer Gildenlow (ex-Pain Of Salvation), for instance?

It’s funny - we have a lot of friends in Europe, we’ve met them over the years through various other friends. We have spent a lot of time in Holland and Germany, and we’ve sort of developed this network of musicians. It seems unlikely that some musicians from California will work with all of these musicians in Germany and Holland, but really it’s been just as natural as meeting musicians in Los Angeles. In the case of Kristoffer Gildenlow, he is the husband of a Dutch journalist, and we had known her since the late 1990s, when she covered our albums for a local magazine. Every time we would go to Holland to play a concert or maybe work on a recording, we would meet up with that Dutch journalist and her husband, so we just became friends. When it was time to do the Lana Lane 10th Anniversary Tour in 2005, we needed a European bass player, and it was an easy choice. And the same goes for the “Lady Macbeth” album (2005) as we recorded it in Holland. Kristoffer had become a good friend of ours, we had known his bass playing from Pain Of Salvation, and so we knew he was a good player. It means that it’s someone we can work with.

As far as I know, you’ve never had any serious personal problems with musicians, and the only conflict that really made it into the press is the one with Arjen Lucassen of Ayreon. Even though it happened several years ago, people on the Internet are still discussing it. Could you say in just a few words what was so wrong with Arjen that you had to make such heavy statements regarding him?

It was a really difficult situation for us. He didn’t really represent himself, the person he really was, and he caused a lot of problems for us on the tour we did and for the releases we were trying to make. That’s really what it comes down to. We tried to give him every benefit of the doubt, and tried to treat him as well as we could. Our record label in Japan tried to treat him as well as they could. But there was something in him that didn’t wanna cooperate. It basically motivated him to look out for himself and for no one else. I’m really glad that’s part of the past. That was a very difficult time for us, and we’re glad it’s over.

In America you have your own record company, Think Tank Media. In the beginning, why did you decide to establish your own label and not sign to anybody else? And is it difficult to be musicians and business people at the same time?

It’s, of course, a lot of work, but we have a lot of great people helping us. We have PR people and distributors that support us quite a bit. We chose to have our own label, because we wanted to be able to have a living off playing music, and we wanted to be able to play the music we wanted to make. In the very early days we, of course, had offers from other record labels in the United States, but they were all kind of traditional. They would want us to play a certain kind of music, produce the albums in a certain kind of way, and maybe even change musicians in the line-up, and in the end we wouldn’t know if we would ever see any of the money that was made from each album. That’s a very common thing in the record industry – the record label would sell a lot of albums, but then they would tell the band that they had all of these expenses, and the band never sees any money in the end. We never got a fortune from music, but we do work very hard, we take what we do very seriously, and we feel that we’re entitled to earn a living making music. Having our own record label enables us to do that, because we known that whenever we sell an album, the musicians get paid for it. It’s been a lot of work over the years, but it has allowed us to keep on doing what we love to do.

The Think Tank Media website says you don’t accept unsolicited artist submissions, and that this is based on advice from your legal staff. Is it a question of time, or is there any other reason for limiting the label only to your own releases?

Well, I’m glad you read that! We started the record label purely as a vehicle to release our own music. We never wanted to be BMG, we only wanted to release our own albums. As far as the statement of not accepting artist submissions is concerned, we only want to release our own music, and obviously we’re very busy doing that. There’s no time to take on other artists. The legal advice is that we should not do this because what if an artist sends us a demo, then we release an album, and then the artist would say, “Well, you took that idea from my demo that I sent you!” We will have to face a legal battle or something like that. It’s a kind of standard practice for independent record labels. Obviously we’ve never had that situation, but that was always the legal advice.

In Russia most of your back catalogue will be re-released by the label CD-Maximum. Will there be any difference between Russian versions of these CDs and the ones released in the rest of the world?

