My aunt in England called to tell me that the Download festival was happening just down the street from her. Sigh. I love Huntsville, but the lack of live shows I want to see is killing me. I've been reading great reviews of HIM's performance which is wonderful for this fan. Poor substitute, but I found this NME interview on You Tube from Download. About 1:50 is fantastic. -K
Showing posts with label Villevalo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Villevalo. Show all posts
Monday, June 16, 2008
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
HIM in St. Louis - October 26, 2007
It might have been cold and wet on the streets of St. Louis last Friday night, but no one inside The Pageant would have known it. Fans of Finnish superstars HIM were too filled with anticipation to notice as they waited for their cherished musicians to take the stage. At just past 9:00 PM, the houselights dimmed, the stage filled with smoke and the collective screams filled the venue as one by one the band members took their places and to their instruments, adding layer upon layer of music. The audience did not have to wait long for charismatic frontman Ville Valo to appear and give them exactly what they wanted.
The band delivered a 16 song set that included a mixture of their harder tracks, opening with Passion's Killing Floor from latest release Venus Doom (Sire). Highlights include Dark Light's Vampire Heart with a great breakdown of harmony, a passionate delivery of It's All Tears (Drown in this Love) from their first album (incidentally released 10 years ago this November), the track that made them a hit in Europe back in 2000, Join Me In Death, the ambitious yet impressive Sleepwalking Past Hope, and the finale of beloved track Funeral of Hearts off Love Metal. There was no encore.
Setlist:
Passion's Killing Floor
Wings of a Butterfly
Buried Alive By Love
Wicked Game
The Kiss of Dawn
Vampire Heart
Poison Girl
Dead Lover's Lane
Join Me In Death
It's All Tears (Drown In This Love)
Sleepwalking Past Hope
Killing Loneliness
Soul On Fire
Bleed Well
Right Here In My Arms
Funeral Of Hearts
HIM frontman Ville Valo sported skinny jeans and a Black Sabbath t-shirt under a dapper blazer. The ubiquitous beer of years past was replaced with bottled water and Red Bull, which he swigged throughout the performance. His most beloved prop, the ever-present Marlboro Light, was in hand, but despite this Ville's voice was rich and bold. As usual, Ville commanded his audience with the subtlest of gestures, a characteristic that makes this band best experienced, in my opinion, in close proximity.
Dear reader, if you are a stranger to HIM's style of music you should imagine arctic folklore, heartbreaking melodies, and wicked tales of love and death. Perhaps one can describe it as Lynchian thematics married with ambient melodies. It's five-star music that weaves a tapestry of goth, rock and melancholic-catchy pop. However I describe it here, it's a taste that should continue to catch on in this country. Just open your arms and drown it its love. -K
To see more pictures go to our buzznet site and enter the HIM gallery!
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Shelter from the Rain: Judakris' Exclusive Interview with Ville Valo and Mige Paananen from HIM.
Since October 18, 2007, HIM have been on tour supporting their latest release of Venus Doom. It is now October 26 and the band is in St. Louis to perform at the Pageant. On this cold and rainy night, lead singer Ville Valo and bassist Mikko (Mige) Paananen offer Judakris a bit of shelter inside their tourbus for an exclusive interview.
As my friend A and I enter the bus, we are immediately impressed with the amount of Halloween decorations that take up every inch of the place. Ville and Mige stand up to greet us and offer us refreshments: coffee, water, or beer. As we get situated in the lounge area A makes an observation about the amount of yellow crime tape. As it turns out, the tape is real and not exactly a planned acquisition. According to Ville, after their recent performance in Washington D.C. someone got shot about 6 feet away causing their bus to become part of the crime scene. The band was not allowed to leave until the investigation was over. Once it was, they drove away with the tape and decided to put it to good use.
We were allotted ten minutes for the interview, and it seemed a shame to have to get serious. I don't even take my sweater jacket off because I am worried about running out of time. But, when it is all said and done, the interview stretches into just over an hour, 15-20 minutes before the band is scheduled to appear onstage. And, it honestly doesn't feel like an interview as much as it does a casual conversation. Ville is intense but both he and Mige are extremely warm and personable and very good listeners. There is not a hint of bravado during the entire conversation. They take pity on an interviewer who is not just a writer, but a fan as well. Looking back, it all could have gone so terribly wrong. It could have, but it didn't.
I have the latest issue of Blender on me, in which a letter to the editor references Ville's comment on marketing HIM dildos (with realistic casting) and states that she would be most interested in Linde's because "he must be packin!" That's where we begin, but during the course of the interview we hit a number of topics including where Ville stands with writing the next James Bond theme song, the things they miss most about home, lessons learned, and of course, Venus Doom.
But, let's cut to the chase.
K: Will we be seeing HIM dildos?
V: No we're not doing that.
K: I'm actually really glad to hear that!
M: You're not curious?
[Laughter]
K: Me? No!
A: She's only saying she's not curious.
V: [Laughter]
K: I could be, though. But, moving right along. One of the latest rumors on the web was that you had been approached by the producers of the James Bond movies to co-write or to write the next theme song for the Casino Royale sequel. Can you confirm this?
V: It's a very flattering idea. Of course it would be great. We grew up with Bond, but I've never even met those people. It's just a rumor. It's good to do little projects like that rather than the same old same old.
K: Like Synkkien Laulujen Maa? [I murder this pronunciation and am quickly corrected by Ville] I have this cd and it is beautiful. Forgive me for not knowing a lot about Finnish folk music, but is this a good example of that?
V: All the time people are asking, well, wtf is Scandinavian melancholy. To Mige: When I sung that [begins to sing] "kun mina kotoani läksin"... that explains a lot about Finnish folk music. It's not necessarily pathetic, but it's really, really sad. That song is about you leaving your home and the world is treating you really cruelly and you're falling in love and you can't get the girl you want. It's a classic, folklore type of thing. That's the stuff we grew up with as well as Kiss and Black Sabbath. So that's probably where love metal itself came from.
K: On the latest album Venus Doom, the track Song or Suicide, is that in the same vein as what you're talking about with the folksy style? It's acoustic and it reads like a poem. It doesn't have the standard song structure.
V: That was the idea, yeah. It was more like an "intimate". That's because we had a long track (Sleepwalking Past Hope) that precedes it. Like in the 70s they had a lot of that shit happening.
K: Lots of prog.
V: Yeah, well like Led Zeppelin. Or if you listen to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, the tracks will be straightforward Black Sabbath, and then all of a sudden the third track is an acoustic intimate that lasts for five minutes. And not a lot of bands do that nowadays. It was nice to play around and not limit ourselves too much.
K: I feel like as we go farther into the future that everything has to be fast and immediate. Easy and fast pop seems to sell a lot and it's a challenge when you put something with more of an album feel, more complex, longer, etc.
V: True, but there's people that like David Lynch and there are people who love reading romantic poetry and there are people who love Stephen King. [laughs] There's nothing wrong with Stephen King.
M: No, absolutely.
V: But actually if you think of the world of literature, I guess that fiction is going in a good direction with stuff like Kite Runner. Literature seems to be becoming more proggy. The romantic novel structure is fucking dead.
M: Yeah, perhaps music goes in phases as well. People get sick of hearing the same thing. They have iPods with one song from every artist. Maybe our album was a reaction to that.
V: But there is a cool thing about iTunes. Just a couple of months back I set up my own account for the first time. It's strange, you know, if I'm all of a sudden, "what was that great song from A-Ha…The Sun Always Shines on T.V. I WISH I could hear it now." And then just you just 'click' and bring it down. I love that. It's great.
K: [Looking at A] We're obsessed with our iPods.
V: It's good.
K: Growing up in the 80s, I feel like it was all about the single. Same with the 50s or 60s.
V: Well, same with the 40s. The iTunes generation is nothing new. The medium is different, but albums started happening in the 60s. You didn't have long players before the 60s. So, this is nothing new. People want the best, which is their right, rather than spending 20 bucks on an album with only one great song. So, that's reasonable I guess. That's the thing that record labels figured out. Take Paul Anka, who got, like, 2 big hits, and they last four minutes altogether and you could put them on the A and B side of the single that costs 3 bucks. Why won't you sell an album that costs 13 bucks that has filler? Because you make more money out of it - obvious reason. Bands like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, they changed the format. So, an album can be a conceptual piece. As musicians, we are fans as well and we keep downloading one-song wonders [correcting himself to say one-hit wonders], it's obvious that that's going to affect the way we start writing our songs. We get bored of that. So that's the reason probably Venus Doom as a whole is more like an album with more of an album flow. Some songs are longer and there is more mood in the songs, more than we've had before. That's our reaction to the iTunes 'thing,' which we still do embrace.
K: Do you have a problem with filesharing? Bootlegging?
V: Well, bootlegging is a different thing. That's always a sign of a great band: the more bootlegs you have the better, obviously.
K: Besides that you once said that when gay rumors start that that was a sign that you had made it.
V: [Taking a drag] Mmm-hmmm. When it comes to the fact that people are downloading albums for free...the making of Venus Doom took me about two years to write. I gotta live off of something. I can't tour and write at the same time. I can't have a normal day job. To Mige: What was the budget for VD? It cost like 250 K to finish the whole album, with mastering, the cover art work, everything. Where the fuck do we get the money to pay for that if we don't get people to buy the album? But then, let's say there's a reggae artist called -----, who I'm a big fan of, but that stuff was never released on cd. I found a site where I could download the album where someone recorded it from vinyl digitally. I was like "yes!" I'm definitely going to buy the album whenever it comes out on cd, definitely. That's my rule. I don't want to piss on my own leg, you know, not on purpose anyway.
K: Ha, although we've all been there. [Laughter]
V: Haha. I guess my point is that especially with young musicians who download a lot of shit for free - what they're doing there is taking money off from the record label that one day might be signing them. But the label is lacking the money so they sign the band who downloaded the stuff for free.
K: It's a vicious cycle.
V: It can be vicious and at the same time challenging. And it's great that there is through Myspace and whatever there's a possibility for bands from little tiny countries such as Finland to be heard internationally. Wherever. Whenever. That's great. I've been downloading documentaries [on this tour]. You know, watching documentaries on Alistair Crowley that were aired on BBC4 back in '92. It's never been released on dvd or anything like that. In that sense you can get a lot of material that was impossible before. Back in the day you had to write letters to people who had copied VHS to get some rare material not available anywhere else. Like bootlegs. To Mige: Like old Bad Brains gigs from fucking Munich from the year '83. Actually, Berlin, '84.
M: It's just another moral dilemma, I suppose. People actually probably don't realize that this is really a moral dilemma. It's just something that everybody does and everybody thinks is ok. [Joking] Later on you find that musicians have been dying of hunger.
K: You think about kids from working class families who don't have the money to spend on albums. They aren't thinking about that for sure.
V: But, I was the same, man. My dad was a taxi driver as a kid and my mother worked for the city of Helsinki. They didn't have shitloads of money. I had to save for a long time just to get my first, like, Kiss album. It was exactly the same thing. What we did back in the day was people would record a couple of tracks for you and if you liked Twisted Sister more than W.A.S.P. I would go into the shop and buy the TS album. They were like demos or promotional tools that allowed you to listen to some of the stuff when you didn't have the money to buy everything.
K: When I was in high school, I can remember listening to that very kind of thing. On one side it was Faster Pussycat and on the other it was Guns N Roses. GNR won. Mige, going back to your comment about musical phases or cycles, there are always bands out there who critics hail as having saved rock n roll. Is that overused?
V: I guess the whole thing means that somebody uses old parts in an innovative way.
K: Like a revival.
V: It's kind of like a reminder of why the whole thing started in the first place. At the end of the day, nowadays it seems like the savior of rock n roll is Iggy Pop and the Stooges. You see him live and you think "oh my god, that's what it's all about." Fucking sweat and blood, etc. It doesn't necessarily have to be a new band doing it.
M: It is just something that brings attention to the start of rock n roll.
V: I don't know who's really big at this moment. Nobody's like, super big that may be new. Something that happened to me musically was to fall in love with a band called Interpol. I didn't know that they are not selling a lot of copies.
K: In middle America, no. But on the coast, especially the east, they are more popular.
V: It's all about media. A lot of media is based on the east and west coast, so that's what we get in Europe. Also, acts like Marilyn Manson, he is or actually he used to be hugely popular. Or an act like Eminem. He makes a big budget video and comes to Hamburg and plays to 2,500 people. It's kind of weird to have an illusion that the media creates. But you think that somebody is bigger than life and they aren't necessarily.
