Intervista Pain of Salvation (Daniel Gildenlöw)

Hi Daniel, welcome to TrueMetal.
You’ve been on tour for the last few months and now it’s almost ended, how was it?

It’s been fine, the reception has been really good and the new material goes down really well live so it’s fun
A few years ago the band’s lineup was revolutionised with every member changing but you, was it hard to find new bandmates?

Yeah, and it was especially hard to lose the old members [laughs].
It was in several different steps, we had our drummer, Johan, leaving the band much earlier and then Johan and Fredrik followed which was a hard blow and I was…every time it happens I consider just quitting the band, ‘cause it feels impossible every time but in the end, well, first of all every time someone has left the band they are like really convincing me that I should NOT leave the band [laughs].
They had families, they had kids and they really wanted to focus on that; I don’t really have that option, because if I would quit the band everything would still continue, my music would still continue in my head and I would probably be even more absent and frustrated because I wouldn’t even have an outlet anymore, whereas they can quit the band and actually focus on family, especially Johan the drummer, he is very different from me.
He quitted the band, he sold one of his drum-kits, the other one he put it in a warehouse, a storage somewhere, and he just didn’t play at all while for me it’s…how could he even do that?
He is practical to the point where he’s just unbelievable, which made it easy for us to work together, I think, because we were so different that we were more fascinated with each other like “Okay, you think like that…?”.
I remember when one of his grandparents died and he had a very, very close relationship with them and, if that was me, I would be really devastated and go so deep into the emotions of it and just thinking about it over and over again, going through all the memories…when that happened to him I was like “Oh my God I’m sorry, that must feel really, really bad” and he was like “Well, he’s better off where he is now” and that was it, I never really understood that some people actually say that.
I mean, I’m not saying that he didn’t feel anything, of course he did, but it’s just, you know…it’s just like dropping drums all together, okay, interesting…

So it was hard losing them and it was difficult getting new people, which is why the entire “Road Salt” journey for me was a sort of way of taking a break from what we had been doing, because when you start a band with a specific lineup of people you will first make the band a vehicle for your vision, and then after a while, as years go by you will find that the band is actually making you its vehicle and toward “Remedy Lane” and “BE” we had become pretty much the perfect tool for what Pain of Salvation was at that point, so we were like…we were not the best musicians in the world, who could claim to be that, but we were the perfect tools for this band and changing anyone was difficult, because it meant that whoever that was, even if you knew that you were picking the best musician in the world it would still not be the perfect tool for the band, there would still be a period when you have to fill things in, for me I think it was a good way of going back to my roots of music and exploring that for a while until the wound healed a little bit and going back to Metal again [laughs]

Are you still in touch with your old bandmates?

Yeah, we play every once and a while actually!
He has picked up drums again! [Laughs]
We have like once, twice a month we meet up with the families, we cook food and then we “old men” go out in the rehearsing room and we make music and it’s really fun.

Who’s coming, both new and old members?

No, it’s me and Johan and Johan and then the old guitar player from the first album, Daniel Magdic.
We’ve done that quite a few times now and, who knows, I think there might be something coming out of that…

Are you thinking of some special show, an actual reunion…?

I don’t know, but I can tell that everyone is really hungry again…I mean, when they quit they had small kids, now the kids have been growing up and you get that itch up again like, “Aaah, it was kind of fun” because that’s what happen, we met every once in a while, ‘cause we all stayed in touch, and every time we meet we talk about fun stuff and every time they’re like “Hey, it would be fuuun, I miss it, I miss playing, we should play sometimes” and at one point I’m like “What the hell” and I call everyone up and “So, what do you say? Shouldn’t we just meet up and play?” and everyone “Yeah!” [laughs].

What are, in your opinion, the strengths of each of your new bandmate?

The strengths of the new members, I mean, none is new to music, because all of them have been around for quite some time, they know what it means to work with music and what it means to be on tour, so it’s not like anyone one Sunday will go like “Oh my god, touring is really hard, I don’t want to spend this much time away from home”.
Everyone is aware of the cost of doing this, everyone is very versatile, everyone plays different instruments, we’re a band consisting of five multi-instrumentalists which is ALWAYS good because even if you’re focusing on one instrument, just knowing many instruments will make it easy for you to play other stuff on your instrument, you will get a bigger understanding of your musicianship beyond that instrument.
It’s interesting that many years ago when we started off, I have a big vocal range, back then I was the only one who could go really high, the other ones had to really push themselves to get up there; now we have Ragnar and Léo who are both like, they can go ridiculously high up but they can’t go low [laughs] I still have to do that.
But it’s weird because it used to be, I always had to take the high parts because no one could do that, and now is the other way around, no one can take the low parts [laughs] but I think it’s pretty nice because they have different kind of voices, for instance on the “Remedy Lane” material where I have all these kind of harmonies I would have, for instance in “Beyond the Pale” when we have that “ta na na na naaa” we have the regular harmony and then there’s the reply which was kind of my lead thing, but usually I couldn’t do that because nobody can take the high one, when Johan started the band he could do it but just roughly, so now I can take all those lead stuff that I wasn’t supposed to do from the start, it’s interesting…

Your songwriting changed substantially since “Road Salt Two”, what was the main inspiration behind your latest work, “In the Passing Light of Day”?

