Interview с Epica : DARKSIDE.ru

llo, first of all, welcome to Russia, I hope you like it here. How come you’ve never been here before?

Mark: I don’t know. (Laughs) In the beginning there was no interest from Russia, no promoters that wanted to get us over and last 3 years some promoters wanted to have us here, but we didn’t have any free time period. Now we have and it happened.

So, maybe we just start from your last album.
What does represent your cover art work for “Design Your Universe”, where the world turned upside down under water?

Simone: it’s a little bit of short version of designing your universe, creating your own world. The woman on the cover is meditating and creating the world she feels comfortable with. And while she’s doing that she lives her city life, the world goes up side down, and she goes into the water. I was a little bit inspired by “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie, I don’t know if you’ve seen it, with Johnny Depp.

Ahh, yeah, I’ve seen it.

Simone: The moment when they are on the boat and they have to go down, when the sun goes down to get them out. I saw it and I was really inspired and I thought that it’d be great idea for the album cover.

So, it was yours idea?

Yes, I worked together with Stefan Heilemann, photographer and art work designer. I gave him the idea and he made it, because I’m not good at Photoshop.

Really?

Simone: No, I don’t.

But I’ve heard you’re doing some photography as well.

Simone: Yes, but I have other photo editing program and about Photoshop… I’m currently reading books about it, because it’s very complicated. Photos I make don’t have lot of Photoshoping on them.

How come you became interested in photography?

Simone: I’m interested in everything that involves creativity. Besides photography I also like fashion, make up, painting. I like lots of thing besides music. So, whenever I have time… Being in Epica is perfect possibility to make photos, because you travel and see a lot, although my big camera is lying at home, because I thought that would be safety.

And what’s your camera?

Simone: I have Nikon D300S.

Impressive. So, you do have preferences between camera’s manufacturers, there’s like they say, always a competitions between Canon and Nikon?

Simone: Yeah, I like Nikon more.
Meanwhile our photographer was doing some shots with Canon and was a little bit unhappy about when our conversation went…

Simone: and yeah, I see your photographer has Canon. (Everybody Laughs)
But on the other hand, I have Canon compact camera.
А какая у тебя камера?

Did you ever take any lessons?

No, all self taught basically. I have photography books and I have couple of friends -photographers, I watch video on YouTube, tutorial stuff. That’s little bit how I do it.

There’s quite a bit lyrics written in Latin in your songs, which one of you know this language?

Mark: None of us. (Laughs)

Who writes it then?

Mark: I work these lyrics out with Gjalt Lucassen, brother of Arjen Lucassen; guy from Ayreon, his brother is Latin teacher. So, we work together with Jaap Toorenaar, friend of brother of Arjen Lucassen. We work with group together to translate my ideas into Latin; most of them are mine ideas and some Simona’s. Because Latin is the great langua

ges for quires, it sounds really big and epic.

And who sings that quires?

Simone: It’s Epica quire
Mark: Every album we take some different people because we always try to do quire better year by year, but the core people are always the same: Melvin, what’s the name of …

Simone: Previn, Bridget, Linda- wife of our keyboard player Amanda Somerville
Sometimes we switch sopranos and altos so we basically have the same quire but sometimes we add someone new people.

So, you can actually sing that, I mean you know how to pronounce it right?

Simone: Yes.

Mark: And the guy we work with makes sure that we have the right pronunciation before the recording, that every part sounds right way. He’s perfectionist and whenever he would hear something is sang in the wrong way, he’d get little bit mad. (Laughs) Teachers… you cannot fool with them.

Yeah, I know, my father is teacher as well, not of Latin though … physics.

Mark: Yeah, but all teachers are the same. They want all to be perfect.

Tell me about collaboration with Amanda, you recorded version of “Unleashed” with her, why that track is only available as Itunes bonus?

Simone: It’s more like a special track. We chose like my version for the CD and when you wanna have extended versions or cd-extra, we have stuff like that to make it special. And since Amanda is a little bit part of the band anyway, we wanted to do that between both of us. So, solo version ended up on the record and duet version is some kind of rarity, which you can only get on Itunes.

Tell me about the video “Unleashed”, because I broke my brains trying to figure out why 5 of

you guys are hunting a dead man. (Jokingly)

Simone: In the beginning he’s entering the house with his wife and they see that house is all up side down, somebody’s still in the house, he try to chase the guy and the guy kills him and couple months later he’s still in the house, he doesn’t know that he’s dead, and his wife can’t communicate with him or see him. She’s looking in the other direction, when he sits on the sofa. And he sees us- We are basically ghost from underworld who tries to take him with us. The script for the song is not actually what the song about, the lyric itself. The people, who made a video, wrote a script for it according to a budget. The idea I had was a bit hard to create and then they came with the idea.