The artwork is exactly the same. As far as the actual songs are concerned, I think in a couple of cases we included different bonus tracks for the CD-Maximum releases, they are different from the versions that are released in the Western part of Europe. We had some kind of political issues with our label partners in Japan and Europe. In Japan they wanted unique bonus tracks, because in Japan a CD is so expensive that a Japanese importer can buy a CD from, let’s say, France at the full retail price and then still sell it in Japan for a big profit, for less than a normal Japanese release. For this reason, Japanese labels always asked for bonus tracks. But it was only for a limited amount of time that they would have unique rights to those tracks. Since CD-Maximum releases have come out a little bit later, we were able to include Japanese bonus tracks on CD-Maximum versions. Maybe in this way CD-Maximum releases are a little bit better than Western European ones.

You played in Russia in 2004, and the show was recorded for a live CD and DVD. What impressions did you get about Russia? How much did this country live up to your expectations?

We had a really wonderful time in Russia. I didn’t know what to expect, because obviously we’d seen pictures, films and videos of the city, and it was clear it’s a place with beautiful architecture and rich history. But as far as the actual culture and how the people would be, we really didn’t know much. Of course, for years there was this kind of wall dividing Russia from the United States, it was a kind of secret - what went on over there in Russia. We were very much looking forward to it, because it was kind of like exploring a new world. When we arrived in St. Petersburg, we were treated so well by everyone, not only the tour staff and the concert promoters, but by the people at the hotel, at restaurants we’d go to, even at coffee shops at Nevsky Prospekt. We were just so happy with the warmth of the Russian people and how generous they are with their spirit and their friendliness. I think it’s because of the Cold War of the 1960s and 1970s that a lot of Western people imagine Russians as stone-faced, cold-hearted people.

…And Russians have the same image of the Americans! (everybody laughs)

Yeah, and it’s not that way at all. People are people anywhere you go in the world. We really found a great unique spirit in the Russian people and made a lot of great friends on that tour. We are still e-mailing with them, in fact, I just received an e-mail from a friend in St. Petersburg this morning. We’re looking forward to coming back, and we’ve already made some tour plans for 2007!

Are there any chances that you will visit Moscow as well?

We’re working on that, we’d very much like to visit Moscow. I would like to play there, of course, but I would also like to visit it and get acquainted with its culture and history as well.

You recorded the song “From Russia With Love” from a James Bond movie as a bonus track for the “Live In St. Petersburg” CD. Are you a fan of the James Bond series?

I’m not a fan, but Lana is really a big fan of James Bond movies. When we were editing the DVD of the St. Petersburg, we had all this beautiful video footage of the city made during our visit. A lot of it was just the band and the crew walking around, but then you’d see things like the St. Isaak’s Cathedral in the background. It was really incredible, and we wanted to include that footage, both as a kind of tribute to the city that treated us so well, but also as a way to share our visit with our fans in the Western part of Europe, the United States and Japan. Many of these people will never get to go to Russia, but maybe they will see it and will know what it’s like. We wanted to come up with a way to show a lot of these beautiful architecture and beautiful settings, so we ended up putting together a little video montage of our visit, and we needed a soundtrack. It would have been, of course, easy to just use one of our songs for the soundtrack, but we thought it would be especially nice to use “From Russia With Love” because of the lyrics, of course. It obviously speaks very fondly of Russia, and it echoes the sentiments that we have for the country and the city of St. Petersburg.

One more question about Russia – did you get exposed to any Russian music, maybe some rock or folk bands, while staying in St. Petersburg?

We heard a lot of music. One of the bands we heard was Pushking, and there were other musicians, just individual guitarists, bass players or drummers. I don’t remember all the names, but good music is good music, no matter where you are in the world.

Your and Lana’s albums are now famous all over the world, but the first country to accept Lana Lane was Japan. How did you manage to achieve a breakthrough on the Japanese market? What is it that attracts the Japanese people to your music so much?

I don’t know what the secret ingredient is. But we had a record label in Japan that really believed in Lana and the music of Lana Lane. They released the first album, and it did very well, it sold 10,000 copies or something like that. Then they released the second album, and it did the same. Then the record label said, “Now we have a chance to do something really big,” so they formed a new label called Avalon, actually named after a Rocket Scientists song, the one that Lana covered on the first “Ballad Collection.” This label was a much bigger venture, it was distributed by JVC, the biggest electronic corporation in Japan. When the third album “Garden Of The Moon” came out, it really took off, it was a big hit for Lana. I don’t know what it is with Japan and the fans there, but it always has been a great place for us. We’ve been there five or six times, done a lot of great concerts, and it’s always been a kind of special place for us in that way.