M: It's a hype thing, you know.
K: [My ten minutes have come and gone] Is it time?
V: No, no, we've got plenty of time.
K: [Continues] Recently I finished reading Clapton: The Autobiography and in it he says that fly-fishing is the hobby that takes him away from the chaos. What do you guys do to retreat.
V: For me, I have actually been thinking about things I would like to do. I guess, for example, now I'd like to be back home playing acoustic guitar and writing some new songs. That's always a new step for me. You kind of like find yourself with a character you don't know. All the information you've been collecting into your subconscious comes out. In my case it comes through music and I find new aspects and new ways of looking at things, looking at yourself, and your friends through music. So, I consider being on tour, I'm like a sponge in a way. You see so many cities, meet so many people, uh, watch a lot of movies maybe, read a lot of books and get that information and then when you go back home you kind of decompress. All the information starts flowing around, hopefully the good information through the acoustic guitar. That's kind of like what I'm looking for now so I guess my big hobby is writing music.
K: Mige, what about you?
M: I have been wondering actually.
K: Well, you have a family at home which I'm sure takes up all of your free time anyway!
M: Yeah, I guess hobby would not be a good word for that, though to some people I suppose it would be! I don't have a hobby and it's something that is worrying me.
V: He's a thinker, he thinks a lot. He's like a problem solver. [Likening to life] Like mathematical problems with varying results. There's a lot of things in life where A you don't wanna and don't have to and B you can't solve.
M: But you must underline that you try.
V: You also want to do a lot of things but you don't get the chance. [Like a mom talking about a son] He loves gardening.
M: Yeah, I like gardening.
K: I heard you were a gardener in a past life.
M: Yes. In a sense I'm half the man I used to be.
K: Oh now we're quoting Stone Temple Pilots.
M: Actually, it's not that I miss having a hobby. But I keep hearing that people need hobbies.
V: But everyone does have a hobby in one way.
M: Well, I have millions of ways to spend my time.
K: Hobbies develop naturally.
V: Watching T.V. is a hobby! On tour you never get the time to concentrate on a movie or whatever. You're on tour for months and months. So you go back home to do nothing. Um, fart, cook - for yourself, obviously! haha But, finally just getting to watch a movie. That's one way of decompressing. Mine is for now, I stopped drinking so I'm not hanging in bars so what I'm doing is put my house in order. I'm still unpacking my boxes and I moved there like, a year and a half ago. So, basically my hobby is setting my place up to be the perfect place for me to play my acoustic guitar!
K: Speaking of your house... in the VD cd liner notes
V: Booklet.
K: ...booklet, there is a picture of an owl in a window.
V: That's my window sill.
K: A little menacing isn't it?
V: A little? haha We started recording VD and I had a really bad time, nearly a nervous breakdown, I woke up one morning hearing the voice of an owl. I had never seen a live owl before. Well, in the zoo, but never like this. I woke up hearing it and I said "what the fuck is that? Am I hearing voices now?" because I live in the city and we have, like, four owls. And ornithologists know EXACTLY where THEY are at, you know. That particular owl came back twice after that. I borrowed a digital camera from my producer Tim Palmer and left it on the window sill in case I had the chance to see it. We were still partying one morning at 7 AM and he came back and I shot the picture. And he has never been back. This was strange because he wasn't scared of anything, like people moving in the halls or knocking on the window or anything.
K: Ok, switching gears. What's the hardest thing about touring in America?
V: [Thinks] The carpeting. And, uh, all the pillows are filled with feathers.
K: [Laughs and looks knowingly at A.]
A: You know, I have this thing I travel a lot with my job, and it's like, every time you have to ask for the synthetic kind. Good to see someone else has the same issue!
V: That comes from living in a bus, there's not a lot of carpeting because a lot of us guys we smoke and then we have the air conditioning on all the time. That's basically the only thing that makes it hard for me as a singer. Otherwise it's fine. If I was in the rodeo or a drunkard I wouldn't have to worry about it, but I gotta sing every night so...
K: Gotta focus on the job.
V: Hoh, it's not a job- it's a hobby that became a...
K: A labor of love.
V: Yes, a labor of love!
K: What do you miss the most about home?
V: Solitude.
M: No 'me' time.
V: The road is really social, which is great as well. You get to meet a lot of people and play hopefully to a lot of people. It's just when they're a lot of people in a small container like a bus you never have 'me' time. That's the reason we stay in hotels a lot when we're on tour. Would rather stay in a shitty hotel room for a couple of hours in a day just to have your own room, you know, to center yourself, or whatever you call it. That's what I miss.
K: When you are home, do you have a lot of fans stalking you or hanging outside your window?
V: No. Finland is pretty easy. I don't have a doorbell that works so it's pretty hard to get into my fortress. You gotta have my cell phone number or be a friend to get in.
M: Finnish people are more reserved.
K: Not here so much. Stalking is a full on hobby for some!
V: [The Finns] have a respect for privacy. I've had some situations where fans have come up to the door, but normally I don't open up the door you know. It's my home. It's my own private place.
K: Where you're not on the clock.
V: Yep. So, I've been thinking about building a gate. Just imagine if you've got fans that start knocking on the door at 9:00 AM and I've just come off tour and I've got jetlag... even though their intentions might be the best, but you know, I can't be in the mood all the time. It's hard to put a smile on.
M: It is unacceptable.
V: That's the only place in the world I have my own peace. Surrounded by my books and just talk to my mom and my dad and play the acoustic guitar and read books and watch films and bake. That's what I do there.
K: That sounds almost lovely.
V: I may do that two months out of the year. The rest we're working on something so don't [you] think so. If you think about it, an average Joe works and is home five nights in the week. If the family is cool and the wife is a good cook, you know, it's fine to come home and stay in the same spot and then you have your weekends off and maybe have a holiday once a year where you go somewhere else. But we travel all the fucking time. We don't get to see any of our families. At all. And then there's the time difference. I only get maybe two months or a month and a half. Though, I keep on working when I'm home anyway, so... [being home] there's a lot of shit to sort out anyways.
K: How is it when you get home? Hard to decompress?
M: Well, it takes days. I'm not sure that you ever actually decompress. You can always get the most stuff out, but there's the knowledge that there are already future days booked. Because of that I'm not sure if you're able to totally decompress.
V: It's like a normal job when you take that vacation and you know that in a couple of months you have to go back to it.
K: Yes, we are account managers for a software company and we know the feeling when you take vacation.
V: It's not that different. We get things out of this job that you don't if you're staying in one place or whatever. Sometimes you feel that it would be nice to have a job like that rather than have to travel. For example, I'm single, I don't have a relationship, I don't 'need' to go back. You know, I've got my parents, who I care for, and my little bro- that's basically what I like when going back home. So I don't 'mind' touring and the travel. I travel a lot for promotional stuff, but it's been fine.
M: It's an attitude.
V: It's becoming easier now that I'm not hanging out in bars all the time. You really test the limits of your physicality by getting fucked up every night and touring and acting like a brat for months and months on end. Then it's harder to decompress. Even if you have just two weeks off, when you're actually sober you have a lot more time to yourself. The sleep is better. I've spent the last ten years in bars so it's almost like a new drug to be back home watching films I never had time to watch rather than puking in the toilet or waiting to get drunk again.
K: Did you find that changing your lifestyle made some 'friends' disappear?
V: Uh, nah. I can still hang in bars, I just drink coffee instead of beer. It's also been a luxury...the first time you're looking at yourself in the mirror and you're sober, your brain works and you have a lot more energy. I haven't taken that 'me' time for the past 15 years. I've been very social on and off the road. In that sense, the friends haven't gone anywhere, but I decided to not hang out with a lot of people. I've got a lot of friends who are fucking alcoholics. I don't have any problems with that. It's maybe more me making decisions than people running away from me.
K: Switching gears again. Helldone? Is it still on this year?
V: Yes, tickets go on sale next week. It's going to be three days. New Years is on a Monday, so it will be Saturday, Sunday and Monday. On the first day it's going to be, well, we're trying to sort out good A-class Finnish bands so that people can come and see a bit of what's going on in the hard rock music scene. It will be eight bands on the first night so people can get a good vibe of what we have. On the second day we have an international act there, and then a headliner and then we do New Year's Eve.
K: How long have you been doing this?
V: For about 10 or 11 years. We're trying to expand it a bit. Originally it was just a regular gig and then all of sudden we had a lot of people outside of Finland and then northern parts of Finland traveling to Helsinki just to hang with the band. We thought "let's just expand it" over a couple of nights to make it more worthwhile. A lot of people fly in and it's an interesting way to meet people who are outside of your ordinary realm. For example, South America, America, and Japan, even. It's rediculously interesting to see people hooking up with each other and making friends out of it. So, that was the idea of making it a three-day meeting point, kind of festival thing happening. We're still trying to expand it next year to make it bigger, but we're still looking for the right venues. This year it's going to happen in the same club it's always been in, Tavastia.
K: Will Hanoi Rocks be performing?
V: No. They're friends, but I had heard they will be playing a big gig with Motorhead in December and then they will do something right before Helldone in the same venue. You don't want a band who's played the same club the week before. I think that they've booked the gigs already. And, they may be a bit different from what an average HIM fan would like to see. But they are really good live.
K: Not to diminish their popularity, but Hanoi Rocks is most known for the loss of Razzle in the car crash with Vince Neil.
V: They were highly influential, but never sold a lot of records. They are a big cult band, like New York Dolls. They never sold a lot of records and still haven't, but everyone knows them, knows their story, and have fucking Johnny Thunders on their t-shirt.
K: I know all about the New York Dolls, but I could not name one song of theirs.
V: Sam Yaffa from Hanoi Rocks played bass for The New York Dolls.
M: Ah, there you go!
V: Like The Ramones. People know "Hey Ho, Let's Go" and they know the logo.
K: The seal.
V: Yeah. There are a lot of bands like that that changed the scene and were influential for other bands that actually became big.
K: [Since this is past our time, I say] I feel like I've taken up a lot of your time.
V: We can wrap it up or you can stay. We still have plenty of time.
K: Ok. Favorite venue?
M: There are so many. The one I really like is the amphitheater in Athens, Greece. It looks out over the mountains. The venue is nothing special, but the location is wonderful.
V: There are couple of festivals in Switzerland where the mountains are beautiful. When it comes to venues, in America it's great because you have a lot of old theaters.
K: Or old churches like The Tabernacle where you will be playing in November.
V: Yeah, that's a fun place as well.
K: I saw the Go-Gos there once. [Laughter from everyone]. You know, they had their time. We're kids of 80s. Also, when you have gay friends, it may be some unspoken rule that you have to see them at least once.
Tom, Tour Manager: Hey, they had the beat.
V: [Chuckles]
M: We have a lot of gay friends, too.
V: [Sarcastically] No, no. We don't have a clue about that.
V: But, you don't get cool venues like that in Europe. It's mostly old wherehouses or bars, so they're not visually that exciting. It's not like playing the Wilshire in LA or the State Theater in Detroit or yesterday we played the Congress Theatre in Chicago. Ornamentally and the paintings, it's like being in a movie. Sound-wise they are not always the best, but that's something we don't get in Europe.
K: With your music anyway, the ambience really completes the experience.
V: But we play anywhere.
K: I saw you guys twice on Projekt Revolution. And it was fantastic, but…
V: But it lacks the mood.
K: Yes. I prefer being at a HIM show, where it's you headlining. The music, the fans, the lighting, everything. It's great.
V: And obviously it's more rewarding for us as well.
K: How was PR for you?
V: It was a test of patience. When we started out, we always said to our booking agents that we'd rather play lead in a place that holds 25 rather than support someone somewhere bigger. So, we've never been doing the support thing at all. Which I'm really proud of. For example, in England where the record company didn't do shit for us in the beginning, but we still went there and it was great to see it grow in front of your eyes [over time]. So in that sense it was the first time we did tour and weren't the headliner. Also, playing in the sunlight, which I HATE. [Laughter]. Well, not that I hate the sun, but it lacks the mood, like what you were saying. And, we're not like an emo/punk band that can fit 10-15 songs in 40 minutes. We only had time to play 9 tracks. Obviously, we were able to play to lot of people who never heard us before and in that sense it was really good.
