I N T E R V I E W

Interview Tuomas Seppälä

Hi, and thanks for giving your time to the French webzine http://auxportesdumetal.com.

There is more than a month between the Finnish release and the European one for "The Clouds of Northland Thunder". Why this?

We negotiated with several labels about European licence and we didn't want to delay our Finnish release because of that. By the way, Japanese release came out even earlier, April 22th. It's difficult to get all releases out at the same time. Right now we have three different labels, one in Finland, one in Europe and one in Japan.

If we study carefully your new cover, we can see a lot of things. What were your intentions when you choose this artwork?

We wanted to utilize the lyrics used on the songs. The album cover is based on the lyrics of the song called "Kokko - Eagle of fire. It's loosely based on Finnish national epos "Kalevala".

The photo shoot for your second album is softer than the first one, which was more epic. Did you want to pass on a message through it or you didn't think about the image you will give?

We just wanted to do something different than on our debut album. There's no special message or anything in it. We liked this new style.

How did you worked for this album? Did you compose all the songs and Heidi wrote all the lyrics as you have done for "River of Tuoni"?

Yes, we have always worked like that. I compose all songs and Heidi writes all lyrics. In normal case Heidi writes the lyrics based on the demos of the new songs I have recorded in my home studio. In this new album we did one song in an opposite order. The song called "Lionheart" was composed based on the Heidi's lyrics. It was very exciting process and we will try the same process with a couple of songs on our next album.

You're definitely not a band that composes ballad songs. Is it something that bores you?

I disagree with that one. We do have some ballads. In fact there are two slow songs in our new album. But of course it depends on the defining, whether a slow song can be called a ballad or not.

The main subject of "The Clouds of Northland Thunder" is mythology. Why Heidi decided to write about it, and what is Kalevala, which is one of her inspiration?

Heidi likes to write about mythologies and different kind of national heritages. Kalevala is a Finnish national epos and it's written in poetry form.

People compare your band to Nightwish. Is it a group that inspire you or do you think it's just because you're coming from the same country and doing symphonic metal with a classical voice?

I think the reason we are compared with Nightwish is because we have a same kind of vocalist and we come from the same country. My musical roots are deeper in history and I can mention as my musical heroes for example Ritchie Blackmore and Ronnie James Dio. So Nightwis doesn't mean a lot for me. It's a good band though.

Nowadays, pop voices in symphonic metal seem to be more popular than classical one and some people think pop voices are more emotional. What do you think about that, you who had a soprano singer?

It's about matter of taste. Personally I like both pop singers and classically trained singers. But when we are discussing about music of Amberian Dawn, it's obvious that a classically trained vocalist is needed. There are some extremely difficult vocal melodies in our music and it takes a lot of technical skill to perform these songs.

You've played with Epica in eight countries last year. What is your best souvenir?

Our best souvenir is definitely all our new European fans we got during that tour. And of course we got a great chance to travel with nice people of Epica and our tour crew.

In Paris, there were Finnish fans who were there to support you. What do you think about people who can travel so far to see you?

Yes, we usually have several fans at our gigs, who has travel from far to see us. It's very touching and we always try to get a chance to meet our fans after the show.

Because Tom Sagar left the band, there will be some changes on stage. How do you apprehend it?

We had to let Tom go in mutual understanding because I wanted to take a role of fulltime keyboardist on stage. So nowadays I play keys on stage and we recruited a new guitarist. He (Emil Pohjalainen) didn't have a chance to participate in recording session of the new album, but we will hear his playing on our third album. I will play both keyboards and guitar in future in studio, but I will give more room to Kasperi and to Emil than before.

You don't seem to do a tour to promote your album. What are your projects for the upcoming months?

We are doing only a couple of shows in summer, but we are preparing ourselves for a European tour which will happen at next fall. It's not a hundred percent sure thing yet and we are negotiating with several bands about this matter. But I have a strong feeling that we are touring in Europe again next fall.