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ON THE COUCH WITH: HIM

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ARTIST INTERVIEW

Ville: Hello, hello! What’s going on yonder?

AccessAllAreas.net.au: I’m in Australia at the moment, it’s night time.
Ville: What is it, it’s 10?

AccessAllAreas.net.au: Yup it’s 10.
Ville: It’s 1 pm over here in Helsinki. I’m sorry to keep you up and from doing things that people do at night!

AccessAllAreas.net.au: Oh no worries! It’s a pleasure to have a chat with you.
Ville: (Laugh) It’s not done yet so you don’t know how it’s gonna turn out!

AccessAllAreas.net.au: Go easy on me now! So has it been a good start to the New Year for you?
Ville: It’s been busy as fuck. When you’re in a band, it’s not 365 days. I think a year goes in what you call an album cycle. So, a year for a band is 3 and a half years. That’s when something new starts and you work maybe a year and half - get it produced, mixed and done and let everybody know the album is coming out which takes another 6 months or whatever. Then it’s out and you tour for about a year.
I started the year by working. We played a few gigs to celebrate our New Year here in Helsinki, a traditional thing we’ve done many years in a row. After that, just sorting out everything that has to do with ‘Screamworks’.

AccessAllAreas.net.au: So you’ve been home for some time now.
Ville: I’ve been home since December. I’ve made a couple of promotional trips over to England and to Germany and it’s miraculous how much work you can get done via the necessary evil – the Internet and email. Our record company is based in Los Angeles, so basically I have to live in LA time which is a ten-hour time difference. I go to bed like 6 o’clock in the morning. Now we rehearse with the band for the forthcoming tour and tours in plural. Trying to get the last details done. Everything’s fine with the album, we’ve got some live tracks for some special editions of the album and stuff like that. It’s a lot of detail work – the demo and the god is in the detail and you gotta be careful, a lot of people tend to see mistakes first.

AccessAllAreas.net.au: Yeah it is a common thing in being human…
Ville: Yeah it’s just human nature, there’s nothing bad about it but when you put a lot of effort and love into a piece of work, you don’t want to let it go unfinished. We know the album’s good and that’s been done. We just need to make sure, let’s say the digitised version of it, the album’s gonna be sold on iTunes. I wanna make sure that that’s uncorrupted. It’s crazy how you record music on a super hi-tech equipment, the resolution is heavenly until you compress in down 16-bit then you compress it down to 192 kb/s…I don’t mind that fact as long as I recognise that fact. It’s just funny how much blood, sweat and tears you put into a fucking mp3 that people download illegally.
There’s a song called ‘Disarm Me (With Loneliness)’ on the album, I started working on that back in 2001, so it’s incredible how you can put nine years of work into four minutes and then it’s compressed into this little thing you download in 15 seconds. It’s crazy!

AccessAllAreas.net.au: It’s interesting that it took you almost 10 years to complete that song, have you made a lot of changes to that song?
Ville: I had the chord structure, Mige used to have a more metallic or more rock’n’roll version of Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade Into You’. It’s a track that I love. I want an ethereal ¾ time signature, folky thing. I don’t know, I was working on it for a long time. I tried to make it work for our album called Dark Light. It just didn’t feel right at that time. Occasionally with music, you need patience. You need to go with the flow but you need a lot of patience. You need to keep your head open but not let go of unfinished stuff. So occasionally it takes a long time and same with our previous song, ‘Passion’s Killing Floor’ and I wrote that back in 1999 at the back stage of a TV show somewhere in Germany. It’s just funny pieces of puzzle there. Occasionally a song gets itself done in a week or two days or whatever and occasionally it takes years. It doesn’t mean the song is not any better, it’s just you don’t want to fuck up a possibility. You don’t want a premature death, you know. You don’t want to abort.

AccessAllAreas.net.au: And also with your new album, ‘Screamworks’ is also important to you because it’s the first time that as you’ve mentioned before, you’ve written the record sober?
Ville: That’s an exaggeration. I’ve always worked on the album sober. I may have performed the albums being a bit tipsy and may have written some songs while having a terrible hangover. But when you’re fucked up, you can’t work…at least I can’t work, so let’s just say I had double the energy cause I wasn’t spending half my time at the pub, so we were working on the album more. Yeah it’s important, obviously it is, all the albums should be important. I’m not dissing the past, without the album in the past we wouldn’t be here. There is not necessarily a reason for anything, I’m not a big fan of Eastern philosophies but I think it’s necessary for bands to take steps to get to where they are. You need to make good albums and shit albums and everything in between to be able to get to the point of making a great album (laugh).