Mark: And whatever people get out of it is always good. People who make a video, they make their own story anyway. It’s always a struggle between people who make the story of the video and what you want to say, but I never care so much about the video. It’s a necessarily evil to make a video.

Simone: I like it. I like photoshoots and videoshoots.

Yeah, I think girls like it.

Mark: I don’t, I hate it: photoshoots, videos…

But I’m sure fans love it.

Mark: that’s why we do it. For my fun it doesn’t have to be done.

And what’s the reason, I know that for some bands it’s not money wise, it’s not worth it.

Mark: Several reasons: it takes a lot of time, you have to drive all the way to the foreign country; I’d better stay at home and swim at swimming pool. And another one: if you make a long version of the video like we do, MTV doesn’t want to play it, because it has to be exactly like their standard. We don’t

wanna make video their standard, we wanna make the video we want! So, all these channels like MTV, they say: this has to be like this, this and this: 3 minutes, 3.15 long, otherwise we won’t play your video. I don’t like that dark side of music world. We like to do what we want to do; we don’t make videos for MTV. The only reason we make video is to promote the album for fans who do like videos. I really don’t like it.

Simone: But I like it. I found it a little bit fun. Though it’s a long day, you have to wait a lot. You have to do takes over and over again. It feels a little bit silly when you’re standing there and they’re playbacking the song non stop. But I like creative process and always hoping in the end video is good. I’m quite happy with this one. This is all about it.

You said that the lyrics of “Unleashed” itself is not what the video is about, so tell me what is it about.

Simone: The story basically is about old guy who has failed or thrown away many opportunities in his life and he’s not happy about how everything turned out. He feels confined in his own mind and he wants to be free basically. That’s it; it’s not about guy getting killed and haunted by ghosts. But the first script that we wrote that was close to the actual idea of the lyrics would actually double our budget. So we had to come up with new idea as well to make it all fit.

Tell me about song “Tides of Time” – its’ so emotional and sincere, how hard for you was to record it to sing that way. Do you record such kind of songs only when you have special mood or you can do it any day?

Simone: Basically, lyrics is written by me and Amanda at the time when somebody close me, more close to Mark died. So, you’re anyway in this

kind of sad mood, so we wrote the song and recorded it. But when my grandmother died, they want me to sing the song, but I couldn’t have done it, because I was too sad and when you’re singing a sad song, you gonna cry, you’ve got clot in your throat and you can’t sing anymore. So, if I really, really get into the lyrics during doing the concert, then I have to cry and cannot sing it. So, you have to stay a little bit distant, a little bit perspective. Apart from that lyrics which written by myself are, of course, closer to me than Mark’s lyrics, but he tells me what the song is all about and I close my eyes and try to get a vision, try to get the emotions and Amanda is there to help me with that, “It has to be more convincing or not”. I don’t have roses lying around or special lamps or candles. I don’t need that. I just close my eyes.

How many songs did you work at in the beginning during recording “Design Your Universe”?

Simone: 3 or 5 more. We went to the studio to work with Sascha and Amanda on demo tracks, made selection which songs were gonna be on the album.

Mark: We collect every song that everybody write together then, first of all, there are always songs that really don’t fit the style, we list them out. All the songs, that we think are pretty good, go to Sascha, our producer and he listens to it with fresh ear and he makes a new selection and he’s very rude this that. The album should be as good as possible, so he sometimes takes the song out just like saying, “this doesn’t get me a good feeling”. It can be really painful, because you work like 3 month on one song sometimes and it can be thrown out just in one second. But it’s better in the end; after all, I think he made right decisions with songs that weren’t

good enough. When I hear it now, I think he was right, but at that moment you hear something like that, you think, “aahhh, that’s a pity”. So, the end selection we recorded in the studio and only one track was left over and we used as a bonus and extra.

So, Sascha has a strong influence on your sound?

He doesn’t need to do much about our sound, because it’s already established and we work out on our songs very well. There’s not so much to be done, when we come to the studio. But the thing is you need, when you are working with the band on songs for over a year, you are not objective anymore. So, when the guy is there and he doesn’t know any of the songs, he can listen to it with open mind and that’s his quality to listen and to decide this is good and this is not.

