Metal-Rules.com’s interview with Opeth’s Mikael Akerfeldt
Interviewed by Jeff Kent, March 2001
One of the benefits of getting “older” is that more of the
bands today have followed a parallel musical path to mine. Opeth is a
perfect example as they loved Iron Maiden early on and then moved into
more Progressive genres; always trying to capture their new influences
in the music. On the verge of releasing their fifth album, Blackwater
Park, vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Mikael Akerfeldt took the time to
call me from his native Sweden. As you’ll see, I may be new to the
band, but I’ve fallen for them and I’ve fallen hard.
You have the upper hand here because I’m a newfound Opeth
fan. I’m a clean slate. Be gentle.
[Laughs] That’s nice.
I
can’t stop listening to Blackwater Park and it makes me mad at
myself for not taking everyone’s advice to listen to Opeth earlier.
That’s cool, I’m glad.
I’m working my way backward through your back catalog now.
You’re probably going to like at least Still Life, the
album before this one and the one before that.
Do you see yourself progressing in a definite direction or are
you just going where the music takes you?
Depends, for the last couple of albums we haven’t done much
touring so I’ve had a lot of time in between recordings to write
therefore we put out an album each year. I pretty much let the music
take whatever it wants to go. I don’t think much about it I just
write; we use the stuff that’s good.
It sounds like most of it is riff writing, adding riffs together
to create these almost epic songs.
Some songs are put together like that where I didn’t know I had
two sections that would go well together until I actually tried it.
Some parts I wrote entire arrangements and songs at once.
My favorite part of the album is that twisted dissonant little
acoustic guitar melody at the beginning of “Bleak.”
Yeah, I know what you mean. I love that stuff as well, that
disharmonic stuff, especially with an acoustic guitar. I’m very fond
of that.
Did working with Steven Wilson add a lot to the record? Since I’m
really only familiar with the last two albums, I can hear a distinct
difference between the two.
Well Steven Wilson is a big idol of ours both as a producer and
with his band Porcupine Tree, I’ve been listening to them for a
pretty long time now. To work together with him made us maximize our
performance because we really wanted to impress him. He’d never
produced a Metal band before and it was a big experience for him, so I
think he was a bit nervous as well. He produced all the vocals and
lead guitars with us. He also helped out writing vocal harmonies and
stuff like that, we also used him because we knew he was very good
with sound. We’d never really experimented a lot with sound for the
guitars, but we knew what he was capable of. Every idea we had we
asked him if he could do it and he fixed everything as well as coming
in with some weird ideas himself, which we liked and ended up using.
Was he familiar with your music going into the project?
Yeah, he was the one who contacted me actually. He got a copy of Still
Life when he did an interview with a journalist who’s a friend
of mine. My friend knew that I was a big Porcupine Tree fan, so he
gave him the Still Life album and my email address. So then I
got an email from Steven which said he thought it was one of the best
albums he’d heard. Then we started talking about doing an album
together and I met him in London to ask him if he wanted to produce
what would be Blackwater Park and he said he would.
He plays all of the acoustic piano on the album, right?
Yes.
I think that adds a whole new dimension.
It does. We’ve used piano before on our third album My Arms
Your Hearse, but I was doing it all and I’m not a piano player
in the same way as Steven. He can pretty much play every instrument.
We wanted to add something special; also to get him featured on the
album, we got him singing a couple of lines as well and he played one
guitar solo.
Do you think he’ll go back to Porcupine Tree having learned
something from Opeth?
Oh yeah. We were doing press in London where he lives and he
invited us to dinner and he played a couple of new demos of Porcupine
Tree, and it was Metal. He said, “can you hear the Opeth influence?”
I was pretty blown away.
That’s excellent.
Yeah, we’re turning more into Porcupine Tree and they’re
turning more into Opeth, so we’re thinking about changing names
[laughs].
Everything ends up blending together into one thing simply
called Music.
Well people love to categorize and they ask me what they should
call Opeth’s music and I tell them I’d like it to be categorized
under “Good Music.”
In describing your music I tend to use the word beautiful a lot,
which not everyone understands after they’ve heard you. There’s
definitely that full rich sound.
I’m glad you think so.
It sounds like your clean vocal style is improving each album.
Is that something that you’ve worked on, or does it just happen with
experience?
I don’t practice anything and we don’t rehearse. I never do any
kind of practicing between recordings. I just kind of talk myself into
getting better since the last album.
Do you foresee going to a completely clean vocal style?
I don’t know, I think what makes Opeth is the combination of the
two vocal styles.
