Interviu Lake of Tears

Inaintea concertului de diseara, metropotamul s-a intalnit in backstage la Arene cu baietii de la Lake of Tears, mai precis cu Daniel Brennare (voce) si cu Mikael Larsson (bass), cu care stat de vorba despre muzica mai veche si mai noua, despre ciuperci, fantezie si griul atotprezent in versurile lor.

Welcome back, it's nice to have you here again.

It's nice to be here again.

Really? :) Do tell us more.

(Daniel laughs)

We were really wondering how come you decided to come here without a tour, we are the only lucky country to have you here in this period.

Daniel: Yeah, we don't play so many live shows anymore, touring is nothing that we do lightly, now we had the opportunity to come here again, so we took it.

Mikael: We really liked it here last time.

What did you like about it?

Well, the audience was fantastic. As far as the audience goes, it was one of our best shows.

Well, it's probably going to be the same tonight.

We hope so.

Now a little bit about the concert tonight: it was quite a pleasant surprise to see in the opening act a band with a different style from the headliners. did you choose to play with Rage, or how was it that happened?

It wasn't really our choice, they were at the same booking company as we are, so I really don't know who decided that we would play together.

Did you play with them before?

Yeah, a couple of times, back in '95-'97, about ten years ago, we met at some festivals, we are not like in the same genre, so we do not play together so often.

What do you feel about playing with somebody who's in the heavy metal / power area?

We started with two schools of metal, and we were between what they call gothic metal and heavy metal, so we played at both kinds of festivals, with both kinds of bands. Like I said, it wasn't our decision, but I guess somebody thought about it.

Rockers tend to over categorize. you've been labeled doom initially, then gothic and even progressive metal. for the sake of taxonomy and classification, what metal label would you apply to your music?

Mikael: Rock and roll, maybe.
Daniel: Yeah, actually, more rock than heavy metal.

'cause Neonai had definitely more of a rock sound to it, and Sister Sinister definitely rock and roll.

It's not really that important for us, we don't care that much. I guess every band says that about themselves. But as we've played for a couple of years now, it comes even clearer that it's not fun to play the same thing over and over again. Every time you take your guitar in the rehearsing room and you rehearse the same thing, it's no fun.

You said that most bands say they don't fit into a genre, but actually most bands do fit into a genre. You are one of the very few bands who actually evolved throughout their entire career. (smiles on their side)

About the concert tonight, are you going to have a keyboard?

A machine :) we're going to have a little machine.

'cause we noticed that this album is the first one where you don't have any guest musicians.

We do have a keyboard player.

Yeah, you do have one, but it seemed to be part of the band, not a guest on the album

Daniel: No, he was with us only for the recording period.

Mikael: We actually want to have a keyboard player in the band. it brings much more energy to the show to have someone playing live with us, but so far we couldn't find the right one.

So you're still searching for one.

Daniel: Yes, well, we've been playing together for such a long time and the band feels almost like family, and it's hard to pick a keyboard player just because he plays well, or because he's "something else".

Mikael: He would have to share our directions and beliefs...

About directions, we noticed that this last album is more unitary than your previous releases. It seems to have a main vein around which it grows. Judgind from you faces, maybe not. Would you care to comment on that? How do you feel about it?

Daniel: I don't know, we haven't really thought about it.

Mikael: no, I don't really feel it's that much different from the others.

My impression was that you've started to focus on this problem that the world is heading in the wrong direction lately

Actually we've kind of focused on that from the very beginning.

Some of your older songs are more romantic, some more heavy metal, fantasy inspired, etc, but this album seemed to me to be more focused on one issue

Yes, well, from the beginning... you know, our recordings... every subject has, as they say, two sides. We've been describing things from different sides (perspectives).
I think in the beginning we were more into metal, we had fantasy inspired lyrics. Escape from the world. We've done some stuff complaining about the world and standing outside of it, now we're maybe complaining about the world standing inside of it.

