I just wanted to start off and say thank you so much for taking some time to do this interview with me. I'm a really big fan of you guys. I saw you last time you were in Calgary back in 2016 on the Popestar Tour. I've never been to a show like that or one, to be perfectly honest, I didn't really know who you guys were, but I walked away as a fan. So much so that I went out and like literally bought all of Ghost's discography on vinyl pretty much the next week. So thank you for coming back to Calgary as well. How's the tour been going so far?

Really well, really well. This tour has had a special purpose in the sense that over the years I've always been very annoyed by the fact that depending on the venues, that has meant that some cities got a big show and some cities did not get one. That is just a logical way that, you know, it just ends up that way because of fans. It takes time to grow into a band that can sort of deliver the same production to everyone. So the main purpose of this tour that we're on right now has been everyone, wherever you are, gets the same show regardless of your so-called market, whatever. If you're a big city, metropolitan hub, or if you are a smaller city in the middle of nowhere.

So with that in mind, this tour has been phenomenal because so far with the odd exception of maybe a trim height, which sort of dictates how much of the backdrop you see. Everything else has been very fluent and very equal, which is great. I remember just looking back at the Popestar tour and at the beginning of the Pale Tour Named Death when we were playing theaters. Theaters have a tendency to be very comfy - they're very nice and very old and historical, many of them at least. But you can't do pyro, you can't do bombs, you cannot do confetti. Oh, the curtain doesn't work, we also have fucking Lion King going this weekend, so you have to be mindful of all their sets and it's like "uuuugh!". So you have 2000 people coming that expect them to see the same thing as the bigger city down the road got yesterday. Because we're a production-oriented band, that's very, very, very irritating.

I know you guys just released two new songs and they're very 1960s, including the music video for "Kiss The Go-Goat”. How did those songs kind of come to be, or I guess decide to resurface now because I did read you say they were released 50 years ago… technically.

Yeah, so, therefore, I can't answer that. I don't know - I'm 38. [laughs]

Fair enough. As you said, you're a very visual band. How much control do you have over the visuals - from the production to the music videos, to the webisodes?

I have a hundred percent control, but you know, you're always at the hands of whoever is sort of executing, so there's always some involuntary wiggle room that I have to have in order to accept whatever we end up with. Sometimes it gets really, really good and sometimes, it's not really according to what I specified. But you know, it's an organic thing. I mean, most things are on my initiative, which is nice, but you know, there's always a sort of a little interim. I mean, obviously I don't sit down and draw every t-shirt design that we have, of course not. I'm not a tailor so I cannot sew clothes, but they're done according to spec, demands, and wishes.

You have these personas - this tour, it's Cardinal Copia. When you're writing, is it kind of like you sit down and you write as yourself Tobias and the persona is just more for the live show and it's like a vessel to deliver the songs, or is there any of the persona that kind of shines through in the songwriting process?

No, it does not. Many songs are written with a live show in mind of course as most bands do. As soon as you are a touring band and especially if you start playing bigger places, you will start adapting your writing to the forum that you're playing. Because if you're playing grindcore and for some reason, you start playing really, really, really big places, you will start to slow down because it just sounds like an absolute train wreck if you're writing that for a bigger room than a basement. So you will start changing because it's not pleasant. That's why most bands, especially heavy metal bands that sort of started in one way - super sped up and sort of intricate - I'm talking about Maiden, Metallica, bands like that, that sort of started more proggy and more thrashing in a way, end up playing slower because they play big places.

And that's why you tend to write what you know will feel good for the crowd and yourself. It's kind of like having an intimate relationship with someone. You start adapting to whatever the other person and you like, right, and therefore you find the vibe. So I do that [in] writing songs now where I'm trying to write songs that we don't have. In the back of my mind, I know that "well, fuck, we should really have a song like this - we should have more of this, we should have more like that. This song does not work, so I definitely don't want to play that. I definitely don't want to have another one of those because we don't need it." So, therefore, you write songs to work on a live stage. Essentially, the premise is that the songs are interpreted by the band and also our character that are our main focal points of each tour or each tour cycle Papa Emertius I, II, III, Cardinal and beyond, they're just there executing. It's never been the point. I mean, Cardinal Copia hasn't written a tune in his life and couldn't to save his life.