The whole album is an exercise in dynamics.
Yes and that’s what we’re all about. We’ve always been about
that and it’s one of the most important parts of our music. That
goes for the vocal styles as well. I think it creates some kind of
special dynamic because the screaming is one of the most extreme
styles there is and if you combine it with the normal singing you can
create some terrific dynamics there?
Is it hard to play a whole song like that live when you have
that many shifts? Does it take away from your energy flow in the song?
It’s not hard for us, we’re used to it now. We’ve done five
albums and even a couple of gigs so we’re used to that. I’d say it’s
the same for us as it is for any other band playing their stuff. It’s
so normal for us that we never really stop to consider what we’re
doing.
Most people don’t realize that you can have quiet parts that
are just as intense as the loud and heavy parts. It’s not only about
volume.
Yeah, people don’t really think in those terms. You’re pretty
much the first person that ever understood it.
A lot of bands are starting to do that. A band like Pain of
Salvation does a similar thing.
I’ve never heard them. A lot of people are telling me about them,
but I’ve never heard them; I should have to check them out.
So you’re coming back to America this year.
Yeah, pretty much for the entire months of April and May we’re
going to be in the States and Canada.
Are you looking forward to it? I know last year you only got to
play the one show in Milwaukee.
Yeah, we’re looking forward to it very much actually. We’re
looking forward to the whole touring thing because we haven’t really
toured since ’96. So it’s been five years since our last tour. It’s
going to be an interesting experience for us, not only because we
haven’t done it in a while, but we’ll just enjoy being in America.
It’s always one of those countries that you want to see properly.
You laugh, but it’s like that for Scandinavians. All the cities we’re
going to have those fucking classic names like Dallas, it’s going to
be amazing.
Since it’s been so long, do you know what bands are out there
that would go well with your style?
I have no idea. Pretty much we don’t care what bands we play with
as long as we get our stage time. Obviously if it’s bands we like
personally it’s going to better. I don’t know any of the guys in
Nevermore, I got a couple of emails from the singer; I don’t know
him personally, but I like their music so that’s a good start.
They do a lot with dynamics too, which is good because many
bands today just try to be as extreme as they can for as long as they
can.
How many times can you hear that? Fast music is not exciting, I
think with dynamics you can be way more extreme. If you just play fast
all the time you can’t tell exactly how fast it is.
Have you always liked those dissonant harmonies?
Yeah, I’m very interested in that. I was a huge Voivod fan a
couple of years back; they had many different chords the same with
Coroner, I love Coroner. Basically the strange choice of notes came
from like Led Zeppelin III.
Today it seems like more bands are combining influences rather
than emulating one specific band or sound and sometime they’re
sounds that you wouldn’t expect to work together.
I think there are a lot of bands out there who have dropped what
they thought they wanted to do and just started experimenting a bit
more. That’s what makes a band grow I think.
If it results in albums like Blackwater Park then I’m all for
it.
[Laughs] Yeah, me too.
The cover is equally suited to the music.
Yeah, it’s nice. I love the cover. It’s Travis Smith who did it
again, he did the Still Life album as well and he did the new
Nevermore. He’s done a lot of covers and I think he’s the best
artwork guy around right now. He’s like a… painter [laughs].
He’s a “real” artist, not just some guy who does album
covers.
He should be very well known I think. He’s starting to some
recognition and he’s got a lot of jobs through this.
Do you think that after the acoustic guitar and the piano you
might progress to using strings?
That’d be interesting, but it would pretty much have us unable to
perform the songs live unless we had the other musicians with us. We’re
such a small band that we couldn’t afford to travel with an
orchestra or something, it’s just too expensive. But it would be
very interesting to do an album like that. I may do some of that in my
little side project where I’ll be able to use instruments I’ve
never used before. It’s like an itching I have to create something
apart from metal.
Will it just be you?
No, it’s going to be a keyboards and by that I mean Mellotrons
and Fender Rhodes, stuff like that, the guy from Spiritual Beggars
[Per Wiberg]. Me and him and a guitar player who’s been in a couple
of Swedish bands that are totally obscure. He’s one of my favorite
guitar players of all time.
More of an ambient record?
It’s going to be very mellow, but very, very dark and very if I
may say so, beautiful. It’s going to be like Simon and Garfunkel
type harmony vocals.
I guess that’ll give you a chance to work on your clean vocals.
Yeah and it’s an itching I have. I’ve been doing five Metal
albums now and I just want to try this out and play with different
musicians as well.
What kind of expectations do you have for the tour?
