Dark Tranquillity
There's So Much Mystery in Music

23.01.2014

Dark Tranquillity have been on the forefront of the Swedish metal scene for years. Their 10 albums have serve as rulebooks for several generations of musicians, their concerts are eagerly awaited in many countries, and every year they are welcome at festivals in all corners of the world. However, retaining fans’ interests and keeping what you do attractive for yourself is not an easy task even for established musicians. That’s where it got tough for Dark Tranquillity, which, as bandmembers admit, experienced a frightening attack of creative impotence following the completion of “We Are The Void” (2010). However, the guys managed to find new sources of inspiration while working on “Construct” (2013), and the latest record is once again a triumph of their creative spirit. We got Dark Tranquillity singer Mikael Stanne on the phone to talk about this crisis period, the remediation measures taken, the new record, and the band’s life outside the stage…

The festival season is at its peak while we’re talking. How is it going? Any cool experiences so far?

Well, yeah, I guess so. We’ve been to some places we’d never been to before. We played festivals in Romania, Tunisia, India, Turkey… They were new to us, so it’s been really interesting so far. There were some crazy troubles, of course, as well, like missed planes and delayed visas and typical stuff. We got stuck – we played in India two weeks ago and our visas were not sufficient, so we had to stay there for three extra days doing nothing but chilling out and waiting for new visas. And then in four days we spent time in nine different airports around Europe… You know, weird, weird days. But now I’m free, now I’m home, and we have one week off.

How are people reacting to your new songs? Are you happy about the feedback?

Yeah, for sure. It feels great. We’ve done four songs, I think, from the album so far and it feels really good. You can already feel like, “Oh yeah, this is gonna work, this is probably gonna be in the set for a long-long time”. But we’re working on it still, we’re trying things out, we’re gonna start rehearsing properly – we want to make sure we know all the songs from the entire album so we can do it before we head off on our proper headlining tour. It looks really-really good so far and we’re so happy to be doing new songs.  We toured for “We Are The Void” pretty much for three years with a rotating setlist of twenty songs or something like that, and now we’re gonna be able to add ten more - that’s just fantastic, you know.

Were you a bit worried about your fans’ reaction when you released the record? As far as I understand you tried to approach the recording process in a bit of a new way, and it’s always a bit scary to change your old ways…

I wouldn’t say “worried”, I think I was curious. I was curious and I wanted people to hear the album and to let us know what they think. Once we recorded the album we thought that it turned out pretty good, it didn’t sound like anything we’d done before. It felt a bit risky but we were incredibly proud of it and we wanted people to hear it. We played it to a couple of friends and they were like, “Wow! Yeah, man, that’s awesome!” And then we wanted to let our fans hear it, we released the first song online, and then the second one, and we started to get these reactions, “Oh, it’s different, oh, it’s weird…” But I loved it. I was so happy to hear that people got into it and understood that we wanted to do something different, that this is not the continuation of “Character” (2005), “Fiction” (2007) and “We Are The Void”, this is something new. It’s a different approach, it’s something that is always at the back of our mind when we write music – we just want it to be more challenging.

Do you feel like this new record marks some new beginning for the band?

It does feel like that in many ways. We just felt better when we started this album, because we went through a tough time after “We Are The Void”. We were like, where do we go this way? How far can we change this sound? How long can we play our music without being stagnant, without being bored with ourselves? How can we reinvent our interest and our love for music? And that took forever to get through, that’s why it took us so long before we actually started writing. It took years. We didn’t want to deal with it - you just feel like kind of depressed, like, “Probably it’s not gonna happen this time, just wait, we’ll just do another tour and we’ll see, we’re probably gonna get inspired then”. And then another tour went by, we didn’t really feel that inspiration coming, and we just thought like, “Fuck it, let’s do something totally different, let’s just write in the studio”. We started off just bringing ourselves in studio, started writing, bouncing ideas off to each other, recorded something, and one kind of took it off the other to finish it off. That became such a refreshing change to the whole writing process, and we were like, “Wow, this actually is fun!” Sometimes it is fun to write, even though, you know, all good things come from pain. (laughs) But it was really tough for the past couple of years and now finally we can put this to end. I think that’s why for us it feels like a kind of new beginning. Who know what the next album is gonna be… but for now it’s just really really good.

As far as I remember you said that all the songs for this album were somehow constructed from different parts written at different times. Was it a new approach to songwriting for you too? Is there any huge difference between writing this way and creating one whole song after another?