AccessAllAreas.net.au: ‘Heartkiller’ is the first single. Most of your songs on Screamworks deal with the notion of not only love, but also fear. What do you think you guys have learned after completing the album?
Ville: I’d like to say ‘fuck all’, I have learned…nothing. It was a funny process of making the album in a way…I started also developing feelings for a certain somebody and obviously, naturally the process of that thing ended up being on the album, which for me makes it really exciting. It’s in the here and in the now, as they say. It’s kinda current as opposed to looking back or looking too much into the future. This album is actually about what’s going on at the time of recording the album and working on the songs, so makes it really immediate in my ears and in my heart, so in that sense it’s very different. I think that’s the most different thing and the fact that the songs are based on our hope or things not yet lost and things that have been lost, all things that are on the way of becoming you know, going terribly wrong. We were in a hopeful state of mind while working on the album.

AccessAllAreas.net.au: This album uses more synths and plays on sounds from the ‘80s. Which song do you think takes you more out of your comfort zone?
Ville: The second single from the album, ‘Scared to Death’ – I’m a big fan of Dinosaur Jr and it does have this alternative guitar vibe to it, and it’s very very ‘80s and it’s keyboard. I feel rather comfortable wherever. There’s a last track on the album called ‘The Foreboding Sense of Impending Happiness’…

AccessAllAreas.net.au: Yeah I was just gonna say that…
Ville: Yeah that’s a bit different from what we’ve done in the past. That’s maybe the oddball track on the album but then again it does hold the essence of the band, HIM. It’s got the distorted guitars, that weird soundtracky mood and it’s very melancholy and it still has that devilish smirk or whatever you wanna call it. It’s not overly serious. I think that’s very important because life shouldn’t be taken this serious anyway, you gotta be able to laugh at yourself and others. You know, it’s not a laugh – it’s part a laugh and part being on the verge of tears I guess.

AccessAllAreas.net.au: That’s true, and how did you connect with producer, Matt Squire?
Ville: It was just a simple story of us having a new A&R in the building in Warner’s at Sire Records in California. I flew over there to play some new demos of the stuff that’s on ‘Screamworks’ and we met the new A&R, we started to chat and getting along, I was asking about different possibilities and what’s the vibe and he was suggesting ideas…I ended up meeting a few people, and we had worked with the British super, super good producer, Tim Palmer on couple of albums and sold many albums in a row that we needed to take a break. Otherwise the band gets too comfortable, going in the studio with someone you know too well. Not to say that they will be the same old same old or feel too repetitious but there is a chance of you taking not enough risks so it was a good call for us to work with Matt. We sat down, we had a blast on the first meeting where we talked about I guess, Brian Eno’s production on U2’s Joshua Tree. We talked about that for about three hours. And that’s something rare, you meet somebody where you can sit down for the first time and using nearly the same references when it comes to music. Everyone talks about music and everyone feels differently and talks about it differently but we had so many similarities in what we would listen to when we grew up and so many same reference points that was incredibly easy. Then he’s one of the only guys who during the second meeting (cause the first one went so well) would come in with a bunch of notes, detailed comments on each and every song on the demo and I Love that. I love that when somebody really takes it seriously enough to find the stuff that bugs them. Like that Major 7th chord of this and that song, he felt odd about it. I was like, “why?” and we started discussing the song structures, the chords and stuff like that. As a band when you’re working on the album for a long time, you wrote the song then take them to rehearsal and demo them shit tonnes of times. At least I get blind and deaf when you know it too well, it’s good to have someone come in and pinpoint the great things about the songs and pinpoint the songs that might not translate that well.