I think we’re pretty much going to see all the fans who have been
with us since the beginning and maybe some new people who have heard
our name and heard good things. But I think the bigger part of the
audiences will be fans that have been aching to see us for a long
time, six or seven years. Since we’ve never done a tour of the
States I think all of our fans are going to show up of course, but
hopefully we can snitch one or two from the Nevermore crowd as well.
At the one gig we did in Milwaukee the response from the crowd was
just amazing, so I have high expectations for the tour.
It’s a big country.
It is, and I’m sure we’re going to have our ups and downs at
shows, but I wasn’t to see the States as a tourist as well. It’s
been a dream of mine to rent a car or something and drive maybe from
the East Coast to the West Coast with my best friend Jonathan [Renske],
who is the lead singer from Katatonia. We want to go down to those
redneck places just see everything. Maybe meet the Amish people
[laughs].
I don’t know that they’re familiar with your music, but you
never know.
No, I don’t think so either, and no you never know, but I doubt
it.
Judging from the studio diaries at your website, it looks like
you try and have all the songs ready, at least in your head. Doe sit
take a long time to get them to come out the way you want with little
or no rehearsal?
I pretty much have all the basic structures written before we go
into the studio and I’ll send out tapes of demos for the rest of the
guys. We leave a lot of space though for adding things in the studio
because it’s more interesting to experiment in the studio, which we’ve
done for the last few albums, it’s where you come up with some of
the best things I think. It’s a very inspirational place to work. I
also wanted the other guys to come in and contribute with their own
style since they don’t write the material. Also when you come out of
the studio you have a fresh product. Not only for the fans, but also
for yourself as a listener as well. When we did the first album we
were so well rehearsed that when we listened to the finished album
there were no surprises in there for us. Now we can listen to Blackwater
Park on the drive back home to Stockholm and say, “ohhh, I
forgot about that riff, that was pretty cool.”
How much of it gets done in one take? Are there parts that are
improvised on the spot and end up on the record?
Some of it, but most of it is written and then we record it. We can
come up with something and then half a minute later we’ve put it on
tape. We hung out in the mixing room doing the lead guitars and
thought about what we should add like certain harmonies or a strange
sound effect. We tried everything out and when we found something that
was good, we used it.
So you don’t have any limits as to what you’ll use to get a
specific sound.
Not at all.
A lot of Metal bands feel limited by what they can and can’t
use.
We’ve never felt that we had any boundaries, if we like it we
just do it, we don’t care.
How did you get that cool guitar sound at the end of “Bleak?”
I LOVE that. That’s Steven who came up with it. Basically I think
we told him that we wanted the guitar to kind of fall to pieces. He
just put that sound on it. We were laughing so hard because it’s so
ugly. Then again it has a nice effect with the ugliest guitar sound on
the album coming in contact with the next song “Harvest,” which
opens up with a beautiful acoustic guitar.
The other thing that would have been cool would have been to use
it as the last track on the album and let it go on seemingly forever.
I could listen to that ugly sound for a long time; there’s actually
a lot of music in it.
Yeah, but we had the song “Blackwater Park” and we wanted it to
be the last track. It’s the classic way to have the last track be
the title track.
Do you see whole albums almost as suites that work together,
even if they’re not concept albums?
Kind of, yeah. I feel that every song on there is equally
important. Everything that we record ends up on the album, so we want
to have it one hundred percent perfect.
So instead of having fifteen four-minute songs, you have six or
seven ten-minute songs.
We don’t want to spend time working on songs that we know from
the start are not as good as the others. If I have a basic song
structure that I’m not a hundred percent satisfied with I make it
one hundred percent in the studio with the “spices.” We know what
we like and what we don’t like.
Some of the best moments on the album are those shifts between
two sections that don’t sound like they should work.
Yes, that’s what we enjoy doing, putting together stuff that
shouldn’t go together.
Do you have any Classical influences?
Not really, I listen occasionally to Classical music, but not that
often.
Do you listen to any of the contemporary Scandinavian Folk
music?
Not straight Folk music, it has to be some kind of Folk Rock.
Bands like Hoven Droven and Hedningarna?
Yeah, they’re pretty cool. We have tons of bands like that in
Sweden that mix modern music with more traditional Folk music.
I was thinking back to the idea of using strings and an
instrument like a Cello is perfect for your sound.
