Elvenking
Not My Final Song

08.08.2010

The year 2010 has been rich with natural extremes, but the volcano eruption in Iceland, which caused a blackout in the sky of most of European countries, still stands as one of its highlights in this sense. A lot of gigs and tours got cancelled for that reason, but Italy’s Elvenking, showing remarkable courage and luck, still came down to Moscow to play their first gig in Russia. Being long-time supporters of the band, we already had a chance to talk to guitarist Aydan back in 2006, but was a lot time ago, and the band has released two albums since then, which many consider their top achievements. Therefore we attacked the promoters and eventually got into the band’s dressing room shortly before the show to speak to Aydan and Damgagoras (vocals). The musicians looked rather confused, but were still happy to answer a few questions…

First of all, how did you enjoy the trip to Russia? We heard that you had a lot of difficulties because of this volcano eruption in Iceland…

Damnagoras: It was so bad, really. With all this volcano shit all the flights were being cancelled, and I don’t even know how our plane managed to fly. But in the end, with a little delay, we got here. The problem now is how we will get back home. (everybody laughs)

You will have to stay here and a do a full tour of Russia!

Damnagoras: They’re telling us that at the moment all the airports are closed, so we’re stuck here in Russia.
Aydan: We need to do 10 dates somewhere here.
Damnagoras: Of course, we will play, and then we will think about it. (The band eventually had to stay in Russia for three days before managing to leave for Italy – ed.)

You’ve just finished recording a new album, and it was the first time you were working with producer Dennis Ward. How did you like the experience?

Aydan: It was a very interesting experience, for sure. I think it’s time in our career to get a proper producer, an international one, somebody who can really help us in getting the right sound and the right arrangements for our songs. We chose Dennis Ward, because he’s a producer we’ve always liked. The new album is a little bit different from the previous one, and I think he was the right person to do it. He helped us a lot, he gave us a lot of advice in terms of arrangements and song structures, as well as individual playing.
Damnagoras: Actually we have ready worked with a good producer, Nino Laurenne, but only for the mixing. This is the first time we worked with a really cool producer throughout the process of recording.

Your previous album “Two Tragedy Poets” (2008) was an acoustic one, and the one before, “The Scythe” (2007), was the heaviest thing you’ve ever done. How will the new album sound like?

Aydan: I think it sounds like a mixture of those two albums. “The Scythe” was a really heavy one, with obscure gothic touches inside, it was built around the concept of death, so obviously it was very dark. “Two Tragedy Poets”, on the other hand, was softer, we made use of the opportunity to play around our acoustic side. The new one could be seen as a mixture of the two things. It’s definitely not so heavy and not so obscure like “The Scythe” was, I see it as… I don’t want to say “happy”, it’s more romantic and more melodic.
Damnagoras: It captures all the sides of the band. OK, we have the heavy stuff, but we’ve got a lot of melody and a lot of acoustic stuff. It’s a mixture of all our sides, and it’s showing you what Elvenking are playing nowadays.

Don’t you think that the cover of “The Scythe” is a little bit similar to the cover artworks of Children Of Bodom?

Aydan: First of all, Children Of Bodom are one of our favorite bands, so it could be something like that. (laughs) But I don’t think it depends on that. Yes, they have ‘The Reaper’ as their main character, but as “The Scythe” was written around the theme of death, we wanted to represent it as a female figure. OK, it holds the scythe, which obviously reminds you of Children Of Bodom covers…
Damnagoras: But in the end, death traditionally holds the scythe.

You have definitely heard that Peter Steele from Type O Negative died three days ago. If you search the web, you will find a lot of people saying, “He sang about death too much, and he joked about death, and you’d better stay away from such subjects, because you may strangely die quite young…”

Damnagoras: I think the only thing he should have stayed away from was drugs, not joking about death.
Aydan: I think he died with a smile on his face, because he was always joking about death. He wanted a certain type of life, and that’s what he had in the end.
Damnagoras: He was one of the guys who lived at full speed, and that was just his way. I think speaking about death in the way that we did on the album is a way to exorcise it. Of course, everyone of us is afraid of dying…
Aydan: I don’t think we have to be afraid of speaking about death. You can find references to death in all kinds of literature and poetry, and this was our way to exorcise it, to deal with it. On the album we also talk about our own death, so it’s our way to face it.

