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In-person interview with Mikael Stanne of Dark Tranquillity

March 6th 2010, The Wiltern, Los Angeles CA

Andrew: The new album 'We Are The Void' is fantastic. You must be happy with how it turned out.
Mikael: Beyond happy! We worked so hard on this album. Its incredible but it's the hardest work I think we've ever done in the band. It was frustrating, torturous and tumultuous and everything else, but we pulled through and we did it. I don't think I've ever felt that same kind of satisfaction as I did that day, when I recorded my last line of vocals. It was like, 'Alright this is it!' I could just sit down, open a beer and listen to the entire album through and through. The whole band just sat there and we were like, 'Hey, hell yeah! This worked out'. So we are incredibly proud of it.

Andrew: The reasoning behind doing this tour, as the opening band must be to mainly build up for the headlining tour coming up?
Mikael: Yeah, of course. We are exposing ourselves with our music to new and younger fans. Devil Wears Prada has certain kind of fans. A lot of those people are getting into our music. We meet them every night and they are really impressed with our stuff, which is just amazing. Killswitch has all kinds of fans, older and younger and everything like that. Some of them totally know about us. We show up and hopefully impress them, turn a few heads and open a few minds!

Andrew: You guys have experimented quite well on the new record with tracks like 'Iridium'. Were you confident with that or did you think you were taking a risk?
Mikael: It was a risk but at the same time it was one we were willing to take. We talked about it early on that we wanted this album to be very diverse, that it shouldn't be compromised too much and we shouldn't be picky about the things we start out with. For instance, what we usually do is someone comes up with a riff or a piece of music and if we don't like it we just go with something else. But this time we figured, hey listen, work on it a little bit more. If it's not good in the beginning lets add to it, change it a little bit. Martin and Daniel do something on it and all of a sudden we come up with something amazing that everybody agrees on. So that kind of creativity was really important this time around. Also, we said if there are melodies that are different and kind of out there, different from what is something normal for the fan, fine! Lets do it. We just wouldn't restrict ourselves anymore. We're just trying to mark the beginning of the next 20 years of the band's existence with something that is fresh and different.

Andrew: The band has been really stable over the years with very few line-up changes. Was it a little hard to adjust when your bassist Niklasson left the band in 08 and Antonsson stepped in?
Mikael: We have known Niklasson for a very long time. He's been a friend of the band pretty much since we started because he's been active in the same scene as we have been, but in a different band. So on a personal level it was the easiest thing ever. The other four of us have this language kind of thing that we understand when we write music. Its not that we are classically trained or anything like that. We made up our own language when we talk about things. So that took a little while for him to get into. But after a while he totally got into it. So it was pretty easy.

Andrew: The Gothenburg metal scene influenced bands here in the US in a weird way, as metalcore bands. Why do you think that was the case?
Mikael: I can't say why that is, but I think its kind of cool because that means the bands that wanted to create this kind of music wanted to do something differently. The metalcore bands wanted to do it more melodically and took influence from the stuff that we've done. They mixed that together and I think it is awesome. It's kind of the same idea that we had when we started out. We loved death metal and thrash but wanted it to be more melodic. So we took influence from speed metal and traditional heavy metal to combine the two, to create something that we thought was original and cool. So, the metalcore thing doesn't really appeal to me that much. But hey, doesn't matter. Its fine with me.

Andrew: How are your regular fans reacting to your really short [30-35 minute] sets on this tour?
Mikael: We got messages from lot of fans saying 'Ah, I'm not coming out. I don't want to see a short set'. That's fine because this is just the first leg of a long set of tours that we are going to do for this album. The album comes out on Tuesday and we go home in two weeks. So this is the very first step of it. Its basically to promote the album and as I said, to kind of say hi to new people and show our music to them. So its interesting and fascinating to see how easy you can turn people on to your music, people who have no idea who you are before they see you. It's rare because we never really do this. We always do safe tours with death metal bands we share something in common with, we play a festival and usually people come to see that. But here, we play in front of total death metal virgins, you know (laughs). It's a tour for the new fans and to try out some new stuff on stage.

Andrew: What inspired the band to return to some of your clean vocals on the last album 'Fiction' and now with this one, after a long time?
Mikael: It was just the songs. We wanted this album to be more diverse with more mellow stuff as well as some intense stuff. It just totally felt right in some parts. 'Iridium' for instance, is a song that Niklas wrote in 95 or 96! It's always been there, we've always thought about it like perhaps we should use it, but never really worked. But for this album we felt like, 'Fuck it. Lets do it!' because it fits in with the whole mood of the album. It was the first thing Martin B [piano, electronics] worked on when he first joined the band ten years back. Now it totally makes sense to have it on this album. Vocally, whatever fits in we go with it. For 'Her Silent Language', Niklas had this verse and a chorus. It just made total sense for me to mix that up a little bit. I don't want to do it [clean vocals] for the sake of commercially doing something or do make it sound pop-like. It's just that it works and adds some spice to it! About 'Iridium', it has never happened like this before where we had a song written since that long [14 years] ago. Niklas wrote it when he bought a portable studio and it was his first experiment of recording something all by himself with a drum machine and all of that. He was so proud of it. We all liked it, but we didn't really feel that it suited the album we were working on at that time. Finally it worked out and I'm really happy with that.

Andrew: What are some of the upcoming things that you are really looking forward to?
Mikael: We are going home after this tour, staying there for three or four weeks. Then we are coming back. We're doing South America, which is going to be amazing. We're doing Chile, Brazil for the first time, Uruguay and a few countries we haven't been to. Then we're doing North America in May. As soon as we come home from that, we're doing Metaltown, which is a hometown festival. That one is always awesome, right in the centre of the city. We have this very special show. It's going to be huge and amazing. I can't wait to do that. After that it's a couple more European festivals over the summer and then a full European tour in September. It's going to be the biggest production that we've ever done. We are trying to work a few really old songs into the set too. It is going to a really cool year. We're coming back here again in the winter. We're going to announce the whole schedule in a couple of weeks.