What would you say that your favorite album is so far?

Mikael: That's a hard question. We have maybe some favorite songs, but it's hard to just name one album.

Daniel cleares his throat, laughs, obviously puzzled by the question.

I don't know... No... It's from day to day, I think. Depends on what kind of mood you're into. Of course, we connect to all the albums. When you make music, when you do records, you connect them to events in your life. How your life was during this perioud. Some periods were maybe brighter than other periods. Of course sometimes you feel a little bit down and sad. Then you maybe look back to the period when you were sad the last time and see that this period is more comforting than when you were happy. So it's difficult to just pick one. Most of the days I guess we quite hate'em all pretty much.

You seem to pick a lot on the grey side of the world, you have sounds like Greymen, Children of The Grey and I think that the word grey is in every album.

There's a lot to be said about that. I still sometimes have a difficulty in understanding the world, the world is not black and white. Also when I write the lyrics I like to use metaphorical words to describe things, not to make them too concrete, 'cause I don't get them too concrete either. You know, you see something, and then you get an emotion, and it's difficult to describe this emotion.

I dunno how we got stuck with this word, but grey says a lot without saying too much. It's the same with other words, we also used the word raven a lot, it's a symbolic word, sometime, but I think somewhere at the back of the head it has something to do with understanding the world. I think a lot of people that you meet, they have a clear view about things: this works like this, this works like this and when you start to question it, you realize it's different, it doesn't work like that, it can work in many different ways, so it all becomes grey.

What about the mushrooms?

This is the same thing, somehow we found a symbolic value in the mushrooms, I don't really know what it means, but it's there. I think it started with A Crimson Cosmos, when Kristian Whalin, the cover artist, painted some mushrooms there. We had some discussions with him, but we never told him to paint mushrooms, but he must've picked this up from our discussions and our music. From this day on I guess it kept on going, the mushroom idea.

coperta A Crimson Cosmos

Speaking about the covers, you used to have a symbol, a logo, on the first albums, IIII, then it disappeared. Whatever happened to that one?

coperta Greater Art

Daniel: This one was actually...if you look at the cracks in it you could see the letters LOT, it's why we had it. But we decided later to change a little bit about ourselves and changed the logo too.
Mikael: it was our first logo, we changed it as we developed, it was kind of old.



Feeling a bit old was the reason why you split up for a while back in '99-2000?

It was a couple of reasons I guess, one of the main reasons was the support we got from Black Mark, our company, back then we were like, we had many tour opportunities, to go out to play with bigger bands, but they did not want to give us any money for this, so... we were playing together for a couple of years and getting tired a little bit and changing the label was not that easy, 'cause we had a contract that said that we had to do another album for the record company, and working with them was just taking energy from us, we did not get any energy back, we were feeling empty, and this was what happened back there, everything we had to do with them was just ... we decided no more, we're doing something else with our lives.

So what did you do, actually?

Not that much, I guess we cut our hair, started to work, some went to school, stuff like this, wanted to find some different life than what we had.

Luckily for us you decided to come back to music?

I don't know, i guess it was luck. I think we just needed a break.



Almost time to finish, just a couple of quick questions, one for Daniel, we heard that your real family name is Srebrenaric. Do you have East European roots?

Yes, Brennare is an artistic name. I have Croatian roots.

On Black Brick Road you used a hammond organ, we were wondering how come you don't use it more often, because the sound fits your music so perfectly.

Yeah, we used it on some songs on Black Brick Road and on Moons and Mushrooms too, a little bit, we had a very good organ player from the beginning.

Ever thought about using it live?

Yeah, we talked about it, we'll see, that would be great, we had a fantastic guy who played with us, a real musician, a pleasure to see him play, with his hands and feet with the pedals and extra, no delay... One of these guys would be great for us.
 
We could ask question until tomorrow, but it's probably best to let you prepare for the show...

We could answer until the day after tomorrow :)

Thank you, see you all tonight.