

Talviyö



The upcoming tour



Photo by Photo by Jaakko Manninen



Photo by Photo by Jaakko Manninen

TK: Doing good, sitting in my small cabin here in my yard, staring at the fire. Had a busy day, working in the garden and working here, doing stuff to prepare the house and yard for the coming of autumn.TK: That would be nice, yes.TK: *laughs* Yes, that would be great. Anyway, talking about the music serves the purpose more.TK: It's actually the first time for today.TK: Well, it's our tenth album. I think stylistically we are not really drifting so far from the two previous albums,and, soundwise it's slightly different. We went a bit more into the organic live direction.TK: It's a nightmare, slowly getting there anyways, way more than one hundred songs to choose from. And of course there's always a lot of songs that the crowd wants to hear and there are a lot of songs that we would like to play just to keep the setlist interesting for ourselves and they're fun to do. We always find a different setlist, we have a lot of songs that are sort of amassed a frame of the setlist, so it's honestly notdifficult, just try to keep it fresh and play different songs, at least to a certain degree, each time we come to, let's say North America for example. At some point we had this problem that we always changed the setlist for the next continent. We played a certain setlist in Europe and changed it for North America and then came back to Europe and changed it back to the same that it was earlier, realizing that we didn't actually change anything. *laughs* Henrik, our keyboard player, is on the map right now with these kind of things, checking what we played the last time so it wouldn't be a problem anymore.TK: Yeah, the acoustic thing it was a lot of fun to do and we went through a lot of trouble to find a decent set, but not just take the obvious acoustic songs, not all ballads, we took some faster songs and some surprising songs as well, because the music that I've been writing for twenty years is all melodic so basically any of the songs translate well into an acoustic environment. It's a matter of rearranging it, but also sometimes a little recomposing, writing different kinds of solo parts and so on. It was a fantastic tour, a lot of fun. I hope to do it again.TK: Yes, for a change! *laughs* You know, I do love what we do with Sonata Arctica the normal way, but it's really refreshing. And as a singer, I do enjoy the acoustic things more. You don't have to wear your ear plugs, it's not as loud and you can hear everything, and I can use my vocal style in a much more versatile way, paint things with my singing instead of just screaming and howling in the way that I do in a normal Sonata Arctica show.TK: Hell yeah, thank God.TK: That was sort of the starting point for the whole acoustic adventure tour, because it was such a fun thing to do, and people seemed to love it. We just took it a little bit further.TK: Yes, most of the songs. I think all of them actually.TK: The original version of "Shy" was actually a rock song, it sounded a lot likeTK: *laughs* I'm really happy that I chose to go that direction with the actual final version of it. But it was akind of song in a good way in my opinion.TK: Just about any slower ballad type song, "On The Faultline", I would love to play that live a lot more than we have done so far, just to mention one. *silence*TK: "The Misery", that's one song as well, but for vocals it's pretty goddamn high. We haven't done that in the longest time, maybe we should take it back at some point.TK: *laughs* We'll see.TK: Well, yeah, but I'm really reluctant to talk about it because if I start talking about it...TK: Yeah, a schedule and all that. I wanna get everything ready before deciding which way I wanna release it out there, so it's something that probably, once I have all the songs ready, I will start recording, because I have way more than one full album of material that is absolutely not gonna be on any Sonata Arctica album ever.TK: Yes.TK: Yeah, I'm really more from the rock side of things instead of metal. I started listening to metal when I was like twenty-three years old, so I was sort of a late bloomer in that sense. I was listening to, it was pretty much the hardest stuff that I was listening to. I was listening to pop music and rock music but not metal. It's reflected in my songwriting even these days. Maybe that's one of the things that make Sonata Arctica stand out a little bit from the normal metal bands out there, and we're not the most metal band out there and we never will be. We sort of function as a gateway or a step towards metal music for a lot of people that have just been listening to pop music and find metal music through some of Sonata Arctica 's songs and start searching for more and more songs in that style. They fall in love with Sonata Arctica and then they start falling in love with Iron Maiden and whatever and then start listening to black metal or something. *laughs* You never know, but it's opening doors.TK: Yes!TK: Sort of, yeah. Back when I didn't even have a band. Most songs were sort of like Eurodance kind of thing. *laughs*TK: Sort of, yeah, that was the stuff that we were listening to in the car with it going *club noises* *laughs* when I was a kid.TK: That one, yes.TK: It's nice to flirt around with things that you shouldn't flirt