Well, I guess we always do this – we take bits and pieces and put them together. But normally we do that at our rehearsal room space, where we all sit around, go back and forth and try to find something that is good enough. But that takes forever, it’s a long-long-long process. It’s also a lot of fun, but usually it takes a year or more for us to record an album… But this time we’d sit around just listening to stuff, listening to music rather than just playing it made a whole difference. We were trying to be more objective and listen to what it sounds like rather than whether it sounds good enough. That was actually more rewarding.

If songwriting can be such a long and demanding process, how do you decide when to stop working on a song?

That’s a good question because sometimes you just keep on going for years. When it comes to lyrics, I tend to work on them for so long... I can change words and phrases and some vocal lines of the song when I’m already recording the song. (laughs) So you never really know, I guess. And I think what always bothered me before was that when you record a song, it kind of dies, there’s no life in it anymore. But now I think we’ve worked in the studio for a long time and I guess we somehow know what’s too much and what’s not enough. You can trust your instincts and trust your experience. You can feel when it’s time to say, “It’s fine, let’s go on”.

I feel like there is some kind of concept behind the new album. Did you try to think of one main idea to somehow unite all the songs when you were writing the lyrics?

I’m not sure if there is any “concept” but yes, there is something like a “main theme”, the main idea that I started out beating about when I started writing. And it has to do with a bit skeptical thinking, scientific methods and atheism. It’s about not trusting everything but questioning everything around you, trying to get to the bottom of everything you hear and see and speaking to facts and not fiction and trying to see the world for what it is and not what you want it to be. I guess I’ve seen that a lot when it comes to pseudoscience and religion and just basic longing for something else. I think the world is fantastic and it’s immensely interesting as it is, and so the notion of coming up with something else and not like an easy solution to your problems is a cut-off, and I don’t like that. Religion, of course, is one of the most effective mechanisms that you reach for once you don’t understand enough of the world - you try to make sense of what we are doing here, and you go for faith instead of knowledge. And I’ve just found that frustrating my whole life, I’ve never understood that and I think as I grow older, it serves me even more. Now you can really see the horrible effect that this blind faith has on humanity and on people and everything. That’s the thing that always gets me startled, it gets me really frustrated and angry and that’s when I feel the most creative. When you’re trapped in that kind of anger and frustration, you start writing. It also deals with this skepticism on our private “planes”, so to speak. You sometimes refuse to see the obvious, or refuse to see clear signs, because you want to believe the things are good, but they’re not. What you’re doing is just side off the reality when you’re blinded by emotions.  

Isn’t it hard to live without believing in some sort of mystery?

There’s so much mystery in music, in art, in any kind of creativity. And it’s more challenging to use your own imagination. I think that’s all you need… I love how poets kind of extend the sense of the words – you work with things have to be likely, but they might not be true, it’s just how you experience them. And that’s fine, that’s an interpretation. I think that can be magical because that can spark images in your head, it can spark thoughts in your head that you never thought possible. And that’s fantastic, and that’s all there is. That’s not something that you pay your life for, meaning that you live by, it’s just something that makes you feel better. But you also know from the rational point, that this is something that is just words, this is just ideas, some emotions, some feelings and expressions that makes you grasp an extra hold on things. Does that make me believe in something that I cannot prove? Not in the least, I’m really happy with things that can be scientifically proven. It sounds boring, I guess, but I think I will be well off if I have some kind of belief system that you can kind of live up to. You needn’t be miserable because you cannot live up to that high standard that your religion has set for you, and that makes you feel like you have got down to the level of an animal. For me, all I can do is be the best person I can to make myself proud of my life, to be the best possible dad, friend and so on.

On this album you use quite a lot of clean vocals – do you like this style of singing, or do you prefer extreme vocals? And which manner is more demanding for you?

I don’t know. I think it’s obvious what my favorite is, because, of course, I’ve always done screaming mainly, that’s what I got into in the first place. I think some of the songs need something else lyrically and musically and I wanna do something different when it feels natural. That’s not what we want to do to all of the songs, that’s not what we’re about. But it’s fun. I like doing it in the studio. We had a blast recording this album even though it was really challenging but also that’s what I love, it should be challenging and that’s what it’s worth. I think that the songs on this album, there’s a little room for experimentation like that in the songs. There’s no room for keyboards, there’s no room for weird drum fills, but there was room for clean vocals. It wasn’t really planned beforehand, it just made sense.

