Mikael Stanne (DARK TRANQUILLITY) on Rock Overdose: “People still listen to music but in a different way

We are very honored to present you the interview that Dark Tranquillity's singer, Mikael Stanne, gave to Rock Overdose and Konstantinos Sotirelis. Mikael Stanne talked about many issues, such as their new album, "Atoma", their infuences, the downloading and many more!

 

Rock Overdose: Welcome to Rock Overdose! How are you?

 

Mikael Stanne: Very good, thanks!

 

Rock Overdose: Please, tell me how things are going for Dark Tranquillity these days?

 

Mikael Stanne: It’s pretty awesome! It’s super, super busy. It’s pretty crazy. It’s very exciting, as well. You know, a lot of things going on, a lot of things happening. Yeah, it’s probably the busiest we’ve been in a long time. So, I can’t complain, but I do anyway.

 

Rock Overdose: So, you have recently released your new album, “Atoma”. How do you feel about this release?

 

Mikael Stanne: I’m kinda nervous about it, because I didn’t really know what to expect, you know, from people’s reaction. That kind of thing. Like, I knew how I felt about the songs, but I didn’t know how everyone else would feel. That kind of thing... And, also, because it’s been such an intense period; writing this album, recording it, and all that stuff. It’s really hard to actually take a step back and listen, and hear, what the hell we’ve been doing all this time. So, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. But, now that I’ve talked to a lot of you guys, and read a lot of reviews, and played it to a lot of my friends, I realized that, ‘Alright! We did something that it’s not just us that like it’. It actually feels really good. I’m incredibly proud of the album So, I’m really looking forward to hearing what the audience feels. We’re really excited and we’ve started rehearsing a lot of the new material, as well, for the upcoming tour. So, that’s been really cool, as well.

 

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Rock Overdose: That’s exactly what I was about to ask you right now. I was going to ask you about the feedback from the fans so far.

 

Mikael Stanne: I mean, I’ve been reading all those comments on YouTube, and Facebook, and Blabbermouth, and all those usual channels… The general consensus seems to be that we’ve done something right, so I’m really happy about that. I guess we’ve been fortunate enough to release a lot of well-received albums in the past and people seem to be into our stuff. We don’t really have to worry that much what the audience will think, but I guess you’re still always excited and a little bit nervous about it.

 

Rock Overdose: I think Anders stated one or two years ago that this album will surprise a lot of listeners. What should the fans expect – those that haven’t listened to the album so far?

 

Mikael Stanne:: I don’t know, it’s hard for me to say. You know, being so close to it. I think… I guess what the difference is for me is that it’s more impactful, in a way. We worked hard to make sure that every song had a certain impact – emotional, melodic… Something that kind of strikes you when you listen to it. So, when we were writing, we always had that in mind. Like, ‘What’s the core of the song?’, ‘What’s the idea behind it?’, ‘What is the purpose of this song?’... And that was kind of hard to find sometimes, you know. But I think it’s very straightforward. I think there’s an urgency to the songs. It really goes toward the core of the song immediately. Immediately, you’re like, ‘Ok, this is the main melody, these are the riffs, this is the heaviness, this is the pace, this is the speed’. That kind of thing... So, we’re kinda anxious and interested in a streamline, the forward line, so that the impact of the song is kind of immediate. That was the challenge, as well, because it’s so easy to write songs that just go on forever and, um, you can fill it with as many riffs as you like. But it’s like, maybe that’s not the way to write a good song. You can write some cool riffs, but that’s not the point, so... I guess you gotta try to refine the songwriting in a way, just to make sure that all these songs have some emotional impact, something that was different between each song. Because, I guess, it is easy to just put a bunch of some cool melodies together and call it a song, but we wanted something more than that. You know?

 

Rock Overdose: I see. In my opinion, this album is like the old Dark Tranquillity stuff, maybe a return to the roots. Do you agree?