K: American fans will gladly take what they can get since you aren't always on tour over here. You performed a lot of the new material at PR. By now, do you have a favorite song(s) off VD to perform?
V: Sleepwalking Past Hope. It's challenging for us, but it's funny because there are so many instrumental parts that I can smoke fucking 3 cigarettes before the song is over. [Laughter] It's good playing Passion's Killing Floor, Dead Lover's Lane, Bleed Well.
K: I'm fond of Bleed Well.
V: That's going to be our next single. Hopefully the radio will start playing it. We'll see what happens. Now the set is taking shape. We'll start changing the set around later, but not now. Now we're fine tuning the new material live. Also, we're going to be shooting a dvd in LA during our gig. We'll see how it will turn out. It may be good, it may be a really fun night. Or it could really suck and we'll hide it somewhere in our archives. Or we'll just burn it [kidding]. But it's good, so now we're just focusing on fine-tuning the material. Trying to get a balance between the old songs and the new songs. We're trying to get the sense of drama when we're doing the set.
K: Do you ever play In Joy and Sorrow anymore?
M: Actually I was just thinking about that song.
V: Not for a long time.
M: It's a fine song. I really like that song.
V: We're trying to do 16 songs in an hour and a half. That's the max of what we can do. U2 are playing big stadiums where you can have fucking mirrorball lemons that you walk out of...
K: or that you can't walk out of!
V: So, really an hour and a half is good. There are a lot of songs like Gone with the Sin, In Joy and Sorrow, Heartache Every Moment- that's a nice track.
K: Fortress of Tears...
V: Fortress of Tears, Sweet Pandemonium- you know there are a lot of tracks that we can't fit in the set. Now we're trying to do a more 'in your face' set, more than ballady. I like it, we used to have so many slow songs in our set, and it was really moody, it was nice, but it is also nice for us to do something different. It's more challenging. Sleepwalking Past Hope is THE moody piece.
K: Join Me in Death has made a lot of my non-rock fan friends take notice. In 2000, this song made you famous in Europe. It's a wonderful song and timeless.
V: Yeah, I'm proud of the song. Hopefully we can write a song as good as that!
K: Oh come on.
V: No, we were lucky with it. It's funny, back in the day when that came out and all the radios loved it so they played it to death which meant that a lot of people who normally would never know us bought the record. Obviously that affected record sales. So, it's not even about it being a good song we just had a lot of luck. Somebody fell in love with the track and then just played it to death.
K: Your Sweet 666 is considered a seminal HIM song.
V: Oh! Playing the new material, you start to see the old stuff in a different light. We've been doing 3-4 tracks from each album, but we're not playing anything off of Deep Shadows and Brilliant Highlights.
K: Why is that?
V: It just doesn't blend that well. It was one of the albums that was so over-produced and a lot of people don't know the album that well. We used to play Lose You Tonight, Pretending, and Heartache Every Moment. I love Salt in Our Wounds and I love Please Don't Let it Go. Those were two songs I wrote on the acoustic guitar and they worked a lot better on the acoustic.
K: Last year I started playing the acoustic and chords from DSBH songs were what I used to practice. Definitely acoustic-friendly. What about You Are the One? Was that a b-side, or?
V: That was an extra track for Deep Shadows in the digi-pak edition.
K: Also a great song.
V: It's good, but it could be better. With that album we ended up in a situation where we started out recording demos and they started sounding very Queens of the Stone Age. And we LOVED it. But then things got over-worked. We ended up between tours working on the album and overproduced the whole thing. We should have stopped and rerecorded everything.
M: We had many producers coming in.
V: We had like five people mixing the album and it was just a big hassle. But it was a great learning experience, and it was something we don't want to do again. I love the songs. They just could have been better. It's also what happens, you know, we had a great successful tour supporting Razorblade Romance. A lot of bands, well, I think it happened to me, really, you know, we found out that we were successful and then when you pick up the guitar again you think it will be very easy thing to write a song. So, I could have worked harder on the songs. I love the melodies on the album, though. [Ville retires to the rest room]
M: They're not as refined as well because we ran out of time and we ran out of patience. We had been working on the same things for a long time. We were going all over trying to compete with producers and in the end we really didn't know where we were standing. But there's so much good stuff there.
K: That album stands out to me. To some degree, as a listener, perhaps as a female listener, I don't see the problems you point out, because it's full of haunting melodies and romance. But, I can understand that as the owning artist you have a totally different perspective. But there are so many people who love that album.
M: There are certainly a lot of good ideas on the album.
V: [Returns from the restroom] What?
K: We're still on DSBH.
V: Oh, it's fucked up. That was the time when we kicked out the keyboardist and we were touring and we got Burton and at the same time the expectations were really high obviously for the record company to have another "hit" album. We had to have a lot of bullshit meetings about what to do and what not to do and obviously we did what we wanted to do, but that's all the hassle you can come flying to your own work. If you've been working on one song for a fucking year you always get more and more ideas to rework and rework. To Mige: We should have just stopped, had a break, and then went into the studio and rerecorded everything. Anyway, it's a bit more wimpy to a certain extent, a bit more emotional. The vibe is more mellow.
K: Probably why I as a woman love that album! [Laughter]
V: It's a moody album and it doesn't demand too much concentration to get into the mood. You know, I'm really proud of it- just should have been more moody, more acoustic, and more melancholy. After that we did Love Metal, which was faster, then Dark Light was a bit mellow, and they all kind of reflect upon each other to have us do something different the next time around. Greatest Lovesongs, Love Metal, and Venus Doom are from one band, while Razorblade Romance, Deep Shadows and Dark Light are from another. There are two sides: one more feminine and the other more masculine.
K: The yin/yang thing.
V: Right.
And with that it is time for the band to prepare for their show. A and I thank the boys for their time, take a couple of pics, and exit the bus. Tom leaves me with this: "K, don't lose the braces!"
We head into the venue with our little photopasses, rush up to the front, and take some live shots. A review of the show with pictures will follow soon. -K
Thanks to Gabrielle, Tom, Mige, and Ville for making this happen. To see more photos of the interview, go to our buzznet site and enter the HIM gallery.
As my friend A and I enter the bus, we are immediately impressed with the amount of Halloween decorations that take up every inch of the place. Ville and Mige stand up to greet us and offer us refreshments: coffee, water, or beer. As we get situated in the lounge area A makes an observation about the amount of yellow crime tape. As it turns out, the tape is real and not exactly a planned acquisition. According to Ville, after their recent performance in Washington D.C. someone got shot about 6 feet away causing their bus to become part of the crime scene. The band was not allowed to leave until the investigation was over. Once it was, they drove away with the tape and decided to put it to good use.
We were allotted ten minutes for the interview, and it seemed a shame to have to get serious. I don't even take my sweater jacket off because I am worried about running out of time. But, when it is all said and done, the interview stretches into just over an hour, 15-20 minutes before the band is scheduled to appear onstage. And, it honestly doesn't feel like an interview as much as it does a casual conversation. Ville is intense but both he and Mige are extremely warm and personable and very good listeners. There is not a hint of bravado during the entire conversation. They take pity on an interviewer who is not just a writer, but a fan as well. Looking back, it all could have gone so terribly wrong. It could have, but it didn't.
I have the latest issue of Blender on me, in which a letter to the editor references Ville's comment on marketing HIM dildos (with realistic casting) and states that she would be most interested in Linde's because "he must be packin!" That's where we begin, but during the course of the interview we hit a number of topics including where Ville stands with writing the next James Bond theme song, the things they miss most about home, lessons learned, and of course, Venus Doom.
But, let's cut to the chase.
K: Will we be seeing HIM dildos?
V: No we're not doing that.
K: I'm actually really glad to hear that!
M: You're not curious?
[Laughter]
K: Me? No!
A: She's only saying she's not curious.
V: [Laughter]
K: I could be, though. But, moving right along. One of the latest rumors on the web was that you had been approached by the producers of the James Bond movies to co-write or to write the next theme song for the Casino Royale sequel. Can you confirm this?
V: It's a very flattering idea. Of course it would be great. We grew up with Bond, but I've never even met those people. It's just a rumor. It's good to do little projects like that rather than the same old same old.
K: Like Synkkien Laulujen Maa? [I murder this pronunciation and am quickly corrected by Ville] I have this cd and it is beautiful. Forgive me for not knowing a lot about Finnish folk music, but is this a good example of that?
V: All the time people are asking, well, wtf is Scandinavian melancholy. To Mige: When I sung that [begins to sing] "kun mina kotoani läksin"... that explains a lot about Finnish folk music. It's not necessarily pathetic, but it's really, really sad. That song is about you leaving your home and the world is treating you really cruelly and you're falling in love and you can't get the girl you want. It's a classic, folklore type of thing. That's the stuff we grew up with as well as Kiss and Black Sabbath. So that's probably where love metal itself came from.
K: On the latest album Venus Doom, the track Song or Suicide, is that in the same vein as what you're talking about with the folksy style? It's acoustic and it reads like a poem. It doesn't have the standard song structure.
V: That was the idea, yeah. It was more like an "intimate". That's because we had a long track (Sleepwalking Past Hope) that precedes it. Like in the 70s they had a lot of that shit happening.
K: Lots of prog.
V: Yeah, well like Led Zeppelin. Or if you listen to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, the tracks will be straightforward Black Sabbath, and then all of a sudden the third track is an acoustic intimate that lasts for five minutes. And not a lot of bands do that nowadays. It was nice to play around and not limit ourselves too much.
K: I feel like as we go farther into the future that everything has to be fast and immediate. Easy and fast pop seems to sell a lot and it's a challenge when you put something with more of an album feel, more complex, longer, etc.
V: True, but there's people that like David Lynch and there are people who love reading romantic poetry and there are people who love Stephen King. [laughs] There's nothing wrong with Stephen King.
M: No, absolutely.
V: But actually if you think of the world of literature, I guess that fiction is going in a good direction with stuff like Kite Runner. Literature seems to be becoming more proggy. The romantic novel structure is fucking dead.
M: Yeah, perhaps music goes in phases as well. People get sick of hearing the same thing. They have iPods with one song from every artist. Maybe our album was a reaction to that.
V: But there is a cool thing about iTunes. Just a couple of months back I set up my own account for the first time. It's strange, you know, if I'm all of a sudden, "what was that great song from A-Ha…The Sun Always Shines on T.V. I WISH I could hear it now." And then just you just 'click' and bring it down. I love that. It's great.
K: [Looking at A] We're obsessed with our iPods.
V: It's good.
K: Growing up in the 80s, I feel like it was all about the single. Same with the 50s or 60s.
V: Well, same with the 40s. The iTunes generation is nothing new. The medium is different, but albums started happening in the 60s. You didn't have long players before the 60s. So, this is nothing new. People want the best, which is their right, rather than spending 20 bucks on an album with only one great song. So, that's reasonable I guess. That's the thing that record labels figured out. Take Paul Anka, who got, like, 2 big hits, and they last four minutes altogether and you could put them on the A and B side of the single that costs 3 bucks. Why won't you sell an album that costs 13 bucks that has filler? Because you make more money out of it - obvious reason. Bands like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, they changed the format. So, an album can be a conceptual piece. As musicians, we are fans as well and we keep downloading one-song wonders [correcting himself to say one-hit wonders], it's obvious that that's going to affect the way we start writing our songs. We get bored of that. So that's the reason probably Venus Doom as a whole is more like an album with more of an album flow. Some songs are longer and there is more mood in the songs, more than we've had before. That's our reaction to the iTunes 'thing,' which we still do embrace.
K: Do you have a problem with filesharing? Bootlegging?
V: Well, bootlegging is a different thing. That's always a sign of a great band: the more bootlegs you have the better, obviously.
K: Besides that you once said that when gay rumors start that that was a sign that you had made it.
V: [Taking a drag] Mmm-hmmm. When it comes to the fact that people are downloading albums for free...the making of Venus Doom took me about two years to write. I gotta live off of something. I can't tour and write at the same time. I can't have a normal day job. To Mige: What was the budget for VD? It cost like 250 K to finish the whole album, with mastering, the cover art work, everything. Where the fuck do we get the money to pay for that if we don't get people to buy the album? But then, let's say there's a reggae artist called -----, who I'm a big fan of, but that stuff was never released on cd. I found a site where I could download the album where someone recorded it from vinyl digitally. I was like "yes!" I'm definitely going to buy the album whenever it comes out on cd, definitely. That's my rule. I don't want to piss on my own leg, you know, not on purpose anyway.
