WITHIN TEMPTATION – Photo by Patric Ullaeus
When you started with WITHIN TEMPTATION your music was darker and harder…
Well, I don’t think so. It was a different way of making music. It was called more ‘doom metal’ by people at this time. But our latest album, Hydra, is probably the heaviest album we have made so far. For us it’s the heaviest album which took us about two years to write, record and produce it.
WITHIN TEMPTATION‘s new album Hydra features collaborations with Howard Jones, Xzibit, Tarja, and Dave Pirner
How did the collaborations that are on Hydra come up?
We had the songs ready and were thinking about the perfect scenarios for the songs. So we were also thinking about possible collaborations. Then we had Tarja, Dave Pirner, XZIBIT, Howard Jones…actually the fun thing is that we got everybody we wanted to have on Hydra. It was cool to do, because they liked the songs and we said to ourselves ‘yes, cool!’ (laughing) And with XZIBIT we had a certain vision how wanted to have this rap combined with the song and it took us a lot of time until we had the right song for it. We had written a lot of songs and took hiphop tracks from the internet and just put it on the songs to see if it might work somehow. A lot of times it didn’t work, but we finally found a song that it did work with. Then we were thinking about which rapper would fit, and we thought XZIBIT would be ideal for it, because his low voice is a really nice contrast to my voice. So the song became even darker due to the combination.
How was working with Howard Jones, the former KILLSWITCH ENGAGE singer?
Well, we never met him in person. We met him on Skype and talked about everything, sadly we never shook hands by now. He’s a really nice guy and he told that he knows us already since a lot of years. So maybe we should have asked him years earlier. (laughing)
What do ‘hope’ and ‘passion’ mean to you?
That connects somehow together. I think with passion there’s hope. If you’re passionate about something people will embrace it somehow, because it’s a pure kind of emotion. We had a passion for music and we were always hoping for bigger stages. Not in the way that we always wanted to have it bigger, bigger, bigger, but in the way that there would be an audience for us that we can express ourselves to and do our thing and our love for music. So we were always hoping that our passion wouldn’t be senseless.