 

Mikael Stanne: I don’t know what that means… Yes, definitely. We were kinda laughing at this… When we started out this album, when we started writing it, we told ourselves, ‘Let’s make this album as far away from the normal, classic, whatever, Dark Tranquillity stuff as humanly possible’. So, that was the starting point. But, of course, that never happens, because we’ve grown up in this band. We’ve become adults writing music for this band. Obviously, it’s extremely hard to get away from yourself, so to speak. But if we try at least to take our music as far as we possibly can, maybe – at least in our minds – it will feel different. We will have a different emotional connection to it and, hopefully, we will have some ideas that may be different from what we’ve done in the past. Of course, all the tropes and all the ingredients are there, you know: it’s melodic, it’s intense, it’s aggressive, it’s melodic and melancholy, and all those things, of course. Maybe it’s a more distilled version of that. It’s more kinda condensed, you get everything in a song, almost, sometimes. So, maybe that is true. But I don’t know about going back to the roots. We have a few roots when it comes to our catalogue. Maybe… People have called it a successor to “Projector”, in a way. Someone said it’s closer to “Character”. I don’t know…

 

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Rock Overdose: I don’t know, but I believe it’s gonna be one of my favorite albums of Dark Tranquillity.

 

Mikael Stanne: Cool! I like that, to make a good first impression with it! That’s a good thing!

 

Rock Overdose: Actually, from the first song, I went like, ‘Wow!’.

 

Mikael Stanne: That’s the point, that’s what you want. You want the album to open in a certain way and, hopefully, people will listen through…

 

Rock Overdose: Yeah, and there was a fast opening, which was a surprise, and I said, ‘Wow! This is amazing!’.

 

Mikael Stanne: Cool, man! I’m glad to hear that.

 

Rock Overdose: I believe two years ago you said that the album would be released in 2015. Did you face any difficulties that made you release it now?

 

Mikael Stanne: Yeah, I guess so… We realized that we’re just not ready. We still had more songs to write. We were just not really ready as a band, I think. We were not really prepared. We had all the material. That’s why we were really confident that, when we put all this stuff together, then it would be fun. But the truth of it, I guess, is that, even though we had all this material, we still didn’t really have a direction. We knew we had all the melodies, all the riffs, and all the things, in order to put it together in a way that feels interesting and kinda sparks your creativity and imagination. We had to make sure that the songs had something extra; we just didn’t really know what that was, I guess. So, we just gave it some extra time. We also struggled with stuff like Martin [Henriksson] leaving the band, things like that... I mean, obviously, a lot of things changed and we had to deal with that in our own way as a band. It was only when we let go of that and started anew that we could finish the album. And also, it’s one of the things you discuss with the label and they say, ‘You can either record right now and we can have it out at this point or you record it later. If you miss that, you’ll have to wait’. We were OK, we thought we should wait like two months, to get prepared. I don’t think it would have been a good album had we started recording already in February.

 

 

Rock Overdose: So, do you plan to tour to promote this album?

 

Mikael Stanne:: [Laughs] Like crazy, actually.

 

Rock Overdose: Is Greece included in your touring plans?

 

Mikael Stanne:: Of course! Right now, I don’t really have any of the dates. I’m not sure… I know it’s being planned right now and they’re working on it. It will definitely happen. It’s either gonna be the beginning of next year – like January or February – or it will happen during the summer – or after that... That’s all I know right now… We’re starting out in North America in two weeks, as the album comes out there. And then, we do a long tour in March, April and May, and then summer festivals, another European tour, another US tour. It’s gonna be a full schedule situation. We always have a fantastic time in Greece and we love going there, so that will definitely happen.

 

Rock Overdose: What are your memories of your last shows here in Greece? I think it was two years ago…

 

Mikael Stanne: Yeah, two years ago, and I think we only did the one show in Athens, right?

 

Rock Overdose: And one more in Thessaloniki.

 

Dark Tranquillity: Oh yeah, absolutely right! That was a cool club, too. I remember… The Athens show was so special, because we met one of the biggest magazines from Sweden. We were doing a whole travel, kind-of exposé, and we also had this girl from this magazine who never really understood anything about heavy metal, or metal culture and music. And she comes down to Athens and we hang out there the day before the show, just hanging out... It was like we almost directed the whole thing or wrote the script for the night. Because, no matter where we went, we ran into fans; crazy, super-passionate, so devoted fans. She wrote this amazing story about how blown away she was by the intensity and the passion of the Greek audience, and how incredibly devoted [they were]… [She was] mindblown…

 

Rock Overdose: We really love you here.

