With their eighth studio album, ‘Tears on Tape,’ HIM have had a busy year. The band recently wrapped up their North American Rock Allegiance trek with Volbeat and All That Remains and now they are on the road in Europe.
During their last date of their U.S. tour in Brooklyn, we had the chance to chat with singer Ville Valo
about the tour and the connection he has with his friends and
bandmates. Valo also spoke about recording ‘Tears on Tape’ and why he
thinks classical music should be banned. Check out our interview with
Ville Valo:
How has Rock Allegiance treated you?
It’s been well, how does a tour go? Let’s see nobody’s been ill, the
bus only broke down twice, everything got fixed quick the rest of the
bands have been nice.
How have you been? You had some health complications earlier in the year.
That was when we were supposed to be touring in May. It was supposed
to be a record release tour, it was eight dates in 12 days. Right before
the first date I got the starting of pneumonia and bronchitis and since
I have asthma I wasn’t in tip top shape. The doc said I had to lie down
for about six to seven days and then see if you need to take more
antibiotics and stuff like that.
It wouldn’t make any sense for us to wait for a week to play the last
two gigs and then not even be sure if we could pull those off. When
it’s a longer tour maybe you can postpone a couple of gigs or you skip
one or something like that but with the schedule being so tight, we
couldn’t do it. Now we’re trying to figure out if there’s a way for us
to come back next year to kind of make up for the lost ones. S— happens,
thankfully stuff like that doesn’t happen too often. This tour has been
tremendously successful health-wise to everybody.
It’s odd, normally for a European in an AC bus with carpet,
everybody’s ill at some point so many germs flying about and long
drives. It’s been very mellow. It’s odd playing outdoors, in Brooklyn,
someone just told me it’s a Brooklyn waterfront – I thought it was a
gig, in an indoor venue. I was just like “What the f—?”
This tour has been real interesting because there’s been a mixture of
radio station sponsored festivals, then a couple of monster festivals.
There’s been these outdoor amphitheaters in Arizona and then the next
day it’s like an old theater in Kansas and then all of a sudden it’s a
smallish sports arena and then it’s something like this. Every day it’s
not the same old, same old which is exciting and also audience wise
because at some places people go bananas for Volbeat and hate everybody
else. Then at times people appreciate all the bands, it can go both ways
which is cool because it keeps us on our toes.
Being with the same bandmates for so long, with recording the
new album ‘Tears on Tape’ did you notice anything that surprised you
about the other members in HIM or even yourself during the recording
process?
I think there’s always something that happens, but the base of
personalities are set in stone. They haven’t changed that much. Playing
music is like playing pool, in a way that if you’re not a professional
pool player – if you play pool for a while, you kind of get stuck on a
level and then you take a couple weeks off and all of a sudden you start
playing again and you’ve gained a level or two.
It’s better and nobody knows why, I guess you subconsciously do the
work and with music it’s the same. For example Linde [Lindstrom] our
guitar player, he hadn’t done anything [for a while] and then all of a
sudden he’s up a level and that’s really cool to notice. It’s the same
with vocals, sometimes you surprise yourself on how it works and there’s
no rhyme or reason or any logical explanation behind it.
What we try to do now is try to create as fertile ground as possible
for such paranormal events that take place. That’s the fun thing, those
unexpected mistakes because that makes it lively and organic and it
makes it sound like music. For a band member it feels magical because
it’s not just painting by numbers.
With a few years being in between ‘Screamworks’ and ‘Tears on
Tape,’ what was the most important thing you needed to consider when
recording this new disc?
Well the reason it took such a long time was our drummer had several
hand injuries, there was some nerve damage. It was pain injury or stress
injury and all types of things so he wasn’t able to play properly for
about eight months which meant I sat down more with the acoustic guitar
and was working the songs a bit more and getting f—ed up and hanging
about.
It was really stressful for the band because we didn’t know if he was
going to get better which ended up in these philosophical sessions with
the guys. What are we going to do, are we going to have somebody else
join us or do we call it a day as a band? It was stressful, that
probably the biggest difference with this album. When he got his hands
in shape, we did rehearsals, we started playing and everything was nice.
I think the main thing was that since we didn’t know what to expect, if
he was going to recover or not, as he recovered fully then everyone was
like super pumped up.
It felt good to be back like “F—in’ hell we can still pull off an
album.” It was a relief for everyone in the band and around the band too
because we probably weren’t the best husbands and boyfriends at the
time, everybody was super pissed off. There’s always got to be, not
tragedy but some sort of s— has to always hit the fan. This time it was
[drummer] Gas [Lipstick's] stuff, other times maybe the material isn’t
strong or someone just isn’t feeling it. It’s tough to get five people
in the same state of mind and wanting the same thing.
A lot of HIM fans have been devotees for a long time. Some,
like myself, since a much younger age when we didn’t even know what the
heck love and connections between people really meant.
Wow, yeah, I’m still trying to figure that out myself. I think good
music evokes something and lets your imagination lead and do half the
work. Then it makes it worth it, it’s the same with cinema and books,
sometimes it’s nice when the stuff is not overly explained. I grew up
listening to Sabbath and stuff I didn’t have the slightest idea – I was
there with a dictionary trying to translate some of the stuff that was
out there.
You figure out your own stories and that’s half the beauty of music.
That’s one of the reasons I don’t find religious music and political
music too interesting. Obviously when there’s bands like Rage Against
the Machine, back in the day, the energy was astounding but I still
couldn’t relate. I could relate to the aggression but the lyrics, for
that band, didn’t matter to me – it was just the full on force they had.
What would you say is the biggest misconception people may have about you or HIM as a whole?
I don’t know any, the more stories about a band, the better. A lot of
things should be left unexplained, whether it be musically speaking or
any other way. It changes from country to country and from state to
state. I think maybe somewhere people think since we play melancholy and
gloomy, doomy music that we are gloomy doomy individuals which is never
the case especially if you know people from Paradise Lost, they’re
funny as f—.
It’s the same with people from Carcass or any of them, we grew up
with horror movies and with Sabbath and we like music to be forceful and
a bit frightening and that’s important. All kinds of people go and see
horror movies. At the end of the day all the serial killers listen to
classical music, so that should be banned. [Laughs]
This bus looks pretty clean but what would you say is the weirdest thing on this tour bus?
We actually emptied the bus, there were a bunch of very odd
looking…socks. I’m not sure for what they were used or when but they’ve
been here for a month and a half.
http://loudwire.com/him-singer-ville-valo-rock-allegiance-tears-on-tape/
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