Sonata Arctica
Back on the Wolf’s Trail

01.04.2014

There are two promises you’d better not make if you are playing heavy metal. The first one is never to reunite with your band’s former members (no matter how emotional the breakup was), the second, never to turn back to the music style that made you famous and was left behind afterwards. The latter is exactly what’s happening to Sonata Arctica. Just a while ago the Finns were unanimous in saying that they were through with the power metal thing, that this page in the band’s history was turned, and that their minds were only focused on their progressive future. But three albums later the band goes back to its roots, the logo is once again shaped in the classic manner, and even the trademark wolves are back on the cover. You can’t step into the same river twice, can you? We’ll have the answer as soon as “Pariah’s Child” is out, but meanwhile we’ll try to find out what Tony Kakko, the band’s vocalist and songwriter, thinks about this mattyer. By the way, he suffered some kind of flu in the beginning of the year and had not recovered completely by the moment we got him on the phone…

How are you, Tony? I heard you suffered from some kind of flu or something…

Yeah. More or less the whole month. First I got this influenza, then I got normal flu and now I’m just feeling shit. (laughs) It was a hell of a month. I hope to be OK next week when we leave for our Latin America tour.

What do you usually do to keep your voice in a good shape? Does your scarf help you?

Well, the scarf works more or less in the same way as a case for a guitar. It keeps it safe from the environment. (laughs) As you know, my voice, my body is my instrument and I have to take good care of myself and try to stay healthy, exercise and in all possible ways avoid getting sick. Unfortunately this time it was Henrik (Klingenberg, keyboards) having the same flu and fever and everything, and eventually everybody got it. I’m still suffering from the same thing. You know, you can’t help it. The only thing I hope is that people, the fans will understand and will rather stay away from the band if they are suffering from influenza or whatever because the band will get it, too. That means some of the shows will be cancelled and that would be a nightmare, so… How I protect my voice is just taking a good care of myself and trying to sleep as much as possible. That’s the most important thing for a singer.

I saw your video for “The Wolves Die Young”, it is really great. Where did you shoot it?

We went to Lahti with Patrick Ullaeus, the director, and we just played our parts one by one, he shot the film and then he did everything the rest. All the extra material - the wolves and the people - was shot somewhere in Sweden, I believe. So for us it was just as easy. We played the song a couple of times in that hall and it was done. Of course, we had to talk with the director about what he wanted to have on the video, and the idea was to follow somehow the story of the lyrics which is more or less the same story as what you have in "The Emperor's New Clothes" (by Hans Christian Andersen, - ed.) I think we did a great job here because this video really has a story.

Can we talk a bit about your new album? As far as I know you recorded everything in the same studio this time.

That’s correct. That’s the first time since “Reckoning Night” (2004) which is the previous album recorded more or less in the same studio. It was a great pleasure. We rehearsed together, all in the same place and spent there 24/5 meaning that we worked day in, day out, day and night, even slept in the studio. We went home for the weekends, came back on Monday morning and continued. That’s why the whole album and the process had a really great band feeling. I’m very pleased with the result. It’s fantastic when you are able to have a say in everything the other guys do instead of downloading every morning some mp3’s in your e-mail and then trying to come up with an album somehow.If there is something wrong you have to figure out what it is exactly and how you would like it to be changed. That is always so much easier when you’re actually there and you can just show them and talk to them directly. All of us were really happy to be there and enjoy our time.

What about the style of the album? Does it really sound like your first albums?

Uhh… I don’t know. (laughs) I always try to write songs that are different from the previous ones, and every album should be slightly different from everything we’ve done in the past. I think we managed to do that with this album as well. Stylistically it’s a kind of slice of everything we’ve done in the past but in a bigger picture I would place these songs somewhere right after “Reckoning Night”. This “Pariah’s Child” album might have been released instead of “Unia”, in 2007, but then things were different in the band.  After releasing “Unia” we decided to go on and we had a lot of adventures on that road, but today it’s time to go back to that intersection in time and see what the other road has to offer us. I think that changing of our logo with “Unia” and then keeping it for three albums was a really great idea back in the day because now we can get back to that logo to let people know what we are trying to achieve here.   

Sounds like a time loop, kind of.

(laughs) Yes, it’s time travelling in a certain way. Well, I don’t want to put any restrictions on anything we do. It’s better to just do whatever feels right, and everybody in the band feels like this would be the thing to do now, this power metal thing. (coughs) It all started last summer when we rehearsed for the 15th anniversary tour and so we had to go through the old albums to pick the songs we were going to play. I thought it would be a nightmare but as a huge surprise I actually liked what I heard, it was fun, it made me smile. That gave me an idea and an inspiration to try to write something in that style. And the result of that experimentation was “The Wolves Die Young” which became the first single of the new album. It kind of paved a road for everything that happened after that, it showed us the right way to go.