K: Ha, although we've all been there. [Laughter]
V: Haha. I guess my point is that especially with young musicians who download a lot of shit for free - what they're doing there is taking money off from the record label that one day might be signing them. But the label is lacking the money so they sign the band who downloaded the stuff for free.
K: It's a vicious cycle.
V: It can be vicious and at the same time challenging. And it's great that there is through Myspace and whatever there's a possibility for bands from little tiny countries such as Finland to be heard internationally. Wherever. Whenever. That's great. I've been downloading documentaries [on this tour]. You know, watching documentaries on Alistair Crowley that were aired on BBC4 back in '92. It's never been released on dvd or anything like that. In that sense you can get a lot of material that was impossible before. Back in the day you had to write letters to people who had copied VHS to get some rare material not available anywhere else. Like bootlegs. To Mige: Like old Bad Brains gigs from fucking Munich from the year '83. Actually, Berlin, '84.
M: It's just another moral dilemma, I suppose. People actually probably don't realize that this is really a moral dilemma. It's just something that everybody does and everybody thinks is ok. [Joking] Later on you find that musicians have been dying of hunger.
K: You think about kids from working class families who don't have the money to spend on albums. They aren't thinking about that for sure.
V: But, I was the same, man. My dad was a taxi driver as a kid and my mother worked for the city of Helsinki. They didn't have shitloads of money. I had to save for a long time just to get my first, like, Kiss album. It was exactly the same thing. What we did back in the day was people would record a couple of tracks for you and if you liked Twisted Sister more than W.A.S.P. I would go into the shop and buy the TS album. They were like demos or promotional tools that allowed you to listen to some of the stuff when you didn't have the money to buy everything.
K: When I was in high school, I can remember listening to that very kind of thing. On one side it was Faster Pussycat and on the other it was Guns N Roses. GNR won. Mige, going back to your comment about musical phases or cycles, there are always bands out there who critics hail as having saved rock n roll. Is that overused?
V: I guess the whole thing means that somebody uses old parts in an innovative way.
K: Like a revival.
V: It's kind of like a reminder of why the whole thing started in the first place. At the end of the day, nowadays it seems like the savior of rock n roll is Iggy Pop and the Stooges. You see him live and you think "oh my god, that's what it's all about." Fucking sweat and blood, etc. It doesn't necessarily have to be a new band doing it.
M: It is just something that brings attention to the start of rock n roll.
V: I don't know who's really big at this moment. Nobody's like, super big that may be new. Something that happened to me musically was to fall in love with a band called Interpol. I didn't know that they are not selling a lot of copies.
K: In middle America, no. But on the coast, especially the east, they are more popular.
V: It's all about media. A lot of media is based on the east and west coast, so that's what we get in Europe. Also, acts like Marilyn Manson, he is or actually he used to be hugely popular. Or an act like Eminem. He makes a big budget video and comes to Hamburg and plays to 2,500 people. It's kind of weird to have an illusion that the media creates. But you think that somebody is bigger than life and they aren't necessarily.
M: It's a hype thing, you know.
K: [My ten minutes have come and gone] Is it time?
V: No, no, we've got plenty of time.
K: [Continues] Recently I finished reading Clapton: The Autobiography and in it he says that fly-fishing is the hobby that takes him away from the chaos. What do you guys do to retreat.
V: For me, I have actually been thinking about things I would like to do. I guess, for example, now I'd like to be back home playing acoustic guitar and writing some new songs. That's always a new step for me. You kind of like find yourself with a character you don't know. All the information you've been collecting into your subconscious comes out. In my case it comes through music and I find new aspects and new ways of looking at things, looking at yourself, and your friends through music. So, I consider being on tour, I'm like a sponge in a way. You see so many cities, meet so many people, uh, watch a lot of movies maybe, read a lot of books and get that information and then when you go back home you kind of decompress. All the information starts flowing around, hopefully the good information through the acoustic guitar. That's kind of like what I'm looking for now so I guess my big hobby is writing music.
K: Mige, what about you?
M: I have been wondering actually.
K: Well, you have a family at home which I'm sure takes up all of your free time anyway!
M: Yeah, I guess hobby would not be a good word for that, though to some people I suppose it would be! I don't have a hobby and it's something that is worrying me.
V: He's a thinker, he thinks a lot. He's like a problem solver. [Likening to life] Like mathematical problems with varying results. There's a lot of things in life where A you don't wanna and don't have to and B you can't solve.
M: But you must underline that you try.
V: You also want to do a lot of things but you don't get the chance. [Like a mom talking about a son] He loves gardening.
M: Yeah, I like gardening.
K: I heard you were a gardener in a past life.
M: Yes. In a sense I'm half the man I used to be.
K: Oh now we're quoting Stone Temple Pilots.
M: Actually, it's not that I miss having a hobby. But I keep hearing that people need hobbies.
V: But everyone does have a hobby in one way.
M: Well, I have millions of ways to spend my time.
K: Hobbies develop naturally.
V: Watching T.V. is a hobby! On tour you never get the time to concentrate on a movie or whatever. You're on tour for months and months. So you go back home to do nothing. Um, fart, cook - for yourself, obviously! haha But, finally just getting to watch a movie. That's one way of decompressing. Mine is for now, I stopped drinking so I'm not hanging in bars so what I'm doing is put my house in order. I'm still unpacking my boxes and I moved there like, a year and a half ago. So, basically my hobby is setting my place up to be the perfect place for me to play my acoustic guitar!
K: Speaking of your house... in the VD cd liner notes
V: Booklet.
K: ...booklet, there is a picture of an owl in a window.
V: That's my window sill.
K: A little menacing isn't it?
V: A little? haha We started recording VD and I had a really bad time, nearly a nervous breakdown, I woke up one morning hearing the voice of an owl. I had never seen a live owl before. Well, in the zoo, but never like this. I woke up hearing it and I said "what the fuck is that? Am I hearing voices now?" because I live in the city and we have, like, four owls. And ornithologists know EXACTLY where THEY are at, you know. That particular owl came back twice after that. I borrowed a digital camera from my producer Tim Palmer and left it on the window sill in case I had the chance to see it. We were still partying one morning at 7 AM and he came back and I shot the picture. And he has never been back. This was strange because he wasn't scared of anything, like people moving in the halls or knocking on the window or anything.
K: Ok, switching gears. What's the hardest thing about touring in America?
V: [Thinks] The carpeting. And, uh, all the pillows are filled with feathers.
K: [Laughs and looks knowingly at A.]
A: You know, I have this thing I travel a lot with my job, and it's like, every time you have to ask for the synthetic kind. Good to see someone else has the same issue!
V: That comes from living in a bus, there's not a lot of carpeting because a lot of us guys we smoke and then we have the air conditioning on all the time. That's basically the only thing that makes it hard for me as a singer. Otherwise it's fine. If I was in the rodeo or a drunkard I wouldn't have to worry about it, but I gotta sing every night so...
K: Gotta focus on the job.
V: Hoh, it's not a job- it's a hobby that became a...
K: A labor of love.
V: Yes, a labor of love!
K: What do you miss the most about home?
V: Solitude.
M: No 'me' time.
V: The road is really social, which is great as well. You get to meet a lot of people and play hopefully to a lot of people. It's just when they're a lot of people in a small container like a bus you never have 'me' time. That's the reason we stay in hotels a lot when we're on tour. Would rather stay in a shitty hotel room for a couple of hours in a day just to have your own room, you know, to center yourself, or whatever you call it. That's what I miss.
K: When you are home, do you have a lot of fans stalking you or hanging outside your window?
V: No. Finland is pretty easy. I don't have a doorbell that works so it's pretty hard to get into my fortress. You gotta have my cell phone number or be a friend to get in.
M: Finnish people are more reserved.
K: Not here so much. Stalking is a full on hobby for some!
V: [The Finns] have a respect for privacy. I've had some situations where fans have come up to the door, but normally I don't open up the door you know. It's my home. It's my own private place.
K: Where you're not on the clock.
V: Yep. So, I've been thinking about building a gate. Just imagine if you've got fans that start knocking on the door at 9:00 AM and I've just come off tour and I've got jetlag... even though their intentions might be the best, but you know, I can't be in the mood all the time. It's hard to put a smile on.
M: It is unacceptable.
V: That's the only place in the world I have my own peace. Surrounded by my books and just talk to my mom and my dad and play the acoustic guitar and read books and watch films and bake. That's what I do there.
K: That sounds almost lovely.
V: I may do that two months out of the year. The rest we're working on something so don't [you] think so. If you think about it, an average Joe works and is home five nights in the week. If the family is cool and the wife is a good cook, you know, it's fine to come home and stay in the same spot and then you have your weekends off and maybe have a holiday once a year where you go somewhere else. But we travel all the fucking time. We don't get to see any of our families. At all. And then there's the time difference. I only get maybe two months or a month and a half. Though, I keep on working when I'm home anyway, so... [being home] there's a lot of shit to sort out anyways.
K: How is it when you get home? Hard to decompress?
M: Well, it takes days. I'm not sure that you ever actually decompress. You can always get the most stuff out, but there's the knowledge that there are already future days booked. Because of that I'm not sure if you're able to totally decompress.
V: It's like a normal job when you take that vacation and you know that in a couple of months you have to go back to it.
K: Yes, we are account managers for a software company and we know the feeling when you take vacation.
V: It's not that different. We get things out of this job that you don't if you're staying in one place or whatever. Sometimes you feel that it would be nice to have a job like that rather than have to travel. For example, I'm single, I don't have a relationship, I don't 'need' to go back. You know, I've got my parents, who I care for, and my little bro- that's basically what I like when going back home. So I don't 'mind' touring and the travel. I travel a lot for promotional stuff, but it's been fine.
M: It's an attitude.
V: It's becoming easier now that I'm not hanging out in bars all the time. You really test the limits of your physicality by getting fucked up every night and touring and acting like a brat for months and months on end. Then it's harder to decompress. Even if you have just two weeks off, when you're actually sober you have a lot more time to yourself. The sleep is better. I've spent the last ten years in bars so it's almost like a new drug to be back home watching films I never had time to watch rather than puking in the toilet or waiting to get drunk again.
K: Did you find that changing your lifestyle made some 'friends' disappear?
V: Uh, nah. I can still hang in bars, I just drink coffee instead of beer. It's also been a luxury...the first time you're looking at yourself in the mirror and you're sober, your brain works and you have a lot more energy. I haven't taken that 'me' time for the past 15 years. I've been very social on and off the road. In that sense, the friends haven't gone anywhere, but I decided to not hang out with a lot of people. I've got a lot of friends who are fucking alcoholics. I don't have any problems with that. It's maybe more me making decisions than people running away from me.
K: Switching gears again. Helldone? Is it still on this year?
V: Yes, tickets go on sale next week. It's going to be three days. New Years is on a Monday, so it will be Saturday, Sunday and Monday. On the first day it's going to be, well, we're trying to sort out good A-class Finnish bands so that people can come and see a bit of what's going on in the hard rock music scene. It will be eight bands on the first night so people can get a good vibe of what we have. On the second day we have an international act there, and then a headliner and then we do New Year's Eve.
K: How long have you been doing this?
V: For about 10 or 11 years. We're trying to expand it a bit. Originally it was just a regular gig and then all of sudden we had a lot of people outside of Finland and then northern parts of Finland traveling to Helsinki just to hang with the band. We thought "let's just expand it" over a couple of nights to make it more worthwhile. A lot of people fly in and it's an interesting way to meet people who are outside of your ordinary realm. For example, South America, America, and Japan, even. It's rediculously interesting to see people hooking up with each other and making friends out of it. So, that was the idea of making it a three-day meeting point, kind of festival thing happening. We're still trying to expand it next year to make it bigger, but we're still looking for the right venues. This year it's going to happen in the same club it's always been in, Tavastia.
K: Will Hanoi Rocks be performing?
V: No. They're friends, but I had heard they will be playing a big gig with Motorhead in December and then they will do something right before Helldone in the same venue. You don't want a band who's played the same club the week before. I think that they've booked the gigs already. And, they may be a bit different from what an average HIM fan would like to see. But they are really good live.
K: Not to diminish their popularity, but Hanoi Rocks is most known for the loss of Razzle in the car crash with Vince Neil.
