finnbands: How is it to tour together with 2 Finnish bands?
Vreth: It's great to tour with Finnish bands. Speak your own language and have similar minds. Not everybody understands the Finns and how they live so that's nice. Especially because we have Tarot in the same bus it works very well.
finnbands: For those who still don't know Finntroll please describe the band in a few words or the style of music or what ever comes to your mind.
Vreth: Metal Madness. (laughs) Because it's a combination of so many different styles. The base is metal, the rest is some kind of madness.
finnbands: When a new singer comes to a band the fans often overreact. It's a big issue for the fans. Did you already get some reactions - positive or negative?
Vreth: Well, now it's mostly positive criticism. But last summer when we announced on the website that we have a new Singer everybody was a bit sceptic in the beginning but after a couple of festivals and people have seen me on stage the criticism started to get better and better. Everybody accepted it. First there was a bit baseless and stupid criticism like he doesn't look like a troll or something like that. That was the only bad thing that I got.
finnbands: Is there a boss in Finntroll or is it a more or less democratic band?
Vreth: There is democracy and everybody can contribute in their own way and nobody is like 'No, we're not gonna do it!'. There's nothing like that. Of course when we were recording the album it was like Trollhorn and Tundra made the main decisions, they produced the album. But everybody could give their ideas.
finnbands: Who is responsible for the song writing? Is it just Trollhorn?
Vreth: No, it's not only him but he composed the main amount of the album. I think Tundra has made three songs and Routa also has made one. So it's that everybody contributes but the others haven't in this one.
finnbands: Is there a plan to do a second album in the style of 'Visor om Slutet'?
Vreth: Not at the moment because it was more like an experiment but you don't know what happens in the future. With this band nothing is set, you know. No one knows how the next album's gonna sound.
finnbands: Now some completely different stuff. Some historical questions. Do you think the future would change if you would have been able to give a historical person a hint in the past?
Vreth: I don't wanna see that future. Probably it depends on who (laughs) …which guy of the band would have done that. Yeah, probably this world would be totally screwed up if that happened.
finnbands: Imagine you could travel time which time would you choose and which historical event would you want to be a part of.
Vreth: For me I really want to see how Egypt worked in the old days. That would be great. I really wanna see how their society worked. That would be really cool.
finnbands: What was the greatest invention in history in your opinion?
Vreth: That's a hard one because all of this inventions have brought something bad with them. So I still hope the best is yet to come. I can't really say.
finnbands: No problem.
finnbands: What was your worst moment on stage so far?
Vreth: That depends on how you define bad. One of the worst things was that I kind of lost my voice on a festival last summer. It sounded so bad because you know the air condition in the planes dries out the hole system. So on one of the festivals, I can't remember which one it was, (starts to whisper) I couldn't get the sounds. That was one of the things. It was like a real nightmare. I couldn't really concentrate on the show because it was distracting me all the time.
finnbands: Your best live show so far?
Vreth: Which one should I say, because there have been lots of nice shows now on this last three tours we did. There were really great shows. One of my favourites was of course the Wacken show. That's because there where lots of people there and I haven't really experienced that before and I was quite new to this whole thing. The Show in Hamburg we did a couple of days ago was really great.
finnbands: If you could choose a band or artist you want to tour with - no matter who - who would it be?
Vreth: Oh, crap. (pause) Oh that's hard. I don't have any big bands I want to tour with. I'd like some band that thinks in a similar way and there I have to say this has been really successful with the combination of Tarot and Finntroll. This has been working really, really great! Like some band that has similar mind, not in music but that you get along with them, otherwise it doesn't work to be in the same bus with a band.
finnbands: When you remember your first concert with Finntroll how was it when you went on stage? How did you feel then?
Vreth: The first one I did was a really small one. We had this practice gig we did in a really small club in Helsinki. It was nobody there and we didn't announce that we're gonna play. So, that one was kind of strange to go on stage. But the first real show when I was realising…when I came out on stage…'Oh, crap there's lots of people.' Because it was the Rock Hard Festival. That was the first real gig I did with Finntroll and I wasn't used to that amount of people. I think it was like 10 000 people watching and I'm used to something like 300 or 400 people. That was a big change.
finnbands: And your other bands are smaller ones, right?
Vreth: Yeah, we haven't really done that much gigs and I hadn't been playing outside Finland before.
finnbands: Your lyrics are all in Swedish and I don't understand any Swedish so what are they about?
Vreth: Well, it's mythology, folklore based with lots of influences from shamanism, old children's tales combined with a little bit of anti-christian stuff sometimes, a little bit of drinking and madness. But the main points are folklore, mythology and shamanism. That's the main thing.
finnbands: How did it feel to go to studio with the guys recording this album? Was it something special to you or how was the time there?
Vreth: Yeah, we had a great time there. But the main difference was that this time we had three weeks to record it and 2 weeks to mix it. I'm used to record stuff in about 5 days and then mix it for like three days. So it was really like relaxing a little bit and don't have to be stressed out all the time. That's nice for the whole process but in the beginning we took it a little bit too easy, so we had to really speed up in the end. It was great.
finnbands: Thanks for the interview.
Finntroll
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May 2007
Interview by Lepakko © finnbands.com