On “Two Tragedy Poets” there’s a great song called “Not My Final Song”. What inspired you to write it?

Aydan: And it’s once again about death. It’s about our own personal death, about our funeral. And it’s another way to link to the previous album and see death in an ironic way. The character of the song is in his coffin, he sees all the faces around him and he thinks, “Hey, this one was talking bad things about me, and how he’s crying.” It is an ironic way to see death and how death changes the minds of the people. When somebody’s dying, everyone goes like, “Oh, he was a very good guy,” but maybe when he was alive, they weren’t saying exactly the same thing. Death really changes people’s point of view.

At the end of the song you sing “I’m more alive than you are” – how often do you get this feeling when you look at the world around you?

Aydan: Really often. It’s another way to tell people, “You need to live, not survive”. I think too many people around are just surviving and not trying to live a real life, whatever it means… I don’t say it has to mean how Peter Steele was living, everyone has a way to live his own life. How you prefer to live is your own business, but just don’t only survive, try to live.

You say in most of the interviews that you want every album to be different. But what motivates the choice of the direction? Do you all gather together and say, “Let’s make it really heavy this time”, or does it happen in the process of writing and recording?

Damnagoras: It happens naturally, this is our way to see music. We can’t make an album or a song the same as the previous one or something we did before. We just have the need to do something bigger, better and different every time. This is happening with the new album, too. You can hear that it’s us, you can hear all the different faces of the band, but it’s fresh – at least this is how we think it will be. You can hear songs that we’ve never done before. I know that some fans are upset about this, maybe they want us to make songs like we did in the past, but there are a lot of bands who do that, and we don’t work like that.

For every album you have a lot of guests playing various folk instruments – tin whistle, Uilleann pipes and so on. Who are these people? Is it easy or difficult to find a person who plays such instruments and enjoys heavy metal at the same time?

Aydan: We have had different guests on our albums in the past, we had people from the metal scene, too, such as Mike Wead from King Diamond or Schmier from Destruction. For the acoustic album we needed someone who plays traditional instruments. The guys who played on the album are from the band Waylander from Ireland, they’re fans of Elvenking, so they enjoyed playing their parts. They actually play metal in their own band. At the same time, we did have people who don’t like metal, but since our music is a mixture of things, they got to like it and play with us.
Damnagoras: For example, the guy who is speaking on “The Scythe” is totally out of music. He just liked the idea and came down.

Are there any guests on the new record?

Damnagoras: (laughs) This is the first time we don’t have any guests, actually.
Aydan: Maybe Dennis Ward will sing something, some choirs. But this time we didn’t need any special names, we just did it ourselves. There are people who play keyboards for us and stuff like this…
Damnagoras: We’ve got a couple of keyboard players, who are friends of ours, but they’re not famous names.

You had your former guitarist Jarpen singing backing vocals on “Two Tragedy Poets”…

Damnagoras: (surprised) Did we???
Aydan: Yes, we did.
Damnagoras: Sorry, I forgot about that. (everybody laughs)

What is he doing how? Is he considering a return to Elvenking one day?

Aydan: He has nothing to do with music, unfortunately. He totally left the music business, because… I don’t know. We asked him openly to come and play with us some songs onstage, but he was like, “I’ve not been playing since too much time, and I don’t want it”.
Damnagoras: It only happened once, when he got married, and we did a little gig, we played acoustically.
Aydan: But when there are some backing vocals to do, we’re like, “OK, Jarpen, come”. He’s still a very good friend of ours.

“Two Tragedy Poets” contains two old songs – “”The Winter Wake” and “The Wanderer”, both from “The Winter Wake” album (2006). Why did you choose these two specific tracks? Are you dissatisfied with the original versions?