I remember you saying some time ago that you were no longer interested in power metal, that you didn’t even listen to this music and everything…

I told everybody that we were not going back to that style anymore.  Well… People change. (everybody laughs) After the “Reckoning Night” tour I was wrecked and the band was almost breaking up at the time. We had a lot of problems, and it was a really long tour, really demanding… And obviously Jani (Liimatainen, former guitarist) was kicked out of the band because of his personal problems and… you know… issues he had at the time. It meant nearly breaking up the band and I really wanted to do something totally different. I could have gone with my solo thing and release a solo album but instead of doing that I talked to the band and everybody agreed that it might be a great idea to do something different for a change. “Unia” was the result of that and we stayed on that road for three albums and now, like I said, last summer something happened and I started to see power metal as something cool again. It’s great fun to play that style though we never were the purest form of power metal to start with, but It’s a big part of what we are and we just have to accept who we are… So we are back on that path. (laughs)

It’s the first time neither you nor the whole band is stated as the producer of the album.

Well, it’s better to have the whole band stated there again. I don’t know, everybody had maybe a little bigger share in what happens there than on the previous albums which were in some ways, producing-wise, my solo things. I was just acting like a dictator (everybody laughs) because with some things I had a really clear vision of I wanted to achieve. This time I realized that the whole band has been the producer on each album but I wanted to, you know, put my name on the previous albums as a producer. Naturally if I am the songwriter and I know how things should be like I always have the most say about how things are supposed to be. Though it’s just words, it doesn’t really mean anything.

So it’s not true that Pasi (Kauppinen, bass) produced the album this time?

He mixed the whole album but it was me and Pasi who spent the most time in the studio dealing with these little details that finally gave the album its current form. So of course, Pasi had quite an influence on a lot of things. Pasi gave me a lot of boost and new energy to write songs which I was not able to write in the past. He is a virtuoso bass player and he can play just about the same things as any of us with guitars. So that gives me a lot of freedom as a songwriter, I can stretch my legs.

Talking about specific songs, could you tell us the story behind that epic 10-minutes-long song?

“Larger Than Life” is a part of my fooling around with this symphonic orchestra sounds. I was just playing around and trying to come up with something… whatever… nothing really. Though in an hour or two I had a lot of great stuff there. Already at that time I knew what the whole idea of “Larger Than Life” would be and it stayed there till the very end and functioned like a red line of the song. I had to come up with a story that would be able to handle that title, “Larger Than Life”. It was a fun song to write, it’s a fairly epic whole thing. It took me one time to write the lyrics in the form that I have them, because I kind of knew what it would be like very early on. I wanted to have a story of a lifetime, you know, an artist getting a big role in a very young age and getting bigger and bigger and living a life like that, and eventually being an old man and passing this torch over somehow. It suddenly found its form only two days before I had to sing, I usually keep lyrics somehow hanging for that moment when I have to sing just in case I come up with something better, some better ways to say a few things and so on … It’s a great story, I think, and the moral is more or less that there’s always hope, no matter how old you are or how late you think it is. It’s never too late to change your life and find something that gives everything a new meaning.

Yeah, it’s very inspiring. One more song I wanted to ask you about is “Running Lights”.

That’s a funny song. When I wrote lyrics it was gonna be a bonus track for Japan, so lyrically and also musically it was kind of more lighthearted song. Everybody gets loose when you’re working on a bonus track. We just decided to go all the way and let ourselves go wild with that song, and do something that the Japanese people normally love. But once I had the song, the guitars and everything, I had a feeling like that it’s a wrong song to be a bonus track and eventually it became the number two track on the album. Lyrically it is more or less about young people having a great fast weekend in every possible way. It’s a really lighthearted song, I wrote the lyrics at one train ride to the studio. Lou Reed had actually died on the previous day and I just had that in mind, too…

Henrik wrote on his blog that you’ve only done one bonus track this time. Why? I really enjoyed your bonus tracks, you had some great covers among them…

We just thought that it’s enough, you know. Japan has always been the only place that really demanded and needed bonus tracks because of the local music business. As a songwriter I usually don’t write any more songs that are absolutely necessary and the bonus tracks have always been like a waste of a good material in a certain way. If you have a really great song which you do as bonus material that leads to the point where many people will never get to hear a song that might eventually become their favorite Sonata Arctica song because not all the fans are so extreme that they search everything online… So I wrote one solid basic album and then made a bonus track for that one place that really needs it. But I never had any problems with people finding it online somewhere and downloading it if they have actually bought a local version of the album. ‘Cause it’s just, you know, a bonus.

The wolves are back both on the cover and in the lyrics. What does this symbol mean to you?

Oh, wolves actually enjoy living in packs, they are really tight-knit and they don’t allow outsiders in. Somehow they ended up being kind of our totem animals and a big part of our visual imagery. Every time we try to come up with something to put on a shirt or an album cover I really like to start with a wolf. We put a wolf there and then we go from there. It just became Sonata Arctica’s trademark animal. It was really early on that we realized that this album’s gonna be sounding like Sonata Arctica’s album number five, only from a different perspective. At that point it was obvious that the wolves were gonna be back, of course. We added them with the ultimate goal of underlining the fact that we were walking on the same path again. For some reason a wolf is a big part of what we are. I don’t know how it got started but I suppose the song “Wolf and Raven” has a lot to do with it.