V: They were highly influential, but never sold a lot of records. They are a big cult band, like New York Dolls. They never sold a lot of records and still haven't, but everyone knows them, knows their story, and have fucking Johnny Thunders on their t-shirt.
K: I know all about the New York Dolls, but I could not name one song of theirs.
V: Sam Yaffa from Hanoi Rocks played bass for The New York Dolls.
M: Ah, there you go!
V: Like The Ramones. People know "Hey Ho, Let's Go" and they know the logo.
K: The seal.
V: Yeah. There are a lot of bands like that that changed the scene and were influential for other bands that actually became big.
K: [Since this is past our time, I say] I feel like I've taken up a lot of your time.
V: We can wrap it up or you can stay. We still have plenty of time.
K: Ok. Favorite venue?
M: There are so many. The one I really like is the amphitheater in Athens, Greece. It looks out over the mountains. The venue is nothing special, but the location is wonderful.
V: There are couple of festivals in Switzerland where the mountains are beautiful. When it comes to venues, in America it's great because you have a lot of old theaters.
K: Or old churches like The Tabernacle where you will be playing in November.
V: Yeah, that's a fun place as well.
K: I saw the Go-Gos there once. [Laughter from everyone]. You know, they had their time. We're kids of 80s. Also, when you have gay friends, it may be some unspoken rule that you have to see them at least once.
Tom, Tour Manager: Hey, they had the beat.
V: [Chuckles]
M: We have a lot of gay friends, too.
V: [Sarcastically] No, no. We don't have a clue about that.
V: But, you don't get cool venues like that in Europe. It's mostly old wherehouses or bars, so they're not visually that exciting. It's not like playing the Wilshire in LA or the State Theater in Detroit or yesterday we played the Congress Theatre in Chicago. Ornamentally and the paintings, it's like being in a movie. Sound-wise they are not always the best, but that's something we don't get in Europe.
K: With your music anyway, the ambience really completes the experience.
V: But we play anywhere.
K: I saw you guys twice on Projekt Revolution. And it was fantastic, but…
V: But it lacks the mood.
K: Yes. I prefer being at a HIM show, where it's you headlining. The music, the fans, the lighting, everything. It's great.
V: And obviously it's more rewarding for us as well.
K: How was PR for you?
V: It was a test of patience. When we started out, we always said to our booking agents that we'd rather play lead in a place that holds 25 rather than support someone somewhere bigger. So, we've never been doing the support thing at all. Which I'm really proud of. For example, in England where the record company didn't do shit for us in the beginning, but we still went there and it was great to see it grow in front of your eyes [over time]. So in that sense it was the first time we did tour and weren't the headliner. Also, playing in the sunlight, which I HATE. [Laughter]. Well, not that I hate the sun, but it lacks the mood, like what you were saying. And, we're not like an emo/punk band that can fit 10-15 songs in 40 minutes. We only had time to play 9 tracks. Obviously, we were able to play to lot of people who never heard us before and in that sense it was really good.
K: American fans will gladly take what they can get since you aren't always on tour over here. You performed a lot of the new material at PR. By now, do you have a favorite song(s) off VD to perform?
V: Sleepwalking Past Hope. It's challenging for us, but it's funny because there are so many instrumental parts that I can smoke fucking 3 cigarettes before the song is over. [Laughter] It's good playing Passion's Killing Floor, Dead Lover's Lane, Bleed Well.
K: I'm fond of Bleed Well.
V: That's going to be our next single. Hopefully the radio will start playing it. We'll see what happens. Now the set is taking shape. We'll start changing the set around later, but not now. Now we're fine tuning the new material live. Also, we're going to be shooting a dvd in LA during our gig. We'll see how it will turn out. It may be good, it may be a really fun night. Or it could really suck and we'll hide it somewhere in our archives. Or we'll just burn it [kidding]. But it's good, so now we're just focusing on fine-tuning the material. Trying to get a balance between the old songs and the new songs. We're trying to get the sense of drama when we're doing the set.
K: Do you ever play In Joy and Sorrow anymore?
M: Actually I was just thinking about that song.
V: Not for a long time.
M: It's a fine song. I really like that song.
V: We're trying to do 16 songs in an hour and a half. That's the max of what we can do. U2 are playing big stadiums where you can have fucking mirrorball lemons that you walk out of...
K: or that you can't walk out of!
V: So, really an hour and a half is good. There are a lot of songs like Gone with the Sin, In Joy and Sorrow, Heartache Every Moment- that's a nice track.
K: Fortress of Tears...
V: Fortress of Tears, Sweet Pandemonium- you know there are a lot of tracks that we can't fit in the set. Now we're trying to do a more 'in your face' set, more than ballady. I like it, we used to have so many slow songs in our set, and it was really moody, it was nice, but it is also nice for us to do something different. It's more challenging. Sleepwalking Past Hope is THE moody piece.
K: Join Me in Death has made a lot of my non-rock fan friends take notice. In 2000, this song made you famous in Europe. It's a wonderful song and timeless.
V: Yeah, I'm proud of the song. Hopefully we can write a song as good as that!
K: Oh come on.
V: No, we were lucky with it. It's funny, back in the day when that came out and all the radios loved it so they played it to death which meant that a lot of people who normally would never know us bought the record. Obviously that affected record sales. So, it's not even about it being a good song we just had a lot of luck. Somebody fell in love with the track and then just played it to death.
K: Your Sweet 666 is considered a seminal HIM song.
V: Oh! Playing the new material, you start to see the old stuff in a different light. We've been doing 3-4 tracks from each album, but we're not playing anything off of Deep Shadows and Brilliant Highlights.
K: Why is that?
V: It just doesn't blend that well. It was one of the albums that was so over-produced and a lot of people don't know the album that well. We used to play Lose You Tonight, Pretending, and Heartache Every Moment. I love Salt in Our Wounds and I love Please Don't Let it Go. Those were two songs I wrote on the acoustic guitar and they worked a lot better on the acoustic.
K: Last year I started playing the acoustic and chords from DSBH songs were what I used to practice. Definitely acoustic-friendly. What about You Are the One? Was that a b-side, or?
V: That was an extra track for Deep Shadows in the digi-pak edition.
K: Also a great song.
V: It's good, but it could be better. With that album we ended up in a situation where we started out recording demos and they started sounding very Queens of the Stone Age. And we LOVED it. But then things got over-worked. We ended up between tours working on the album and overproduced the whole thing. We should have stopped and rerecorded everything.
M: We had many producers coming in.
V: We had like five people mixing the album and it was just a big hassle. But it was a great learning experience, and it was something we don't want to do again. I love the songs. They just could have been better. It's also what happens, you know, we had a great successful tour supporting Razorblade Romance. A lot of bands, well, I think it happened to me, really, you know, we found out that we were successful and then when you pick up the guitar again you think it will be very easy thing to write a song. So, I could have worked harder on the songs. I love the melodies on the album, though. [Ville retires to the rest room]
M: They're not as refined as well because we ran out of time and we ran out of patience. We had been working on the same things for a long time. We were going all over trying to compete with producers and in the end we really didn't know where we were standing. But there's so much good stuff there.
K: That album stands out to me. To some degree, as a listener, perhaps as a female listener, I don't see the problems you point out, because it's full of haunting melodies and romance. But, I can understand that as the owning artist you have a totally different perspective. But there are so many people who love that album.
M: There are certainly a lot of good ideas on the album.
V: [Returns from the restroom] What?
K: We're still on DSBH.
V: Oh, it's fucked up. That was the time when we kicked out the keyboardist and we were touring and we got Burton and at the same time the expectations were really high obviously for the record company to have another "hit" album. We had to have a lot of bullshit meetings about what to do and what not to do and obviously we did what we wanted to do, but that's all the hassle you can come flying to your own work. If you've been working on one song for a fucking year you always get more and more ideas to rework and rework. To Mige: We should have just stopped, had a break, and then went into the studio and rerecorded everything. Anyway, it's a bit more wimpy to a certain extent, a bit more emotional. The vibe is more mellow.
K: Probably why I as a woman love that album! [Laughter]
V: It's a moody album and it doesn't demand too much concentration to get into the mood. You know, I'm really proud of it- just should have been more moody, more acoustic, and more melancholy. After that we did Love Metal, which was faster, then Dark Light was a bit mellow, and they all kind of reflect upon each other to have us do something different the next time around. Greatest Lovesongs, Love Metal, and Venus Doom are from one band, while Razorblade Romance, Deep Shadows and Dark Light are from another. There are two sides: one more feminine and the other more masculine.
K: The yin/yang thing.
V: Right.
And with that it is time for the band to prepare for their show. A and I thank the boys for their time, take a couple of pics, and exit the bus. Tom leaves me with this: "K, don't lose the braces!"
We head into the venue with our little photopasses, rush up to the front, and take some live shots. A review of the show with pictures will follow soon. -K
Thanks to Gabrielle, Tom, Mige, and Ville for making this happen. To see more photos of the interview, go to our buzznet site and enter the HIM gallery.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Venus Doom
Today marked the US release of HIM's new album, Venus Doom. Ville Valo prepped us for a heavier, doomier album and he wasn't kidding. Swollen guitar riffs, a diminished keyboard presence, and overbearingly emotional lyrics indeed make this the heaviest and darkest HIM album to date.
When I first gave the cd a listen I was shocked. Resolution and hope are acutely absent in these lyrics. Indeed, on this album the light has been temporarily turned off at the end of the tunnel. As perhaps a subconsious dismissal of bands who intend on saving your life, Ville just refuses to take on the responsibility. On this album, misery is what it is. The emotional quagmire notwithstanding, the music itself is what every HIM fan has been waiting for (or, at least what I've been waiting for): haunting melodies, gorgeous key changes, and at the center, the hypnotic vocals that are thankfully not muffled by overproduction as they were on Dark Light. I predict that with this album there will be a drawdown of the teenage fanbase and an increase in adult listeners. I just don't see the content and style speaking to the former demographic.
The album begins with the strike of a match and an inhalation. Of course it does. Ha! After listening to the album a few times today, I have to agree with a Kerrang! review in which the writer states that this album is the result of the band getting great at what they do. So a complete departure it isn't, but why change a formula when you know it works? Hell, it's worked for the Foo Fighters all these years.
Here are some highlights, in my opinion...
"Love in Cold Blood" opens with the lyrics "Serpentine love's thighs wrap around me in search for death…" Quite a metaphor. There is something Queen-like in the chorus, though I can't put my finger on it. It totally works for me.
"Passion's Killing Floor" KILLS live. I just love the lyric "In my arms you won't sleep safely…." Let's not analyze.
"Kiss of Dawn" is a favorite on the album. I think that there is nothing safe about the lyrics in that it is steeped in melancholia, but the structure and the haunting melody makes it hit-worthy.
An epic, 10 minute-long song called "Sleepwalking Past Hope" opens with a beautiful piano introduction that very soon explodes into a meandering choral and instrumental melody that is very identifiably HIM. Another favorite. A little proggy at times, but really not too much.
"Dead Lovers' Lane" is a pop/classic rock gem that is a throwback to the Love Metal era. This song also kills live.
Standout "Song or Suicide" is a short, intimate, raw acoustic recording of a poem set to music. It's so raw that you hear Ville shift in his chair. It's a nice turning point in the album.
"Bleed Well" is a fantastic hair metal song. You know, it's sort of metal, but then chicks can dance to it. Oh, and this also kills live. A throwback to Razorblade Romance.
"Cyanide Sun" is quintessential HIM. It's all melody drowning in a minor key. It's definitely a favorite, though this lyric is so dramatic it made me chuckle a little the first time I heard it: "We've sailed the seas of grief on a raft built with our tears."