AccessAllAreas.net.au: And it makes it more exciting too…
Ville: Yeah exactly, for example we had a song called ‘Katherine Wheel’ which was one of my favourite songs. We never got it working right. It was nearly there but it didn’t quite function and basically two important things that Matt and I picked up on that sound ridiculously tiny but then made such a huge difference is that we switched the key from F#minor to G minor, which elevates it to just a tiny little bit, it’s just a semitone but it makes all the difference. I don’t know why, don’t ask me. We lifted up the tempo with three beats per minute, so it’s the little tiny details then all of a sudden, the song became alive. That’s where Matt’s talent really shown – really good with songs, really good with melodies. He’s very vocal about stuff but he’s not the producer who would say, “play like this or do as I tell you”. He’s more of a producer who says out loud that he’s not sure about a thing. Then you ask why, he tells you why and he gets you into a position where you start working harder and make you try things which you would never try out otherwise. That’s great when it works out you know, different artists and different bands need different things in producers, and I need a producer who is sonically well-educated and a producer who kicks my butt, who says that “you have good ideas but it’s not done, you can do better” and when somebody says that I can do better, I take it as a challenge and I really start working on it.

AccessAllAreas.net.au: And you guys have been around for more than ten years. Competition is also common in the music industry. Do you still feel the pressure to prove something still?
Ville: Well “pressure” is maybe a bit of a strong word. We don’t need to prove ourselves necessarily, we can still come up with good songs that please us because we’ve done that for quite a bit. I think that trying to make an album happen that has all the quirky aspects of a band but yet be accessible and translate well, that’s the toughest thing to come up with. I think we’ve succeeded pretty well with the new one, now it’s kinda down to the listeners and it’s down to the public to decide whether it’s too ‘80s or this or that. We don’t know, we’re very proud of it and we’ve done everything that we can to make it happen. The only pressure is the pressure I put down on myself when writing the songs, just not trying to do the same old same old, try to figure out a new order of the same old chords. Yeah and it still translates the emotions…

AccessAllAreas.net.au: So what’s next for you and the band after the touring is done for the new album?
Ville: Maybe a weekend off and start working on a new material. I think that even looking at itinerary or my calendar for 2010, it just gives me a headache. There’s so many things going on that it’s easier to go with the flow and not to know too much about it. Just to know the time to do my laundry. It’s kinda just keeping it simple cause if you keep over-thinking everything, it just stresses you out to a point where you can’t do shit. When you’re supposed to do so many things that you can’t concentrate on one. And I’ve noticed that happen very easily, at least in my case. It’s just better if I concentrate on the task that is at hand, at that moment. When it’s all done, we’ll see where we at. We’ll see how the album’s done, we’ll see whether we’re more successful, whether we’re the same old, whether it’s still really bad. The record sales have been going down so fast that it’s not to be taken for granted that we can survive off music. If people are not liking what we do then we have to decide whether we can afford to be musicians. It’s a make or break kinda thing. What we’ve heard is that nowadays if you sold 100,000 records in America, that equals to 1 million so the amount of money is ten fold. Some of us have kids to feed (laugh) and to pay our mortgages and whatever. It’s not like I would lead a luxurious lifestyle but I need to put on the table the sustenance.

AccessAllAreas.net.au: You can only do your best… Thanks so much for chatting with us, it has been a pleasure.
Ville: Pleasure is all mine indeed, thank you very much.

AccessAllAreas.net.au: I wish you luck with your new album.
Ville: Let’s hope for the best, you never know. As discussed, it’s out of my hands now. Let us hope for the best…and it’ll be okay.

AccessAllAreas.net.au: Yeah alright, Have a fantastic new year!

Interview by Sandy Tan

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

Forming in 1991, the purveyors of ‘Love Metal’ and masters of dark atmospheric music, HIM, re-defined the gothic rock/metal movement completely and no one comes close to their heavy, ethereal sounds. They have enjoyed success across the globe for their unique style of hard rock and heavy metal with melodic and gothic undertones, driven by lyrics that spin tales of fatalistic love and depression.

The bands break out album came in the form of their 2003 effort, ‘Love Metal’ which Pop Matters described as “Ten equally concise, irony-free and gothic-rock mini epics”.

HIM’s sixth studio album ‘Venus Doom’ was released in 2007 ‘and the result may be the year's heaviest, creepiest, and sexiest hard-rock group effort’ - Spin. The follow up to the platinum selling ‘Dark Light’, ‘Venus Doom’ sees HIM rocking with fury and efficiency with Ville’s stunning vocals and lyrical poetry moving from raging wail to deep baritone with ease. “With every album that he writes HIM mainman Ville Valo gets closer to his dream fusion of Metallica, Depeche Mode and Ozzy, while still remembering to add some distinctly gothic beauty.” – Uncut

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