We’ve been thinking about that for a long time, but I don’t
want to over do stuff. There was a time when we did the second album
where I was in an almost pretentious state of mind and I wanted to
have everything on there. But I think it was a good choice to keep it
subtle. We always wanted to have the four of us in the band doing
everything on the album and we never really used any guests until
Steven Wilson for this album. We’re still a Metal band. We never
used keyboard or anything to make certain “sounds.” I think the
guitar is very much an underrated instrument because people think they’re
done exploring the guitar. I think there’s so much you can do with
one that’s never been done before. People ask me all the time who’s
playing the keyboards and I tell them there are none, it’s all done
with guitars. You can experiment so much with a guitar that it’s not
necessary to use keyboards. It’s easy to create some kind of
atmosphere by turning on a keyboard, punching a button and playing a
chord. We’ve never been about disguising our music with some kind of
cheap atmosphere.
Do you ever get a really cool guitar sound by accident and then
find you’re unable to recreate it later?
Yeah, we record at night sometimes and I record all my solos alone.
I wanted to switch the sound a bit, so I went over to the amplifier
and turned the knobs a bit, but then I couldn’t remember what the
initial settings were, the sound I was supposed to have, so I got some
strange sounds from there. Just a simple thing like turning the volume
down on the guitar. I had full distortion for doing solos, but then I
turned the volume down on the guitar and did the solo for “Harvest”
with that sound.
Do you prefer to stick to simple changes like that or do you use
a lot of effects?
We use effects, but simple changes are still very effective if done
right. Steven came up with a lot of the effects, so I don’t know
what they were. He was using Pro Tools, the software…thing, I don’t
know anything about it, but he came up with some really cool sound
with some plug-ins he used.
Are there guitarists you listen to who continue to surprise you?
Guys like Bill Frisell the Jazz guitarist or Robert Fripp?
I don’t like when people experiment too much, I still want to
hear the guitarists themselves. I like Fripp and what he’s done in
the past and some of what he’s doing now, but I prefer hard guitar
players. One of my favorite guitarists aside from that Swedish guy
that I’ll be working with is Andy Latimer, the guitarist in Camel.
This guy called Jerry Donahue who is a Bluegrass guitarist basically;
he’s doing demonstrations for Modern Guitarist I think and he used
to be in Fairport Convention.
Do you know who Bill Frisell is?
I’ve heard the name.
He has a very distinct sound. You can tell it’s him by one
note.
Ok, that’s what I like.
Have you heard the band Naked City?
Yeah, oh yeah! Is that him?! Oh shit! I’ve been listening to
them, the guy who ran our first record label, candlelight, he was a
very big fan of Naked City and he played us some of their stuff and it’s
just amazing. I’m not sure if I think it’s good, but I’m
absorbed in it. It’s almost funny because it’s so extreme. They
had one song where they put in like thirty different music styles in
one song it went from Jazz to Grind Metal…
Mhm, its called “Speedfreaks,” and I’ve seen them do it
live.
You must have been laughing.
It was great and the funny part is that most of them are very
unassuming, almost boring looking.
And they’re a bit older. Are they American?
Yeah.
Shit yeah, I was laughing when I first heard it because I didn’t
know if it was a joke or not, but I could definitely tell that they
knew their instruments. I have to check it out more now. I came to
think of another guitar player that I really, really like. Ritchie
Blackmore. He’s got the tone, you can hear instantly it’s him.
Do you ever just jam?
No, we rehearse so rarely that we can’t waste time doing that.
Which is a shame because I love it. It’s also hard to do when you
have two guitarists. I’m more of a jam guy than Peter is, but I’ve
had some jams with the two Martins. It was funny, but it always turned
into some kind of blues because when you jam that’s really the only
thing you can do and enjoy. It wouldn’t be fun to jam Grind Core
stuff.
Do you stretch any of the songs out when you play them live?
No, we don’t jam anything live. Our songs are pretty much jammed
and ready. It’s something I regret a bit because as I said I love to
do it. We have a track called “Credence” that has a jam ending, so
we might do something with that, since we’re going to play it live.
Do you have a setlist for the upcoming tour already?
Yeah, we’re gonna go for the safe cards. Since we rehearse so
rarely we’re going to go with the stuff we know by heart and not try
something we haven’t played in ten years. We’ll do our standard
set with the new songs added in.
How much of Blackwater Park will be included?
I think two songs. We want to cover every album and since we only
have an hour onstage we want to do at least one song from each album.
It’s not only a Blackwater Park tour it’s more like a OrchidMorningriseMyArmsYourHearseStillLifeBlackwaterPark
tour.
It’s the Opeth tour.
That’s what people want to see and we want to give it to them.
Thanks to Jeff Kent from Promethean Crusade for contributing
this interview. Be sure to check out the zine! Goto prometheancrusade.com
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