You are now getting prepared for your 15th anniversary tour that will last for almost a year. How are you going to survive through it?

We’ve already played some shows in Finland which lasted for two hours. That’s very demanding for me as a singer because we have a lot of old songs in the setlist which means a lot of screaming and singing really high. (laughs) Yes, it can be hard and I think it’s gonna be more than a year, actually. After this “Pariah’s Child” album is released we’re gonna add a lot of new songs to the list as well, but we’re not throwing out those songs that people want to hear and have wanted to hear for a long, long time. You know, “My Land”, “Kingdom for a Heart”, “Wolf and Raven”, “The Cage”… Those songs that we left out at some point because we didn’t wanna do them anymore. Now this is a big part of what we do again, so we’ll obviously let them in. We might leave off half of the songs that we played a lot on the previous few tours like, maybe, “Paid In Full”. I do love the song, and it’s a lot of fun to do live and all that, but we have done it a lot lately so I think we can replace it with some of our newer songs.  

15 years is quite a long distance for a band. Do you remember how it all got started? Did you change a lot since that time?

Yeah, of course. I was a child at that point (laughs), more or less. Everybody changes during those years, between your early twenties and late thirties; you grow up and become an adult and hopefully a responsible human being. So of course I changed as a human being but… I remember all the excitement we had during the first tours, how innocent and how green we were, how we didn’t know anything about anything, and how blessed we felt because of that, because (laughs) the more you know, the more it hurts. We didn’t know that there are a lot of totally wrong and unfair things in the music business. We have changed; we became professionals, now we know what we do much better than we did back then. In fact, more or less exactly 15 years ago we received a phone call from Spinefarm Records. “How’d you guys like to record an album?” We were, like, “Ok, that sounds great”. (laughs) Next summer, I think, in June or July it’s gonna be 15 years since our first single, “UnOpened”, was released… Exactly 15 years ago I was still a different person in more than one way.

Is there anything still left inside you from that “child”?

(laughs) Of course. I am still the same child somewhere deep within, you know. I still love doing what I do, I enjoy writing songs just as I did back then. I only feel I’m better at it, I know what I’m doing more. There’s certain amount of determination in me today in comparison to what I have been, just grooving around and not knowing anything about anything. It was just a matter of going blindly everywhere, not really knowing there could be some consequences. It’s a great thing, 15 years ago I had a dream that maybe we’d get to release this one album and that’s about it, because I could not expect anything more. And slowly I’m getting ready to call this whole thing a career. It’s great.

Talking about grooving around… Did you do the famous alcohol test for the new bass player?

(laughs) No, actually we did not. Pasi doesn’t really drink alcohol at all and what is more important we knew him so well. Henrik was playing with him in the same band for like 17 or 18 years, it’s called Silent Voices. Pasi has worked with us since 2006, when he mixed our first live DVD “For the Sake of Revenge”, and he worked on every major Sonata Arctica release since then and we knew that he is a really great bass player. It was just natural to take him in when we decided to part ways with Marco (Paasikoski, former bassist). The easy part was that Marco even told us, “You cannot take anyone else but Pasi in the band”, so… It could not be any easier than that.

Is there anything that you didn’t achieve during these 15 years, but would like to? I mean, headlining “Rock in Rio” or something…

(laughs) Oh, no, I really don’t have that kind of goals in my life. I think it would be great to somehow (laughs) sell one million copies of an album once in your life, that would be something I would be really proud of.  That would mean that a lot of people have heard my music and it has made a difference. Then I could retire. (laughs) But I really don’t think of anything like that or headlining some big festival. Not anymore. Maybe when I was a younger man… But the harsh reality is that we are so far away from the mainstream, I think it’s gonna be impossible. Well, you never know, things change.

You are travelling all over the planet. Do the fans differ from one country to another?

People differ and the fans differ even from one town to another within one country. That change even happens in the same city, when the only difference is the day of the week. On Friday or Saturday night people go out and drink and they are really more wild and open-minded. More than they are on a Monday morning when they go to work. Generally speaking, in the countries of Latin America and Spain and Italy the people are more hot-blooded, I think. In some way. They are crazier, everybody knows that, it’s not a big surprise. But that’s not always necessary. I naturally enjoy being with the audience in such places where people go totally insane. It’s certainly fun to be on stage.

I know fans usually give you some nice things as presents. What are the most unusual things you received?

Usually it’s sleeve paintings and…  a wine glass.

Do you keep it?

Yeah, of course. I try to keep everything I get. If it’s possible.

You’ll be able to open like a museum soon…

(everybody laughs) Yeah, someday I will.

OK,I am through with the questions. Do you want to add anything?

Well, we’ll be touring Russia later this year, so I hope you’ll all check out the new album “Pariah’s Child” and enjoy it. Come and see on your own Sonata Arctica shows and celebrate the 15 years of Arctic metal with us. It’s gonna be fun. It has always been.

Sonata Arctica on the Internet: http://www.sonataarctica.info

Special thanks to Maxim Bylkin (Soyuz Music) for arranging this interview

Ekaterina Akopova
February 24, 2014
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