Speaking more about the music business, what inspired you to write the rock opera “Music Machine” (2003)? Is it the current state of the music industry, where the role of the business is very big and the role of the artist is minimal?

Yes, you have it exactly! It’s a dark satire of the music business. I think the best satires are a little bit surreal, where there’s some kind of fantastic element included. I came up with this idea and the story about a genetically engineered superhero rock star, and obviously that’s not the present-day reality anyway, that’s complete fantasy. But I think it made for a great subject for the rock opera. It allowed me to tell the story of the way that the music business works, the dark side of the music business, how artists are often manipulated, made and also destroyed by the business side. I put it into this kind of science fiction surreal context, and it made it possible to make a great album. That album really remains one of the great albums in our catalog, I’m so proud of that album. It’s also the first album on which I was able to work with Kelly Keeling, and Kelly has now become a regular vocalist in our projects, he has contributed to at least four or five of our albums.

How much do you as an artist and Think Tank Media as a label suffer from CD piracy and illegal downloading? Do you agree that downloading will eventually kill the music industry?

I think the record business is evolving. The idea of CDs is something that is eventually going to go away. We’re going to have electronic distribution permitting people to download music. I think the world still figuring out how to make a fair business model for that kind of medium. There are a lot of companies such as iTunes, Mindawn and Music Match that are selling legal downloads, and we make a fairly good income from these downloads. As far as illegal downloads, it is of course a problem. When someone pirates our music, it means that he’s stealing it. It may come to the point where we can no longer make a living, and this means that we won’t be able to make any more albums because we won’t be able to afford it. But I do see that the industry is evolving and it is coming up with fair business models for legal music downloads. The prices are coming down, which is good, because if something is priced fair, people will buy it, and if something is priced too high, people won’t buy it. Maybe it isn’t the same for every country, maybe in Japan a download costs more than a download in Brazil. But it’s something that will continue to evolve, and I hope that the next generation of music executives will come up with innovative solutions for that.

Have you ever thought what occupation you would choose if you could not play music? Or is music the only way in life for you?

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, a fiction writer, and at the onset I used to say that I will play music for a while, and then would I grow up and become a writer, that would be my real career. But now I’m 39 years old, and I’m still playing music. (laughs) When I actually get to this real grown-up career of writing, is still unclear, but that was the original idea.

I wonder how your parents and family reacted to you becoming a musician…

They’ve always been concerned, of course, that I would have a good and happy life, and being a musician is a rough job. Even when you’re successful, there are some years when you make a lot of money and there are some years when you make no money at all. Obviously my family are concerned about that, but they’ve supported my decision and my choice, and so far I’ve done OK. I think they’re proud of me in that sense.

Apart from progressive and symphonic albums you have released two fully electronic albums – “Threshold” (1997) and “Seas Of Orion” (2004). What kind of audience do you target at with these releases? Do you think fans of Lana Lane and Rocket Scientists will easily get into these albums as well, or is it totally different music for totally different people?

I love electronic music! I love Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Kitaro, Jean Michel Jarre, Vangelis, all these great electronic artists, and they influenced my synthesizer playing. I listened to so much of this music growing up, and even now still, and I really like making this kind of music. In 2004 I had the opportunity to make this “Seas Of Orion” album, and it was commissioned by a company in the Netherlands that had an annual electronic music festival. I had played at that festival in 2001, where I actually opened up for Rick Wakeman, it was a really great honor. The festival apparently liked what I did so much that they asked me to make an album in 2004, so that I would release it at the festival and be the headliner. This festival is called Alfa Centauri, and Alfa Centauri really gave me the means to finally make an album like that. Whether the fans of Lana Lane, Rocket Scientists and Erik Norlander’s rock albums will like it or not, I don’t know. But I didn’t make the album to be a commercial success, I made it as a kind of artistic signet. I think that the fans that enjoy the synthesizer work that I do on all these albums, will enjoy “Seas Of Orion”, but if you’re a fan that likes the mellower, more melodic rock side of Lana Lane, maybe this album is not for you in that case… Look, I have another interview in 10 minutes, and I also have Lana here with me, so if you have some questions to her…

Yes, sure, I do have a few more questions to her!