with.TK: *laughs* Well, yeah, thanks!TK: Yes, that's correct.TK: Well, let's say that I changed my songwriting style with, that was pretty much what people consider sort of a commercial suicide, and after that album I've been writing music that I really want to write. Of course, to a certain extent you need to write songs that are somewhat suitable, and I realized that if I went allwith my songwriting it would definitely kill Sonata Arctica and we would no longer be able to do this thing as a living anymore, I think. So, to a certain extent, but I pretty much get to do what I want with Sonata Arctica as it is. And of course put all the tooor too weird whatever into the solo project.TK: Pretty much whatever I feel like but I tried to make everything sound somehow connected. You can realize that it's one album instead of a collection of weird songs. And they're not that weird, they're melodic and it's going to be a fantastic thing.TK: *laughs* No, no, they are weird enough, I can tell you that.TK: I think I might even go incognito with this project and not tell anybody that it's me.TK: It might be that I'm not even singing on that album myself, so it's just something like if you wanna have fun and relax you should not connect any of the things that you do when you are actually working to it, so if I want to make the side project more like a hobby then I should find other people to do the stuff that I normally do. Just concentrate on songwriting and maybe play keyboards and do backing vocals and whatever.TK: Yes, I did that, and on other albums, also on the latest a little bit here and there.TK: Yeah, absolutely. *laughs*TK: *desperately tries to cover it up* No, no, I did not, yet.TK: Yes, of course I would, that's correct. *laughs*TK: Yes.TK: Yes, of course, we were really into it and it was the best thing ever. But then I started drifting away and then that was it. I think already with the second album we went in a direction that was...TK: Yes. More like it.TK: Oh, yes! It's one of those things. You know, a dream.TK: I don't know. I think we might sound pretty much the same as we do these days. Only that we wouldn't have any of those power metal things there anymore, any residue, from some tracks to entire albums would be missing.TK: No. But if I were to fall in love with some music style that was popular at the time it would've been reggae.TK: It would probably still sound like Sonata Arctica , but it would be a really crappy reggae album.TK: You never know.TK: Currently still, I'm not sure how much in the future that trend will go on, but anyway the reason behind it is that it's cheaper for a Japanese fan to order the European or American version of the album and get it delivered on their door than to buy it from their local music shop just downstairs. That's why you need to have some extra bonus, whatever material there, songs are the most natural thing obviously. They even demand it on the contract. So that's the reason, the albums are ridiculously priced, or at least they were, I'm not sure how accurate that is anymore.TK: Yes, but sometimes good things come out of it as well, it forces the band to write one more song as a bonus track, like in our case the song "I Have A Right", which would not exist had I not had this need to write an extra bonus song for Japan, and it just turned out really relaxed and fun and it was the first single we got from thealbum. So that's the good side there, it forces bands to extend themselves a little further.TK: Yeah, but these days it's ridiculous to even go there, because everyone can listen to any song online. It's just one song and I have no problem if people buy the European or American version of the album and then go and listen to the song online for free. Doesn't make any difference for me basically.TK: Well, yes. But of course, if you really really wanna go all the way you can order the export version of the album from Japan. Or even better if you want to listen to the extra song you can stream it somewhere some official way, so that everybody gets what's coming to them.TK: Fuck no! *laughs* It's really not, but it's much better than downloading an illegal copy. Streaming is probably the way that it's gonna be in the future, but the way they are compensating the artists currently is stupid.TK: Yeah, it's not working. I think we're just starting the whole process of turning into digital distribution via streaming, but there have been talks that streaming is not environmentally sustainable, because you are spending a lot of data every time you stream each song, so it's consuming more electricity so it's polluting the environment and blah blah blah [ relevant article ], I don't know where it will eventually go, but I think the best way of consuming the music electronically and digitally is to buy the actual copy of the song somewhere from a service like iTunes, and then download it once and listen to it however.TK: *laughs* Yeah, obviously. But that's why people have radios. And this is the difficult conversation to have. From 10$ per month, the artists aren't getting their share. That's the problem here, unfortunately.TK: Of course, everybody should support the kind of music they love, and just streaming your favorite band is not the right way to go, that much I know. It doesn't do much.TK: *laughs* We will do our best. Thank you very much.