While I was kind of concerned that the heavy lyrics would be too much, I love it. I give it an UNEXPECTED. -K
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Kiss of Dawn
(video screenshot) HIM's new video for Kiss of Dawn, a tune on the upcoming new album set to be released this September, popped up on You Tube for a while today. All I have to say is if this is a preview for the new album then September can't come quickly enough. Love the song, love the video, and damn sure love that Ville has finally cleaned up! Very reminiscent of And Love Said No. I would post it, but it's already been removed from the site due to a copyright claim by Warner Bros. I downloaded the video this morning, but I cannot for the life of me crack the code on their website. What the hell am I missing? -K
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Gerard Engaged, K Mourns
Every one around me is now either engaged or married. I'm sorry, but for a perpetual bachelorette this is really depressing. This morning, before I'd had a chance to drink my morning coffee, I got the text message I had been hoping to never receive: "Gerard is engaged…" Yes, folks, Gerard Way has gotten engaged. I realize I'm 32, but as I was driving back from the grocery store today something compelled me to put on I Don't Love You from The Black Parade. I actually got water eyed thinking back on the summer of 2005 when I tried desperately to find him and beguile him with my charm. The watery eyes could also be from a migraine I've had since Wednesday, but whatever. All I can say is that at least Ville is now single. Here's to dwelling in one's own misery and aloneness. -K
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
I Have No Title For This Post
While J and I waited patiently upstairs in the Pageant to see Morrissey for the first time we got ourselves a yummy drink: red bull and vodka. After I bled the cup dry of any drop of drink I looked at J, inhaled a quick and shallow breath, and blurted out: HEY so aksdhashdfasdhfkja;sdkfjha;skdfjh;askjdfh;aksjdhfa;ksjdhf;aksjdhfa;ksjdhf;aksdjfhaksjdhfkajsdhfkjsdhf;kjshdf;Ville Valo jashdfkjhsa;dkfjha;skdjfh;skdjfh;ksjdfh;akjkeyboards jdhf;kasjbwahahahahdhf;a######@@@@@@@!!!
That's literally what it sounded like to me as it came out.
What I was trying to tell her, but was so high from the gorgeous drink, was that in a recent Gauntlet post I saw a quote from Ville Valo talking about the guitar-focused sounds of the new album, due out in September. The quote is: Keyboards are so fucking full blown gay. I love Duran Duran, but there is only so much you can take.
As one may recall, J (who happens to be a lifelong Duran Duran fan) is one of many people who believe that keyboards don't belong in metal. I rather like them, thus I'm a fan of HIM and she is not. I appreciate this and have ragged her about it to no end. So, imagine my surprise when I read that quote. Of course, I had to discuss this with J asap because like a daughter constantly seeking a mother's approval of a questionable boyfriend there's a part of me that still can't quite give up trying to make J like the music as much as I do. I don't lose sleep over it, but I find myself wishing often that there would be that ONE moment that would make the change. Alas, it's just one of those things I have to accept in life. I will say that though MCR might be the real attraction for J to attend two Projekt Revolution dates with me this summer, J will be standing next to me for two HIM performances two nights in a row. (Hello, yes MCR and HIM are performing on the same tour. I'm not going to be able to take it!) A good friend and sister she is.
Anyway, J somehow understood what I was saying because she looked at me, smiled and said "yeah, Ville and I have been discussing it." -K
That's literally what it sounded like to me as it came out.
What I was trying to tell her, but was so high from the gorgeous drink, was that in a recent Gauntlet post I saw a quote from Ville Valo talking about the guitar-focused sounds of the new album, due out in September. The quote is: Keyboards are so fucking full blown gay. I love Duran Duran, but there is only so much you can take.
As one may recall, J (who happens to be a lifelong Duran Duran fan) is one of many people who believe that keyboards don't belong in metal. I rather like them, thus I'm a fan of HIM and she is not. I appreciate this and have ragged her about it to no end. So, imagine my surprise when I read that quote. Of course, I had to discuss this with J asap because like a daughter constantly seeking a mother's approval of a questionable boyfriend there's a part of me that still can't quite give up trying to make J like the music as much as I do. I don't lose sleep over it, but I find myself wishing often that there would be that ONE moment that would make the change. Alas, it's just one of those things I have to accept in life. I will say that though MCR might be the real attraction for J to attend two Projekt Revolution dates with me this summer, J will be standing next to me for two HIM performances two nights in a row. (Hello, yes MCR and HIM are performing on the same tour. I'm not going to be able to take it!) A good friend and sister she is.
Anyway, J somehow understood what I was saying because she looked at me, smiled and said "yeah, Ville and I have been discussing it." -K
Saturday, December 2, 2006
Synkkien Laulujen Maa
I'm very excited about Ville Valo’s latest side project. Like he did back in the late 90s with The Agents, along with other various artists he has recorded a couple of Finnish classics. This is not rock; it is old Finnish melancholy goodness. The cd is called Synkkien Laulujen Maa (The Land of Dark Songs) and it was released on November 22, 2006 and is currently the number one downloaded album in the Finnish iTunes music store. I know I should be reviewing this cd rather than just reporting about it, but it’s difficult to find this one here in the States right now. Hopefully, ebay will come through for me once again because I kind of dig hearing the man sing in his native tongue.Ville’s songs are Kun minä kotaini läksin (When I Left My Home) and Täällä Pohjantähden alla (Here Under The North Star). You can hear samples here and here. -K
Thursday, November 30, 2006
And Now For Something Completely Different
This post is one for the records. K is about to give HIM a tepid review.
While us HIM fans wait for the new album to materialize next year, Ville Valo has agreed to release a compilation cd called Uneasy Listening Vol. 1 that includes rare tracks, acoustic versions, and remixes of the poppier HIM hits prior to Dark Light. Uneasy Listening Vol. 2 will include the heavier tracks and will soon follow, I hear.
What works about this release? The acoustic versions of The Funeral of Hearts and Please Don’t Let It Go, both featuring a solo Ville on his acoustic, are rough diamonds set amongst a handful of rhinestones.
Tonight, with the winter storm of the year throwing copious amounts of ice over the entire St. Louis area, I decided to sit down and listen to each tune to try and figure out why the rest of the cd doesn’t really work for me. I boiled it down to four issues.
Issue 1: In Joy and Sorrow (String Version)
My friends know what this song means to me. I want it played at my wedding and my funeral and any time I get in the car. After playing the Deep Shadows and Highlights version and the UL V1 versions of In Joy and Sorrow back to back I figured what is missing: the rhythm section. Basically, the ULV1 version is the original with bass and drums omitted. You can’t remove the backbone and expect the same kind of impact.
Issue 2: Ville’s falsetto
It’s hard to imagine that when Ville formed HIM his original intention was to be the bassist rather than the lead singer. He’s a natural crooner and knows how to use his voice. When he doesn’t go nuts with it, his falsetto is hot. It just is. On UL V1, I just don’t know what he’s doing at the end of It's All Tears (Unplugged Radio Live) and Lose You Tonight (Thulsa Doom Extended Dub).
Issue 3: The Path (P.S. Version)
OK, this version meanders sleepily like a David Lynch movie. It’s got a slow, hazy, and lovely quality but in a very creepy way. Then, about 3 ½ minutes into it, it plugs in, strongly and suddenly. No matter how many times I listen to it I’m not prepared for it and it is jarring. Ville’s voice is fantastic, though. That’s the only thing that works for me on this version.
Issue 4: The rest of the story
The other tracks, i.e., The Sacrament, are incredibly similar but not great versions of the originals. They seem more like mixed versions that were later tweaked and perfected for the albums. Is that the point of this? I’m not really sure. All I know is that they don’t stand up to the songs I’ve come to love.
Why didn’t the beautiful acoustic version of The Sacrament make the cut?
This is one for the collector’s bin, but it’s just not the sonic perfection I’ve come to expect. For this compilation I give it the unofficial rating of Unmoving. You know I love you...-K
These acoustic performances can be found on youtube and are some of my favorites:
For You 1997! As my friend R would say, young Ville’s hair is long and luscious.
The Funeral of Hearts The German woman introducing Ville is in full goth regalia. It's quite something.
The Sacrament "Danke!" he says. This performance is a little whiny, but it works. Who am I kidding I love every second of it.
Endless Dark and Join Me. This was filmed at a secret gig for a several lucky fans. It’s one of my favorites to watch because he is so gracious and sweet with them.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
Uneasy Listening
"I fucking hate arrogance. No, correct that... I fucking hate people. Vast mindless herds of people, usually around Christmas time or rush hour. And TV stereotyping. Urrrgh! Normality, waiting for anything (patience is not one of my virtues), litter, concrete urbanisation, lack of vision, religious strangleholds, bigotry, sponge cake... hate them all." Dani Filth, lead singer, Cradle of Filth
Ahhhh, what better way to spend the day giving thanks for your loved ones and all the sweet potato soufflé you can eat then writing a post about your favorite Black Metal band, Cradle of Filth, and their latest album Thornography.
I’ve been in Huntsville for nearly two weeks. Whenever I work out of the Hsv office I am operating under a general umbrella of anxiety. It’s impossible to work quietly here. The Hsv people will welcome you loudly and with open arms and you will never be alone at lunch. They won’t have it. It’s something that is beautiful and exhausting at the same time and to prove it I’ve been in bed by 9 every night. Last week, all of the attention and the amount of work I had caused me to not exhale for about five days. Every day when I left the office I would get in my car and immediately queue up a Cradle of Filth single on my iPod called "The Byronic Man". Gradually, I would just let all of Thornography (2006) play itself out while I drove. To seek solace in thrashy metal is unlike me. For example, usually I need to sing along-- ok by sing I don't mean like that delusional kid on the American Idol auditions that wore an MCR hoody and screamed a scream that sounded like a shrieking intake of breath. There's a little of that on this album and I'm not going to attempt to sing along. Another example is that usually when I need a little musical therapy I go straight for early HIM tunes, the sonic equivalent to wrapping myself up in my featherbed. This time I was seeking a musical remedy ten times more extreme than usual, and therefore considered it to be a short period of musical psychosis. Anxiety is now almost completely gone, yet I’m still listening to the album. Does this mean I’m a fan of Black Metal now?
Black Metal, to me, has always been a genre that consisted of bands that took themselves too seriously, produced melody-free cacophony, and burned churches. Yeesh. Thornography seemed like it would be a very typical Black Metal piece, but after listening to it in its entirety I realized that CoF may have shades of Black Metal in their music and on stage, but they seem to be a more commercial and harmless variety of the genre. Ambient, slightly thrashing, theatrical and full of Tim Burtonesque dark humor, I have to say I’ve moved past any kind of musical psychosis into a steady affection for the album.
Random thoughts:
The Byronic Man was the gateway song for me as it’s a duet between Ville Valo and CoF.
What I can’t figure out is why the band has a fast band member turnover rate. The lead singer is the only member who was part of the original lineup. I wonder if there’s something Napoleonic going on there.
Dani Filth and the band join the Viva La Bam crew for an entire episode during the last season.
Dani Filth used to have a regular column in Metal Hammer called “Dani’s Inferno.”
Although I could do without the tiny bit of narration on this album, I do have some favorites:
Under Pregnant Skies She Comes Alive Like Miss Leviathan - Black Metal with shades of Emo due to the incredibly long song title. What's with that?
The Byronic Man - Kickass duet with Ville Valo.
Lovesick for Mina – After being away from my cat Mina for nearly two weeks, I think I will serenade her with this song next time I see her. We’ll see how far I get with the screaming before she claws me. The meandering guitars make me think of Iron Maiden.
Libertina Grimm - Very groovy!
Cemetery and Sundown - Love the guitars and the guitars on this one.
Temptation - Yes, this is a cover of the Heaven 17 hit. Very unexpected, I must say.
I may really like Thornography, but I won’t be walking around in corpse paint any time soon. -K
Saturday, August 5, 2006
A.F.I. at the Pageant
On July 30, 2006 I headed down to the Pageant, sans J, to watch A.F.I.
I did not expect to love Nightmare of You as much as I did. One of my coworkers, R, considered tagging along that night only because of them.
Next was Dillinger Escape Plan. Very raucous and the crowd ate them up.
A.F.I. sound like every other band in that genre, really, but they put on a great show for their fans who returned their love and admiration with their screams and pumping fists.
In a recent article in the Dispatch, lead singer Davey Havok was described as being “rail thin”. Eh? I have seen rail thin and rail thin he ain’t! But I’m getting ahead of myself.
While Nightmare of You, who sounded very nicely like a punk version of Morrissey, played their set, I stood on the top floor and found a wall to lean against as I drank my gin. I had a great vantage point from where I was because I could see the stage, the audience, and people around me. I hadn’t smoked in a week and wanted to smoke one a mile long. Well, that’s what I did. I went up to the bar and purchased a pack. Not having a lighter (which is unheard of for me) I asked the guy next to me who looked a little drunk to hand me a book of matches, located to his left. As soon as I lit up and took the first drag I felt alive again. I’m not religious at all, but that moment makes me want to drop to my knees and thank someone, anyone. Earlier that day I had purchased a pair of sexy black open-toed platform wedges and that night was their inaugural outing. So, I was feeling fine.