In the song “White Waters” we can hear voice of Tony from Sonata Arctica. When you were writing that song did you have in mind that his voice would perfectly fit in there or it came after?

Simone: It came after. Because originally we agreed that he’d sing on the album, but I had him in mind for different song, which in the end didn’t appear on the album. So, I was like, “shit, what do I do now”. So, “White Waters” was a ballad and I thought, “okay, let’s give it go” and I rewrote lyrics a little bit, so it would be a story between man and woman, because I’d really wanna have Tony on the album and he’s happy with this song, because I asked him to sing more in his low voice and he was actually glad that he could do something a little bit different. He liked the story, he liked the song. Unfortunately, we didn’t record the song together in the studio. He had to record it separately in Finland. We sent him a track, he recorded it and sent it

back to us. In a way it’s great, you can write music like that, but since it’s such a creative process, it’s just fun to be there, be creative together and not just to write emails, but on the other hand, it wouldn’t be possible to have him on the album. That’s also a little bit how we are writing music nowadays: we all have our home studio, we send our music to each other, we send our ideas, then we come together and finish the song, because we’re not living in the same village. I’m actually moving now to southern Germany. We’re very happy to have our computers and internet.

There’s two Dutch bands, you - on Nuclear Blast and Within Temptation - on Roadrunner, do you feel any competition between you and them as you both play sympho-gothic metal?

Simone: Within Temptation sells a way more then we do. But if you compare two of us, we’re little bit more underground…
Mark: I don’t agree, in South America and United States we sell way more.
Simone: Yeah, but when it goes who takes first place in Holland, this would be Within Temptation. But in South America we’re doing very well, touring there a lot.
For me, I don’t see big competition between us, because we‘re in different music styles. I actually like Within Temptation songs, they are actually not touring at the moment, they’re writing a new album. Normally, we play at the same festivals, but at the moment it’s kind of quiet.

Mark: The only thing is in the beginning when Within Temptation became big, they also opened up the scene for other bands, that was the good thing. Later on, when people wanted us to book on the festival and then they said, “We cannot book you anymore, because we booked already Within Temptation. So, it has advantages and di

sadvantages. But every time they booked Within Temptation, not every time, sometimes they booked both bands, but 95% of times, when they booked Within Temptation already, our offer was declined, so it’s pluses and minuses.

Thank you for the interview…

Mark: I can do some more questions if you want, but Simone needs more time to prepare before the show then I do, I’m almost finished already.

Simone: I’m getting ready now and have fun with Mark. (Laughs)

With every new album, Epica sounds harder and harder, Mark, you’ve got more vocal parts, is it some natural way or kind of fashion?

Mark: This is natural, because fashion I think is to become less heavy. Bands like Within Temptation and Evanescence, Tristania, Sirenia and many other bands from this genre tend to go less heavy. But we always follow our hearts, we don’t look at fashion and styles, we just do what we feel like doing. I think, if you really follow your heart and you do what you really like, then fans will like it too, because they can hear if it’s true or not true. That’s why we become harder every time. But I think now we are a little bit on the roof, we cannot do way more hard, because that wouldn’t be sound like Epica anymore. That’s why I created this new band besides Epica, because there I can have more heavy songs, it can be more brutal. But I think if we do it with Epica, fans would say it’s different, so I use more heavy songs for side project and Epica can stay Epica. I felt it right.

But do you think you’ll have enough time for both bands?

Mark: I actually don’t have enough time for it, but there’s desire burning in me and I have to do it. I really feel that it has to go out; otherwise old mus

ic is still there, you cannot do anything with that so… Everybody around me says, “You don’t have time to do 2 bands”. Maybe it’s gonna end like I’m gonna explode (laughs), but at least I tried.

Now you’re doing second part of European tour with two support bands, Revamp and Kells. Can people expect some tracks together with Floor?

Mark: We didn’t spoke about it yet, but we did a song with Revamp three month ago in a venue close to place where I live, so it’s possible that we’ll do it again. We’ll see, when tour is starting and the atmosphere is good, everything can happen, if they ask me. They’re actually playing around dinner time, so I have to go to dinner to eat myself before the show. If I do a guest performance, I have to eat too short before our own show. But I’m sure it’s possible if they ask me and probably it’ll happen. One time when we did it, there were a lot of videos on YouTube, people liked that. It was good.