Are there any things that you want to try out but never had a chance to do so with your band?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, there are different kinds of songs that we tried over the years, that we worked on but never put out. We have some plans right now to do something very different for the upcoming release, something really cool and challenging. I don’t know... I love the fact that our music is pretty open to anything that we can do, from something melodic and gothic to blast beat and extreme metal and to progressive and anything we feel like doing. There is something that we are going to try out later, for sure, but we will see. Now we are more confident about the way that we work, everyone is really involved and we’re experimenting a lot with our vision.

What’s the thing you enjoy the most about being in the band?

I guess performing in front of our audience is one of my favorite things. Like when you can truly connect to the audience, you know that they are there for the same reason that you are there and you all have fun – that’s what happens at shows normally and that’s one of my favorite things I guess. I love getting this kind of high that comes from being really nervous not knowing what to expect and then coming on stage - and everything changes in one millisecond from the lowest of the lowest to the highest of the highest. That kind of rush is fantastic, you know. Also I think it’s just writing, creating something you can be proud of, making albums you can be proud of. It’s fantastic. It takes so much work and you feel like shit all the time you’re writing, but once you get it done, it pays off, and that’s one of the best things in the world as well. Of course I like all this traveling too, it’s inspiring, even though you get really tired because of it. But we’ve seen a lot of places in the world, that’s great.

Are there any countries you like the most?

There are, sure. I like it when we go to Finland and Russia – we do fantastic shows there. People are so incredibly cool there. We love going to Japan and to China, because the audience there is great as well. Germany and Сentral Europe are incredible also. We love to play in Sweden of course. And there are always great shows in South America and in Spain... I mean, it’s hard to choose one particular place. It all comes down to getting a good crowd. After you’re doing a top headline show at a festival, where it doesn’t get so intimate, you can do that tiny show in front of 200 people that shout louder than 9,000, and you think it’s the best one of the year. Then you play for 2,000 people or 10,000 people, and you don’t get the same vibe. …

Are there any shows that you’re looking forward to? As far as I remember you’re going to take part in 7000 Tons of Metal and you’re supposed to communicate with people not just during your shows but all the time you spend on that ship. Is it okay with you? Is it interesting?

It’s really cool. You can hang out with some of your favorite bands, you can hang out with some really cool fans. Everybody is drinking beer together there, it’s beyond international borders or any other borders, everybody can spend time really cool there. It’s awesome. I’m really looking forward to it.

Are there any things you enjoy doing in your free time?

There are many. What I’m doing today, I’m gonna cook cider for ten people on a beach. That’s one of the highlights of the summer… Yeah, that’s what I do - hang out outdoors… Cook food, drink beer, hang out with my friends and family – that’s what my Sunday is all about when I’m not out screaming. A good day.

What do you wish yourself to be and to do in 10 or 20 years from now?

Oh… I never really thought about that. But I think if I can keep doing this, it will be great. We’re still doing well and I’m really proud and happy about it and if we keep doing that that will be fantastic. I want to keep it interesting and challenging… But I don’t know. I don’t like talking about the future.

Don’t you think that one day you can get tired of all this music industry?

Well, you can get tired of music industry, but you can never get tired of music itself. It’s a huge part of my life and I can never leave it behind. Music industry itself isn’t that exiting… Well, it can be exiting, but it’s also very stressful.

So what are the main problems you have to face as a band?

I think that’s financial problems. Record companies don’t make that much money anymore, so you have to cut corners. It’s not like in the 80s, when they would just sell albums and you could do whatever you want, now you have to think about all these things. We are doing most of the things ourselves, now we’re a self-managed band, so we know all the errors and we try to be rational about what we do and about our decisions. That takes time - when we’re going on tour, it takes forever to get that going because of all the financial hassle we gotta do, but at the same time it works out pretty good if you do it right. It’s the tedious part. You can’t comprehend it all, so you have to get other people involved, but it’s getting better. We know how to do it this far, we started a couple of years ago.

Could you try to describe the current state of your band in just a couple of words?

Well, we’re tumultuous, exited, and ready to go.

Dark Tranquillity on the Internet: http://www.darktranquillity.com

Special thanks to Niklas Tschaikowsky (Century Media Records) for arranging this interview

Ksenia Artamonova
July18, 2013
© HeadBanger.ru