Anyway, once J and I observed that it seemed perfectly acceptable nowadays to wear the band’s t-shirt at the concert. Among the black t-shirt brigade were a lot of A.F.I. shirts. I also saw a lot of parents hanging out in their jean shorts.
As the crew started to fix up the very white A.F.I. stage, I ordered another drink and fumbled to try and light my cig. I had been noticing a group of non-goth kids standing to my left that kept looking over at me. I recognized one of them as being the one that handed me the book of matches. I was uncomfortable. Without wanting to show my insecurity by looking down to see if I had made some incredibly bad fashion decision, I just acted like I didn’t notice and tried to light my cig. The group walked away, but out of the blue comes this hand with a lit match. He was tall, cute, and very much out of place. I looked at him and said “thanks” and he said, “You know you’ve made it when even your crew is color coordinated with the band and the stage”. I looked down at the stage and sure enough, the crew was all in white. He said that with great sarcasm and I appreciated that.
While there was no music and the atmosphere was conducive to talking we got to know each other a little bit. The perfunctory, “so are you from here?” type questions we got out of the way early. I was surprised that the small talk didn’t seem boring at all. He seemed young, but was an old soul. At some point I unintentionally impressed him with my knowledge of history. I told him I grew up in Germany and he said “Ah, my ancestors came from there about 200 years ago. Valerius”. I looked at him and said “Romans”. At hearing this one word, he jumped up and yelled “OH MY GOD-YOU KNOW ABOUT THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE!!! HOW THEY MADE EVERYONE LATINIZE THEIR NAMES!” I was taken aback by the reaction and then said “bridges”. What I meant to say was “yes, the long arm of the Holy Roman Empire stretched out and influenced many aspects of life in Europe- look at the architecture, for example.” When I’ve been drinking I can’t always articulate, but this guy knew exactly what I meant to say. In fact, he said “Yes, the architecture, absolutely! MAN! I can’t believe I can talk to you about this. Can I buy you another drink?”
You know, for once I’d like to really impress a guy with looks rather than my knowledge of history, comics, or argue that Queen may possibly be the greatest band that ever was.
When we started discussing what we do for a living, we both realized that we were perpetual fixers. He was a Democrat who maintained a database for a local Republican politician. He would be in charge of sending messages or activating a dozen Blackberries at once, for example. He told me that the Republicans were thanking god when the storm hit. He said “they’re all about distraction right now”. When I asked him how he could take it, he said “this is why I’m a drunk at 23”.
So, then A.F.I comes on. The crowd screamed so loudly we looked at each other and grinned. He said “Wow. They’re here for A.F.I., it seems”. Finally, I turned to him and said, “What the hell are you doing here?” He said he was a friend of a friend of one of A.F.I.’s roadies and tagged along for the night. Oh good- another non-fan!
Back to A.F.I. The cd is called DecemberUnderground and how appropriate that the stage and the band were all in white. As I watched Davey run around in his white suspenders, asymmetrical haircut and glittery eye make-up, I looked at my new friend and asked “do you think he’s gay?” He said, “Maybe. Or, maybe he gets so much poon that he doesn’t have to pretend to be straight.”
When the crowd’s singing overwhelmed the band’s voices and Davey simply turned it over to them, my friend looked at me and said “ you know, if I were the artist I’d be like ‘People your job is to buy the album. My job is to sing’”.
In regards to the show, I wasn’t won over, but I also didn’t walk away hating them. I can respect them now, just because they knew their job is to put on a show for their audience and by god they did.
At the end of the night, I said goodbye to my new friend. I didn’t get digits- too young and a drunk at that age! No thanks. I’ve had an alcoholic boyfriend before, and although he was a wonderful man, I will never knowingly walk into that again.
As I drove home, I reflected on what a fun evening it was. When I looked at the time, I realized I would be home in time to tape a FUSE F*** Ups episode that was going to have Ville Valo getting slightly shitty with a tv producer who kept interrupting him. Say it with a flower pot, baby! I opened a cold beer, taped/watched the show, went to bed happy, and woke up the next day feeling like ass. Life is good. -K
I did not expect to love Nightmare of You as much as I did. One of my coworkers, R, considered tagging along that night only because of them.
Next was Dillinger Escape Plan. Very raucous and the crowd ate them up.
A.F.I. sound like every other band in that genre, really, but they put on a great show for their fans who returned their love and admiration with their screams and pumping fists.
In a recent article in the Dispatch, lead singer Davey Havok was described as being “rail thin”. Eh? I have seen rail thin and rail thin he ain’t! But I’m getting ahead of myself.
While Nightmare of You, who sounded very nicely like a punk version of Morrissey, played their set, I stood on the top floor and found a wall to lean against as I drank my gin. I had a great vantage point from where I was because I could see the stage, the audience, and people around me. I hadn’t smoked in a week and wanted to smoke one a mile long. Well, that’s what I did. I went up to the bar and purchased a pack. Not having a lighter (which is unheard of for me) I asked the guy next to me who looked a little drunk to hand me a book of matches, located to his left. As soon as I lit up and took the first drag I felt alive again. I’m not religious at all, but that moment makes me want to drop to my knees and thank someone, anyone. Earlier that day I had purchased a pair of sexy black open-toed platform wedges and that night was their inaugural outing. So, I was feeling fine.
Anyway, once J and I observed that it seemed perfectly acceptable nowadays to wear the band’s t-shirt at the concert. Among the black t-shirt brigade were a lot of A.F.I. shirts. I also saw a lot of parents hanging out in their jean shorts.
As the crew started to fix up the very white A.F.I. stage, I ordered another drink and fumbled to try and light my cig. I had been noticing a group of non-goth kids standing to my left that kept looking over at me. I recognized one of them as being the one that handed me the book of matches. I was uncomfortable. Without wanting to show my insecurity by looking down to see if I had made some incredibly bad fashion decision, I just acted like I didn’t notice and tried to light my cig. The group walked away, but out of the blue comes this hand with a lit match. He was tall, cute, and very much out of place. I looked at him and said “thanks” and he said, “You know you’ve made it when even your crew is color coordinated with the band and the stage”. I looked down at the stage and sure enough, the crew was all in white. He said that with great sarcasm and I appreciated that.
While there was no music and the atmosphere was conducive to talking we got to know each other a little bit. The perfunctory, “so are you from here?” type questions we got out of the way early. I was surprised that the small talk didn’t seem boring at all. He seemed young, but was an old soul. At some point I unintentionally impressed him with my knowledge of history. I told him I grew up in Germany and he said “Ah, my ancestors came from there about 200 years ago. Valerius”. I looked at him and said “Romans”. At hearing this one word, he jumped up and yelled “OH MY GOD-YOU KNOW ABOUT THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE!!! HOW THEY MADE EVERYONE LATINIZE THEIR NAMES!” I was taken aback by the reaction and then said “bridges”. What I meant to say was “yes, the long arm of the Holy Roman Empire stretched out and influenced many aspects of life in Europe- look at the architecture, for example.” When I’ve been drinking I can’t always articulate, but this guy knew exactly what I meant to say. In fact, he said “Yes, the architecture, absolutely! MAN! I can’t believe I can talk to you about this. Can I buy you another drink?”
You know, for once I’d like to really impress a guy with looks rather than my knowledge of history, comics, or argue that Queen may possibly be the greatest band that ever was.
When we started discussing what we do for a living, we both realized that we were perpetual fixers. He was a Democrat who maintained a database for a local Republican politician. He would be in charge of sending messages or activating a dozen Blackberries at once, for example. He told me that the Republicans were thanking god when the storm hit. He said “they’re all about distraction right now”. When I asked him how he could take it, he said “this is why I’m a drunk at 23”.
So, then A.F.I comes on. The crowd screamed so loudly we looked at each other and grinned. He said “Wow. They’re here for A.F.I., it seems”. Finally, I turned to him and said, “What the hell are you doing here?” He said he was a friend of a friend of one of A.F.I.’s roadies and tagged along for the night. Oh good- another non-fan!
Back to A.F.I. The cd is called DecemberUnderground and how appropriate that the stage and the band were all in white. As I watched Davey run around in his white suspenders, asymmetrical haircut and glittery eye make-up, I looked at my new friend and asked “do you think he’s gay?” He said, “Maybe. Or, maybe he gets so much poon that he doesn’t have to pretend to be straight.”
When the crowd’s singing overwhelmed the band’s voices and Davey simply turned it over to them, my friend looked at me and said “ you know, if I were the artist I’d be like ‘People your job is to buy the album. My job is to sing’”.
In regards to the show, I wasn’t won over, but I also didn’t walk away hating them. I can respect them now, just because they knew their job is to put on a show for their audience and by god they did.
At the end of the night, I said goodbye to my new friend. I didn’t get digits- too young and a drunk at that age! No thanks. I’ve had an alcoholic boyfriend before, and although he was a wonderful man, I will never knowingly walk into that again.
As I drove home, I reflected on what a fun evening it was. When I looked at the time, I realized I would be home in time to tape a FUSE F*** Ups episode that was going to have Ville Valo getting slightly shitty with a tv producer who kept interrupting him. Say it with a flower pot, baby! I opened a cold beer, taped/watched the show, went to bed happy, and woke up the next day feeling like ass. Life is good. -K
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Ville Valo and The Agents
In 1999, HIM's Ville Valo collaborated with The Agents, a Finnish folksy/jazzy band, on three songs. I purchased the compilation cd on which these songs appear from a music vendor in Finland through ebay.com. Every HIM fan out there should be exposed to these songs. -K
1. Paratiisi. This is a Finnish classic and a lifelong favorite of V's.
2. Ikkunaprinsessa. If my Finnish is correct, this song title translates into "Window Princess".
3. Jykevaa on Rakkaus. This is the Finnish version of Dusty Springfield's "I Only Want To Be With You".
1. Paratiisi. This is a Finnish classic and a lifelong favorite of V's.
2. Ikkunaprinsessa. If my Finnish is correct, this song title translates into "Window Princess".
3. Jykevaa on Rakkaus. This is the Finnish version of Dusty Springfield's "I Only Want To Be With You".
Monday, June 12, 2006
High Eyes
Not to put too much pressure on him, but M is the reason I will never completely stop drinking. It is too goddemm fun.
The only thing missing Saturday night was my better half- J, who has been out of town on business for FREAKING EVER. To digress slightly, J has an executive office that is HUGE and a perfect playground for M and me to take unprofessional pictures with my camera phone and immediately text her the images. The intent for these pictures is to (1) teach her to never leave us again and (2) to make her know that we miss her terribly. We “punish” because we “love”. This is probably why J is a mom and we are not. To further demonstrate this, we often yell at Feefers for walking into the room in that “cat” way of his. It’s infuriating. (we're usually laughing when we do it, because he's a beautiful and lovely baby.) Anyway, the last series of photos we sent was to celebrate June 6, 2006. M and I both wore black and took turns prostrating ourselves on her floor in crucifixion poses while wearing a homemade mask her daughter had made. It was HILARIOUS. To us.
In retrospect, J would probably have been glad to have missed it. I had just received my second HIM dvd that had a couple of “making of the ________ video” special features. I love the making of’s with Bam Margera because during the shoot something always seems to go wrong, i.e., a keyboard has not turned up and then there are hours to kill. It’s these moments I love because it usually entails Bam and Ville showcasing what hilarious drinking buddies they are. That night I had brought two HIM dvds, one that the band officially released (the mother lode) and the one that Bam Margera released. The latter was what I had gotten in the mail that Saturday morning.
After our first bottle of wine M threw the first pack o’Marlboros across the living room, signaling it was time to open the second. We noticed an ominous storm approaching. The windows were open, of course, and so there was a breeze coming into the loft that set the mood for the night ahead. It lasted for much of the evening.
We finished the making of’s and were locked in. It started with M’s request to watch the featured videos after each making of, and then went downhill from there. By the time we crashed, we had studied Wille Walo for four hours straight. After the videos came the live performances, then the special feature live performances, then the laptop came out and youtube happened so that we could see other versions of the videos that will never be seen on American tv. It was a multimedia event in the highest degree. I think with every question M might have had I could answer with a click of a button. It was incredible. There is a special feature where HIM performs 'The Sacrament' to a HUGE audience in Russia. As we watch Ville play with his nose and forget his own lyrics, M comments “yup, those are ‘high eyes’”. That’s not funny to anyone, but us. This comment was said with such deadpan conviction that we both looked at each other and exploded in laughter. I would love to immortalize these quotes in a book, but honestly you have to hear him say it. It’s M’s delivery of these very unspecial quotes that is so memorable. “High Eyes” is one, and J has one: “Gorgeous”.