Musically it was just getting back to harder material and of course, as the years pass, you will go to different places musically and personally yourself and you will be in a different place, since I always try to invest as much of myself as possible in what I do that will reflect on the music too.
Lyric-wise I ended up using my hospital state three years ago as the concept of the album, which I think in retrospective that was a perfect match, like you can see also in the music in a way, it’s reflected also by being in the hospital because you get sort of, you want to get back with a vengeance, after having been in a hospital for four months and you need to get back, you need to get back on stage, you need to push yourself, you become really hungry with getting back and I think that reflects in the music too.

Lyrically I think it’s a very strong album because you get that uncompromising, relentless music paired with that fragile concept and those very intimate topics.
And that combination I think makes for a really strong album.

How did the recording in the studio proceeded? Did you write any music in the studio or was it all ready when you got there?

It’s different for the different songs, some songs I had already with me since a long time, but they never really found a place like the drum pattern for “On a Tuesday” had been with me for many years and the entire song “The Taming of a Beast”, I basically wrote the bulk of that song in 2005 or 2006 and that has been just laying around never finding its place.
For other songs we had different parts, we were sitting, me and Ragnar, in the rehearsal room I would play the drums and he would play the guitar, I would have a guitar beside me and going through stuff, playing and recording.
That’s what we did for most of the songs, and then we would add sounds, keyboards and stuff after having laying down guitars and drums.
The lyrics came later on in many of the songs.

There’s a song in particular I’m curious about, “The Passing Light of Day”, it talks about a lover, or a friend, and something happening in a January; what is it about?

It’s me and my wife, we met when we were 19, and it was in January, we were studying at this school, she was studying theatre, I was studying writing and we were both deeply into human rights, politics, and we be talking…it’s really a honour to be in your forties and still sharing your life with someone you met at 19 because we shared so many things, so we have a lot of roots.
This is a song about that and it’s supposed to be viewed from the angle that I’ve been taken to the hospital, they’ve been trying to understand what is that is causing this enormous pain, the fever just keeps rising and they realise that it’s probably some flash eating bacteria and they try to kill it, cause you have like two or three days and if you can’t break it by then you basically die, it’s just [laughs] ridiculous.
So all of a sudden I’m there with this thing which started off as something annoying, then it turned into something really painful and then a bit scary, and then all of a sudden you’re lying there and you face something really bad, who would have guessed, I was just going away from home yesterday evening and all of a sudden I’m here and they can’t really figure out how to save me right now…

It’s like your life passed before your eyes
Yeah, and you just feel every minute counts, like, “Jesus! They have to do something SOON, dammit!” and I was in such a ridiculous amount of pain, I never felt anything like it and it was at my spine, the low part of the spine, it’s where all the nerves are stuffed down there, that’s a bad place.
And my wife was with me, but I could hardly talk to her at that point because I was doing my best just trying to breath and not scream, because it was so painful, it’s so weird how fast you can go from perfectly healthy to laying there thinking “Maybe I won’t see my children again”, so it’s supposed to be seen from that prospective, that single moment of lying there and with her saying that I shouldn’t be afraid because she’s gonna be there and I’m way beyond fear, it hurts so much I can’t be afraid, I can’t even think of being afraid, so that’s the main bulk of the song, that’s the feeling I’m trying to get, it’s like a homage to me and my wife and how we have to deal with mortality and how we all have to deal with mortality, how from the first second we are born we’re actually moving towards death, which is a weird thing for a species to be aware of.
Even as a kid intellectually you get to know things that, I guess, most animals wouldn’t know and we’re like, “What’s the point, I’m going to die anyway”.
It is weird knowing that, and all of a sudden you’re there going, “Okay, this might be the day. I hope not but…”

The album cover is quite peculiar; can you talk me about it?
I wanted to find something that felt unique, something that I hadn’t seen before, but also go well with the concept.
At one point I just felt that it would be cool to have…we have a sunset in our backyard, and a field and forest and stuff, and when the sun is setting we get a very nice light that shines across the field and then it will hit our house, and it will hit the kitchen windows and that will reflect back down to the lawn.
I was there looking out and my kids were playing there and you had the sunset coming, with all the beautiful nature, and all that sort of golden light being reflected on the kitchen windows, and I thought “It would be really cool to have a picture like this, framing this with the trees on the sides”, and I thought it would be cool to have me and one of the kids painting something on my back, I just like saw that.
I talked to Lars [Ardarve, the photographer] about that and he thought that it was a great idea, after that it was just a matter of…he lives in Gothenburg, so the weather conditions are very specific, he had to drive up and we knew that the chances are really slim to get those weather conditions and we didn’t, but we also realised that having that exact framing would have been too small for a CD, it would have been like a little dot in the middle.
So instead we just focused on the painting on the back thing and I tried lots of different shapes and forms and having the sun, it was a huge part of the concept of the whole album, it’s a symbol of so many different things, I figured it would be cool to have a sun, but not a complete sun, like half sun, a sun that is being painted or a sun that will never be complete.
It was a very nice thing having my middle son painting that; first I painted it on the back of the photographer so we could try it out, and then my wife had to copy that on my back looking at his back, and then we gave Nimh, our middle son who’s seven, we gave him black paint so that he could paint the same shape, he did it and he thought that it was so fun and towards the end when we figured we had enough shots we told him, “Just do whatever you want” and he continued, he made an entire sun, and a face, and other stuff, and there’s this wonderful picture towards the end when he’s turning towards the camera with his hands all black and the biggest smile ever!

It was a very ritualistic moment, I felt really good.
To me it represents the concept of the album, but also it’s like a sign of protection, going into the rain with the sun on your back, like almost a tribal thing.

Davide Sciaky & Nicola Furlan