 

Mikael Stanne: Yeah, of course, we can tell. And we tried to tell her before we left for the show. ‘You know, this is gonna be awesome. The Greek audience is one of the best things in the world, you’ll love it’. And she was like, ‘Alright! Are they any different from anywhere else?’. And I was like, ‘Well, where have you seen metal shows?’, and she was like, ‘Nowhere’. And we said, ‘OK… Well, I guess you’d still be surprised’. And, sure enough, she was. And it was really great because that article was read by hundreds of thousands of people here in Sweden. I still get questions about it from my friends. They’re like, ‘Sh*t! Is Greece that great?’, and I’m like, ‘Yeah!’. [Laughs] That’s the thing I still remember so fondly about it. It kinda became a memory that so many people know about. Even friends from school that really don’t care about the music, friends who read that magazine and go like, ‘Wow! Greece must be amazing!’. Yeah, it is! That was fun, it was a fantastic show and I had a fantastic time. And I realized that, yeah, when it comes to economic terms, you guys struggle a bit… And I realized it was hard to put on a show and stuff like that from talking to our booking agent down there. That’s always a problem. But it turns out it doesn’t really matter, because people come in crowds. It’s awesome!

 

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Rock Overdose: Is it difficult for a band that has existed for almost thirty years and released 11 albums to get inspiration so as to create new and good stuff?

 

Mikael Stanne: Yeah! [Laughs] We like to keep it up and, of course, this is what we do. We’re really sh**ty at anything else. So, it’s just a matter of keeping doing it and, hopefully, people still appreciate what we do. It’s a privilege, for sure.

 

Rock Overdose: You have influenced many bands, especially the Swedish melodic death ones, and the whole melodic death genre. So, how do you feel you’ve played this role and that you’re one of the founders of melodic death metal?

 

Mikael Stanne: I don’t know how to feel about that, to be honest. I mean, of course, we’re really proud that we started something with this band and got the attention of people. That, obviously, it was not just something super weird that no one cared about than it was initially thought. Because, when we released the first demo, “Trial Of Life Decayed” (1991), the EP “A Moonclad Reflection” (1992) and “Skydancer” (1993) came out, a lot of the people we talked to and the reactions we got were that, ‘Hey, what’s going on? Like, I thought you guys were playing death metal. What going on here? There’s, you know, clean vocals, there’s great guitars, keyboards, female vocals, that kind of stuff… What’s going on?’. And we were like, ‘Oh, you know, this is what we do. I know it’s melodic, but it’s death nevertheless’. You know, that kind of thing… And I guess, because we got this kind of mixed reaction… It was not just negative, it was more like, ‘Hey, I kinda like it, but I don’t know. Is this really cool? And, for us, that kinda reinforced our belief that we were onto something cool, coz everyone said, ‘Oh, this very original’, ‘This is different’, ‘I’ve never heard anything like that’. And that was our intention all along, to make music that we felt no one else was doing. And we didn’t want to be just another death metal band with lyrics about horror movies or anything like that. Because, back then, in the early ‘90s, at least it seemed to us that that’s what most of the music we were hearing was about. To us, it didn’t really have any interesting lyrics, the kind of melodies that we wanted… We went to other bands for that... Like, I went to power metal and speed metal bands for the melody. I went to thrash metal and some other music to hear lyrics that I was interested in. I went to thrash bands to hear speed and intensity and to death metal for technicality. You know, that kind of stuff. We were just taking what we considered the best parts of the bands that we loved and, hopefully, kind of tried to pull some of that as inspiration for our music.

 

Rock Overdose: You have mentioned Depeche Mode as an influence for the band. How did they influence you?

 

Mikael Stanne: In so many ways. I think that when I grew up and I was in my early teens – from 12 to 14, 15 –, it was when they were huge. And, in my school, where Niklas [Sundin], Martin and I went, it was either you were into metal or synth music, you know. And the metal guys beat up the synth guys, and a vice versa kind of thing… There was always a battle, a war between the two. And it was difficult for me, because I had kinda grown up – when I was 10, 11, 12 years old – listening to Depeche Mode and bands like that I really loved. But then I discovered metal through Iron Maiden, Helloween and bands like that. And I thought I still loved this kind of melancholy synth music. Something that I always loved to. It was kind of difficult there for a while, being on both sides of the fence. But for me, it’s something that I’ve always loved. It’s amazing stuff that’s always been a big influence to our music, like not only vocally, but when it comes to melodies… Obviously, Martin Brändström is a huge fan of a lot of this keyboard stuff, and a lot of these sounds and textures and stuff that comes from his upbringing, which is basically those kind of bands, the same that I grew up with. So, when we incorporate that into our music all of our childhood memories, all of our influences come back to life, in a way. I like that.