What I remember, with a bit of humility, is pointing out how in charge Ville is on stage, how effing romantic and perfect “In Joy and Sorrow” is as a song and how the live performance is at the Rock Am Ring festival in Germany and how you can see Nurburg’s (not Nurnberg, where I lived) castle in the background “uch, look at that. IT’S SO PERFECT!”, my explanation for the song “The Beginning of the End” and how it was about an ex-girlfriend who was hospitalized for anorexia, immediately followed by me asking “did I just yell that?”, and replaying the live performance of “This Fortress of Tears” for M a few times.
Ok, so we really watched a lot of HIM that night. But, we also studied Suede and tried desperately to get through MCR’s Life on the Murder Scene (which we had already studied with wine on a previous night). It was unfortunate because by the time we put that on I was already starting to fade. Once The Fade engulfs me, the end is near. But I was still rendered speechless at the opening of Helena. That song will never fail to kill me just a little bit.
At M’s request, I created a perfect HIM playlist to be played at our respective funerals. Here it is:
The Beginning of the End
When Love and Death Embrace
Death is in Love with Us
This Fortress of Tears
In Joy and Sorrow
The Sacrament
Play Dead
The Funeral of Hearts
Join Me in Death
Resurrection
The Path
-K
The only thing missing Saturday night was my better half- J, who has been out of town on business for FREAKING EVER. To digress slightly, J has an executive office that is HUGE and a perfect playground for M and me to take unprofessional pictures with my camera phone and immediately text her the images. The intent for these pictures is to (1) teach her to never leave us again and (2) to make her know that we miss her terribly. We “punish” because we “love”. This is probably why J is a mom and we are not. To further demonstrate this, we often yell at Feefers for walking into the room in that “cat” way of his. It’s infuriating. (we're usually laughing when we do it, because he's a beautiful and lovely baby.) Anyway, the last series of photos we sent was to celebrate June 6, 2006. M and I both wore black and took turns prostrating ourselves on her floor in crucifixion poses while wearing a homemade mask her daughter had made. It was HILARIOUS. To us.
In retrospect, J would probably have been glad to have missed it. I had just received my second HIM dvd that had a couple of “making of the ________ video” special features. I love the making of’s with Bam Margera because during the shoot something always seems to go wrong, i.e., a keyboard has not turned up and then there are hours to kill. It’s these moments I love because it usually entails Bam and Ville showcasing what hilarious drinking buddies they are. That night I had brought two HIM dvds, one that the band officially released (the mother lode) and the one that Bam Margera released. The latter was what I had gotten in the mail that Saturday morning.
After our first bottle of wine M threw the first pack o’Marlboros across the living room, signaling it was time to open the second. We noticed an ominous storm approaching. The windows were open, of course, and so there was a breeze coming into the loft that set the mood for the night ahead. It lasted for much of the evening.
We finished the making of’s and were locked in. It started with M’s request to watch the featured videos after each making of, and then went downhill from there. By the time we crashed, we had studied Wille Walo for four hours straight. After the videos came the live performances, then the special feature live performances, then the laptop came out and youtube happened so that we could see other versions of the videos that will never be seen on American tv. It was a multimedia event in the highest degree. I think with every question M might have had I could answer with a click of a button. It was incredible. There is a special feature where HIM performs 'The Sacrament' to a HUGE audience in Russia. As we watch Ville play with his nose and forget his own lyrics, M comments “yup, those are ‘high eyes’”. That’s not funny to anyone, but us. This comment was said with such deadpan conviction that we both looked at each other and exploded in laughter. I would love to immortalize these quotes in a book, but honestly you have to hear him say it. It’s M’s delivery of these very unspecial quotes that is so memorable. “High Eyes” is one, and J has one: “Gorgeous”.
What I remember, with a bit of humility, is pointing out how in charge Ville is on stage, how effing romantic and perfect “In Joy and Sorrow” is as a song and how the live performance is at the Rock Am Ring festival in Germany and how you can see Nurburg’s (not Nurnberg, where I lived) castle in the background “uch, look at that. IT’S SO PERFECT!”, my explanation for the song “The Beginning of the End” and how it was about an ex-girlfriend who was hospitalized for anorexia, immediately followed by me asking “did I just yell that?”, and replaying the live performance of “This Fortress of Tears” for M a few times.
Ok, so we really watched a lot of HIM that night. But, we also studied Suede and tried desperately to get through MCR’s Life on the Murder Scene (which we had already studied with wine on a previous night). It was unfortunate because by the time we put that on I was already starting to fade. Once The Fade engulfs me, the end is near. But I was still rendered speechless at the opening of Helena. That song will never fail to kill me just a little bit.
At M’s request, I created a perfect HIM playlist to be played at our respective funerals. Here it is:
The Beginning of the End
When Love and Death Embrace
Death is in Love with Us
This Fortress of Tears
In Joy and Sorrow
The Sacrament
Play Dead
The Funeral of Hearts
Join Me in Death
Resurrection
The Path
-K
Sunday, May 21, 2006
HIM is Love, Heartache, and Redemption in St. Louis
On May 20, 2006, J and I made our way to the Pageant, a medium-sized venue in University City. It's large enough for popular bands to play while still maintaining a certain sense of intimacy with the audience. Saturday night, HIM headlined with support act, Aiden.
At the Pageant, if you're 21 you can gain access to the attached Halo Bar. This is a bar that allows you to get your pre-show drink on then gain early access. This is what we did. By 5:30 we had made our way down to the Pageant and hurried past the Hot Topic contingent that had been waiting in line all day. We sat down, ordered ourselves a drink and mentally prepared for the night ahead. For sure, it was going to be slightly different from other concert nights as one week prior I had won two tickets to a meet and greet after the show.
Back at the Halo Bar, J people-watched and I, next to her, was somewhere else entirely in my head. As I drank my second whiskey sour and smoked my umpteenth cigarette, I organized and finalized my questions. I was going to ask Linde about the Daniel Lioneye project and beg that they come to St. Louis if they take it on the road. I would ask Ville about the significance of the Finnish folk song "Paratiisi", which he sang with the Agents a lifetime of his ago. I would say "I've read that you superstitiously start your shows 8 minutes after the hour, could you expand on that?" Of course, when it came down to it, whether or not I could form any coherent sentences at all would have to be seen.
We had grand plans to be in the pit that night, as I had a strange desire to see Ville's pores. Briefly, while in the pit J and I met a superfan named Dan who was a very open and friendly chap. He and I chatted about our favorite HIM songs for a bit. Ultimately, as the crowd got much larger around us, we decided to ditch the pit and said goodbye to Dan. It was a good move to settle in our seats up in the balcony. While there is no crowd surfing at this venue, the opening act Aiden, My Chemical Romance wannabes (do not get me started), encouraged moshing and general rowdiness. In fact, one of the guitarists actually stage dived (dove?) into the crowd directly left of center, which is where we had originally stood. We sat cynically and impatiently through Aiden's set and waited for the music that can make my heart drip with innocent love and then in an instant throw me into the quagmire of deviant desires. I came tonight to hear what love and lust sound like live.
When Aiden finally ended their set, the stage crew prepared the stage for the night's headliners, complete with candlabras (how goth). What sounded like Scandinavian ambient music filled the smoky air. It was going to be a night unlike any other concert night.
The music ended and the lights went down at exactly 9:08 PM. As soon as the iconic heartagram lit up in the background, the collective sonic screams could have reached heaven itself. As Ville Valo slinked to the microphone with trademark cigarette in hand, it was not just any lead singer we were observing- this was someone who would, for the next hour and a half, command the swooning audience with the slightest nod of his head. He was suave, laid-back, and often courteous to the audience, bowing and clapping with approval as we sang the songs back to him at his invitation. Excluding the occasional oral introduction to this song or that song and the periodic sight of bras being tossed onto the stage, this paragraph could sum up the entire performance. But it won't.
Setlist (not necessarily in this order)
Soul On Fire
Vampire Heart
The Funeral of Hearts
It's All Tears
The Sacrament (encore)
Play Dead
Killing Loneliness
Wings of a Butterfly
Join Me In Death
Behind the Crimson Door
Wicked Game
Right Here In My Arms
Razorblade Kiss
Your Sweet 666
Each song was a highlight. At no time was there a lull in the performance and the audience sang every memorized word of every anthemic song. And I do mean every song. The heavy "Soul On Fire" (Love Metal) opened the show. With lyrics like: "We are like the living dead/ Craving for deliverence/With a frozen heart and a soul on fire", it is no wonder that much of the audience there was dressed in gothic regalia. The next song was "Vampire Heart" (Dark Light). This one is quite possibly my favorite of all HIM songs. "Right Here In My Arms" (RR), a fantastic rock-out tune, brought everyone to a clapping frenzy. With "Join Me In Death" (RR) and "The Funeral of Hearts", Ville demonstrated his falsetto with the grace and passionate plea of his miserably romantic poet persona. "It's All Tears" (Greatest Lovesongs, Vol. 666) was HIM again exercising its metal roots. Ville's jump from baritone to tenor was well exercised in "Behind The Crimson Door" (DL), but was never more excellently displayed then with "It's All Tears'" simple but effective chorus "I'm waiting for you to drown in my love/ So open your arms". Because this is America, because the latest album Dark Light is the first HIM album to be released here and overseas simultaneously, and because HIM now has these videos playing on MTV2, songs like "Killing Loneliness" and "Wings of A Butterfly" were the most loudly sung by the audience, but didn't stand out as much as the others. HIM's cover of "Wicked Game" (GL666), both live and recorded, makes one ask "Chris who?". Finally, the encore was, appropriately, "The Sacrament" (LM). The song is like a beautiful unholy hymn. It was a perfect, albeit abrupt conclusion to the pseudo-religious experience shared by hundreds.
Because I studied every movement, I thought I would mention that Ville constantly (1) spit on the stage (2) shrugged and rolled his shoulders back as if to relieve tension. We all know how thin he is, but it's something different to behold live. He also wore black slacks, a black blazer, and a Black Sabbath t-shirt. Oh, and the black beanie, god bless him. He was incredibly "covered". He's not a very energetic soul on stage, but he did seem much more stationary than usual. If I heard him correctly, although any speaking he did was so low and warbled I couldn't make out much, he did mention the word "sick". Damn. I knew where this was going.
What was missing was anything from Deep Shadows and Brilliant Highlights. For me, I consider "Lose You Tonight", "Heartache Every Moment", "In Joy and Sorrow" and "Pretending" to be outstanding HIM songs. Any one of those songs could have fit into the setlist. I would have loved to hear "Sweet Pandemonium" and "This Fortress of Tears" from Love Metal. And of course, "Sigillum Diaboli", a fantastic rock song from Razorblade Romance, was missed. Selfishly, I would have loved to hear Ville perform a non-accompanied version of "Paratiisi", but maybe he'll grant me a private concert someday.
To our disappointment, the Warner Bros representative announced that because the band was very tired and very sick, that there would be no meet and greet after the show.
While the radio station rep and the WB rep struggled to find an alternative to this disappointment, I sat down and lit up a cigarette and absorbed the moment. While watching the crew tear down HIM's set, I came to the conclusion that this was one of those life lessons where you are forced to accept certain truths. What I had been looking foward to was not going to happen, but god damnit if I didn't enjoy the concert more than anything in a long while. Regardless, it was disappointing, but I didn't feel personally slighted. What would have been worse is the band being forced to see people when they clearly weren't in the shape to do so. That is always a tricky situation- that's where you find yourself in an awkward moment subject to the artists' moods. No thank you.
We ended up with two signed Dark Light promos and exclusive t-shirts.
So as I write this, I still struggle a little bit with my feelings, but despite the disappointment, I am listening to my HIM concert playlist, enjoying a cold sweet tea, and smoking my tasty Marlboro Lights (while wearing my Jagermeister HIM t-shirt, I might add). I come out of this having enjoyed the concert immensely. I also feel somewhat thankful for the rotten post-show experience. Why? Because with the money that J and I will make from auctioning J's signed Dark Light poster, HIM will have unknowingly purchased our next concert tickets (though mine is framed and proudly displayed on my wall, thank you very much). Kiitos, boys! -K
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