I understand that your last album was released not so long time ago and you’re still doing a tour, but, of course, fans are curious when you are planning the next one and if there’s some material ready by now?

Mark: As we wrote 4 albums if you don’t count “The Score”, so actually 5 albums, we’ve been working all the time like: touring- recording album- touring – recording album. And “Design your Universe” was our best album, we really had that feeling. For myself, as a main composer, I was a little bit tired and I asked all the guys if they had the same feeling. And we decided that we gonna take longer break before we gonna start working on new album, then get down to the new album straight away as maybe it’d be not as good as “Design Your Universe”. That would be really pi

ty, because we always want to improve ourselves. So, now we are little bit on the break, everybody’s doing side projects and as soon as it’s done, we’ll start focusing completely on Epica material. And I’m sure in meanwhile Isaac writes some songs, Coen writes some songs. I have 6 or 7 songs on the shelf, which can be used anytime. So, as soon as we gonna focus on Epica material, there’s gonna be huge amount of songs.

And then Sascha says: “no, that doesn’t give me a good feeling” and throw everything away. (Laughs)

Mark: Probably, probably. He’s always right anyway. (Laughs)

Your music is pretty epic and expensive to record and nowadays when people are downloading it from the internet for free, how long will you be able to work in same scale, do you feel its influence on your selling numbers , and are you ready to invest your own money if lebel wouldn’t give you enough to release what you want?

Mark: We invested our own money for the first 6 years of Epica, so I’m happy we don’t have to invest our own money anymore. So, I don’t think we’d start investing own money again. If we would drop, because nobody’s buying albums, nobody’s buying merchandise, then we couldn’t do it anymore, because one guy even started a family now, so it needs to be income. We did it for the first 6 years with all passion and love, from now and on there has to be income. We managed to this point and now we can live from the band. But I’m sure if we go down again, we’d have to stop invest money; that would be the end of the band. We cannot manage that anymore.

You’re really good in creating long epics lasting like thirteen minutes and you don’t notice that it lasts so long - so easy and natural it goes. How do y

ou compose it, do you have the image of whole song in the beginning or you’re writing it step by step and later unite them in one whole.

Mark: Piece by piece. It’s always tricky question, because when I start making a song I don’t know where it’s gonna end. Sometimes I’m writing and writing and suddenly after 4 minutes I feel it’s done and I stop and that’s it. Sometimes I’m writing and it continues, continues and suddenly it’s 13 minutes, because with “Kingdom of heaven” it’s 13.30 and I thought of going on and I was trying something more and I thought that’s too much. When it feels like it’s done, you have to stop. If you reach the highest point, best of the song and you keep on going, then it gets worse again. After all of these years of experience I know more or less when I’m on this point and have to stop. But you never know where it comes from, it’s like natural instinct, you know, you hear the melodies already; you know where it has to go to. It’s not matter of talent, it’s matter of instinct I think, you hear it, it’s just there, you just have to put it in music.

There were some rumors that Nuclear Blast was going to republish your old records remastered. Is it true and should people expect that, because it’s really hard to get. Will there be some bonus tracks?

Mark: They are going to re-release them, but they have to work with old record company who owns all the rights, but sold it to Nuclear Blast, but old record company is still in charge and they want to re-release them only with a lot of bonus tracks. And there was a lot of bad luck with the studio who was creating files for bonus tracks, then father of the owner of studio died, so there was a lot of delay. It’s one big curse with the old record company: every time, when we had time to work on bonus tracks, something happens. Now we are really busy and suddenly guy called me and said, “We are ready, do you have time?” And I said, “No, we don’t have time at all, this is the busiest hard year what is going to come up now ever”. So, I’m not sure when it’s gonna be released. (Laughs)

Someday…

Mark: Someday, in some years. (Laughs) It meant to be, step by step, there’s some progress, there’s already this deal, and this is great, so now it’s a matter of time.

You’ve got a lot of records by now, but still there’s no full length DVD, do you plan to film some splendid show?

Mark: There’s one option that we’ll play again with the orchestra. But if we do it, it has to be something really special and there’s a chance we’ll do something with big orchestra in Belgium. But the promoter of that show is still busy with his own festival “Metal Female Voices”, and when it’s done, we’ll start talking how to release that. Maybe it’s not gonna happen. But there‘s a plan and attention is there. If we do that show, we gonna record this for DVD, for sure. If not, we’ll wait for other opportunities.
23 фев 2011 the End


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Epica

Design Your Universe

Melins

_Caesar_