 

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Rock Overdose: You have also mentioned as an influence the Greek band Varathron, right?

 

Mikael Stanne: Oh yeah! For us, it was always amazing to hear – especially early on, we’re talking ‘90s now – to find obscure music, music that no one else was listening to. There was always a challenge. One of the things that I remember most about those years was [me] trying to find extreme cool music. And hearing Varathron for the first time was mind-blowing to us. Here’s his Greek metal band that sounds kind of like the bands that hear from Norway, but it’s still different and has this totally unique atmosphere and vibe, you know. It was so cool and… Especially for me and Niklas, it was one of the bands that really influenced us in many ways when we were just starting out, trying to learn guitar, trying to write songs for the band, you know.

 

Rock Overdose: Cool! So, do you like other Greek metal bands? Do you know any other?

 

Mikael Stanne: Oh, I like Nightfall… You put on the spot… I should be able to count, like, fifteen bands. I mean, I love Rotting Christ, I really do... Nightrage, even though most of them are Swedes… Yeah, but I suppose there’s other bands I should come up with on the spot.

 

Rock Overdose: Yeah, well bands like Varathron are not so well-known here in Greece. They are well-known mostly abroad.

 

Mikael Stanne:Oh yeah, it’s true. That’s always for me… Ever since I was a kid, it was interesting to find bands that no one else was into. There’s something about that, when you just go like, ‘Oh, you haven’t heard this band, have you?’, and you talk to your friends like, ‘What? You don’t? You haven’t heard this? Man, you must’. And then you start playing music and you’re trying to convince that this is the best in the world.

 

Rock Overdose: Yeah, it’s really cool!

 

Mikael Stanne: I love that! It’s a great feeling to find music that no one else can listen to and no one else knows. Of course, it’s impossible now, when everyone has access to all the bands all the time. It used to be…

 

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Rock Overdose: I think that we have access to all the bands, but we don’t listen to music now.

 

Mikael Stanne: That’s true…

 

Rock Overdose: I’m twenty years old and few kids buy CDs and this stuff now. We all download music, so the magic of music has been lost.

 

Mikael Stanne: Yes, unfortunately. I think so too, but I think… That magic that I grew up with… It doesn’t take away from the fact that people still listen to music. It’s just a different way, obviously. As much as I… I don’t want people to listen to our music, at least in that way. I don’t want them to just listen to one song at a time. I still love that… The sequence of the songs that you make for your album is something to be treasured. And when I listen to an album, I wanna hear it from the start to finish. I wanna hear what the band thought when they put that sequence together. Like, how an album starts, how it kinda goes through a low, where that ballad comes in, that kind of stuff, and what powerful song ends the album… It’s always really interesting, something that means a lot to me. You know? Because I remember my favorite songs and I know the order of the songs so well, just because I’ve always listened to them in the same way. As it was meant to be heard… You know? And that thing… Still, of course, metal is still a category, a genre for albums, you know. In my dream, people go out and buy our deluxe edition CD, you know, that has that big-ass booklet with tons of pictures and all the lyrics, and stuff like that. [They’ll] sit back, absorb Niklas’ artwork, read the lyrics and listen to the album through fantastic speakers. That’s my dream for all of our fans, that they do that. But, of course, that’s not the reality, but, you know, you can dream…

 

Rock Overdose: Well, thank you so much for this interview! It was a great honor for me. Would you like to close this interview with a message to all your Greek fans?

 

Mikael Stanne: It’s just a honor, a pleasure and a privilege, of course, to be able to do this and to still have the support of the awesome Greek crowd. We can’t wait to see you guys again! Learn all the lyrics to our new songs and I’ll see you in the beginning of next year!

 

 

 

 

For the Rock Overdose Webzine,

Interview: Konstantinos Sotirelis

Tapescript: Stergios Gkoutsidis

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