Erik: OK, hold on, one moment! (pause)
Lana: Hi!

Hi Lana, we’ve already had a long conversation with Erik, but I have a few more questions left that we haven’t yet discussed.

Lana: Of course!

Let’s start with Russia, and even though we talked about it with Eric, I would still like to know your own impression about this country…

My impression of Russia was so… I was so in awe of the buildings and just the atmosphere of Russia. I didn’t know what to expect, and I was a little nervous about going there, even though we had had great mail and conversation with Tatiana regarding our tour there. I had no idea about how many people knew of my music or anything like that, and when we got there I was so in awe of the warmth and support that we were given. It was amazing! My only regret is that we were not able to stay a little bit longer to see other cities. But we were able to see a lot of St. Petersburg, which was really great. We also got to meet wonderful people, who I would like to see more than one time rather than the hassle of the show and preparations for that. Hopefully when we come next time, there will be a little more time.

With Erik we were discussing your series of special releases. What motivated you to come up with “Winter Sessions”? Is winter your favorite time of the year?

Well, fall and winter are definitely my favorite times of the year, but I also was raised on a lot of jazz and big band swing music, since my mother was a singer. From the time I can remember, that was the music that was played at home. I even listened to a lot of that music myself, I have big-band CDs in my car – Tony Bennet, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and I just thought it would be interesting and nice for the winter feel to do an album of songs that have some of those big band, swing and jazz flavors to them. That’s how “The Winter Sessions” came about.

Both “Winter Sessions” and “Lady Macbeth” are concept albums. But what about “Project Shangri-La” (2002)? Does it also have a common idea behind every song? And what does the title “Project Shangri-La” mean?

We were actually in the process of writing for “Project Shangri-La” in 2001 when the World Trade Center was destroyed by airplanes. It was a very hard time for us to finish that album, because at some point we felt, “What’s the point, when the world is falling apart?” But we saw the gathering of people at the spot of the attack and it showed us that people cared for each other in this terrible time, and it was a kind of relief from this devastation that we had, so we just tried to finish the album and write some uplifting songs that would carry the listener through this evil that was happening.

It’s been five years since this tragic event. In your opinion, how much did this terrorist attack change the country?

The country is quite different now. There’s a lot more mistrust and anger here in Los Angeles, which is where Erik and I are. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of healing that has happened, too. In general, I don’t think the world has changed for the better. It’s difficult for people not to be prejudiced towards the people from the Middle East, which is not always fair, because people from the Middle East that live here in the United States have nothing to do with what happened. But we sure hope that over the years this will change, and people will realize.

Lana, you come from a musical family, and your brother Greg Phelps is playing and singing on some of your recordings. But is he involved in any other musical projects outside your solo CDs and Rocket Scientists?

(in a very pleased voice) No, and he would be so happy to hear that you mentioned him! He’s a great musician, but he’s a very shy performer, he doesn’t feel comfortable performing with anybody else except for Eric and I. And even this he does only in a recording situation. Very early on, when I was in my teens – he’s a few years older than I am – we used to sing for weddings, and we were sort of known as the Karen and Richard Carpenter of our city. (laughs) My brother has a fantastic singing voice, and he plays beautiful piano, but he always was so nervous to perform, that you could see that it wasn’t any fun for him. Even though he has the talent, it is just too frightening for him. But I will absolutely tell him that you asked about him, maybe that will help.

And finally, where will you go from here? What are your plans for the future? What releases shall we expect next year, and what new grounds in music are you planning to tread?

We hope to take a vacation. (laughs) And we are engaged in preparations for the 2007 tour of Russia and Europe. These are our immediate plans.

Lana Lane on the Internet: http://www.lanalane.com
Erik Norlander on the Internet: http://www.eriknorlander.com

Special thanks to Irina Ivanova (CD-Maximum) for arranging this interview

Roman “Maniac” Patrashov
December 14, 2006
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