Aydan: To be honest, we did one song from each album. We did “The Perpetual Knot” from “Wyrd” (2004) and “Skywards” from “Heathenreel” (2001) as well. “The Perpetual Knot” was released just on the “From Blood To Stone” online single, while “Skywards” was supposed to be on the Japanese edition of the album, which in the end never came out. We recorded songs from every old album, except “The Scythe”, and in the end we chose songs from “The Winter Wake” to be on the regular album. It’s just accidental, but in the end, the two songs from “The Winter Wake” we did acoustically were the most interesting. They had a different flavor in the end.
Damnagoras: When we were on tour with Jon Oliva in 2006, we were doing an acoustic set, and we were just enjoying playing those two songs, and they were working out really cool.

Do you plan to do – or have you already done – any full acoustic gigs with songs from “Two Tragedy Poets”?

Aydan: In the end we decided not to do this, we prefer the heavy side of the band. We had different plans to do purely acoustic sets, we outlined a few dates which we were supposed to do just with acoustic guitars, but it never happened. We were asked for electric shows all the time, and in the end we didn’t have time to do acoustic sets.
Damnagoras: Actually it’s difficult to do both acoustic and electric sets at the same time, because you have to have all the instruments, and it’s a challenge. Fortunately tonight we’re doing a small acoustic set, it just seems to happen.
Aydan: But we did a couple of songs from the acoustic album in the electric versions. It was interesting to do it.

“Two Tragedy Poems” also contains a cover version of “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” by Belinda Carlisle. That’s a very interesting choice – do you listen to 80s pop music a lot?

Damnagoras: Yeah, of course! We were raised on that music when we were kids. When we were young, all that stuff – Michael Jackson, Madonna and so on, was really inspiring for us, those were the first songs we were listening to. Then, of course, we got into rock music, like Europe, Motley Crue, Aerosmith and Guns N’Roses, but those songs are still in our hearts, so when we were thinking about doing a cover version, we thought about doing something that was not metal or rock.
Aydan: In the end, those songs from the 80s are really rocking, they just miss the electric guitars, but in spirit, they’re kind of hard rock Bon Jovi-style songs, just the arrangements are different.

What kind of music do you usually listen to at the moment?

Damnagoras: All kinds of stuff, really. We can go from pop music to extreme metal to whatever.
Aydan: From black metal to pop music.
Damnagoras: Music should just have cool melodies and appeal. As long as it’s good music, we listen to it, it’s OK for us.

In an interview we did back in 2006, you said that all the band members have a day job, because you can’t live off music like this in Italy. Has the situation changed over these four years?

Aydan: No! (laughs) Now things are getting bigger for Elvenking, and maybe even too big, because when you have your work and family at home, it’s a problem. When you’re 20 years old, it’s easier, but when you’re in our 30s, it’s getting more and more difficult. You have to leave home, you have to travel a lot, you have to say no to a lot of possibilities like shows, because we can’t always be on the road. There are countries like Sweden or Finland where the government gives money to musicians. In Italy you have to pay (laughs), you get ho help from the country, so it’s difficult.

You have worked with AFM Records since the very beginning, you have never changed record labels. Are you satisfied with everything they do for you? Have you ever considered moving to another label?

Aydan: We did have other proposals…
Damnagoras: But we really think AFM is the best option, because the label really believes in the band. Over the past few years they have been doing a lot on the promotion side, and at the moment it’s really a good thing for us.
Aydan: Our new record is our final record for them under the current contract. Let’s see what happens then…

By the way, do you already have a title or a release date?

Aydan: The release date is October at the moment, but it may change. The title of the album is a working title…
Damnagoras: We don’t wanna leak that. Probably it’s gonna change tomorrow. (everybody laughs)

Now the final question – what are your expectations from this trip to Russia? What did you expect to see when you were going here? And how much does this country live up to your expectations so far?

Damnagoras: Now the only thing we know is all the other gigs are being cancelled. Immortal were supposed to play here tonight, and Voivod were supposed to play tomorrow, but this will not happen. We really hope for a lot of people tonight, because we’re the only ones who had the guts to come here to Russia. (laughs) Maybe we will stay here for a couple of weeks to see all the surroundings.

Elvenking on the Internet: http://www.elvenking.net

Special thanks to Vladimir and Vitaly (Delta Mekong Concerts) for arranging this interview

Interview by Roman Patrashov, Natalie “Snakeheart” Patrashova
Photos by Natalie “Snakeheart” Patrashova
April 17, 2010
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