HammerFall- interview met Joacim Cans
Joacim Cans: “I think the words hope and freedom gives this album a very positive vibe, a positive touch, because the kind of freedom here is the right to live your life as you want to live and be the person that you want to be. Maybe this album might need some contemplation. It might raise some existential questions to the listener IF they are open for it.”
HammerFall blijft goed bezig! Sinds ze in 1993 besloten om hun eigen koers te varen met toegankelijke heavy/power metal in weerwil met de opkomende meer extremere metalen stijlen, hebben ze een eigen niche gecreëerd met fans over heel de wereld. Daar is het nieuwe, dertiende (!) studioalbum ‘Avenge The Fallen’ het levende bewijs van. Deze opvolger van ‘Hammer Of Dawn’ staat in het teken van vrijheid en hoop. We hadden daar een heel hartelijk gesprek over met zanger Joacim Cans.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 19 augustus 2024
Last weekend was busy for you and I saw some recordings from Sweden Rock festival. That seemed to be a special event with so many people on stage…
Yes, we had a competition where our fans could win the place on stage with HammerFall, singing the song, the first single from the new album ‘Hail To The King’ and this has been recorded as a bonus B side on a single released on Sweden Rock magazine. There are a lot of bonus features included in this issue. It was so much fun, we had two versions of Hector on stage too, being the conductors for the choirs, so it was a really cool thing.
I hope you have recovered from the huge happening…
A little bit yeah. We have been playing at Trondheim Rock two days before, so we have been travelling a lot since Wednesday, so of course, today you are a little bit tired and after so much travelling and two big shows there is always a big party.
Something that changed during the last years, is that you have been writing a lot while touring, on the road. It means that we already have a new album after two years. Can you tell about this evolution in the writing process?
It will be two and a half years or probably a little bit more between the previous album and ‘Avenge The Fallen’, but you are correct per se. This is more the way Oscar is writing nowadays. He brings his studio equipment on tour, so he can always pick up the guitar and find inspiration. Sometimes he just comes off stage and runs to the bus, just trying to find one thing. So he is constantly creative, which is a very good part, but when it comes to my part of the song-writing, I never did anything on tour. I wait until we come back home. Also the fact that Oscar is responsible for all the musical parts in the song-writing, then he hands over the demos to me and I have to fill in the blanks with some melodies and when I am done with creating my melodies, then I write the lyrics. I need to be at home in order to do so and I think some parts on this album are as old as five years. If you are constantly creative, there are so many things coming out of you, but you are not really sure what to do with it. Those parts you can record and just save it for another day and then eventually if there is a piece missing, you can remind ‘oh I have written something on that tour’ – now I am trying to think as Oscar when I am answering this question – but I don’t like it. When we started HammerFall for the first 15 to 18 years, we always wrote at home for six to eight months – maybe ten months – and then we recorded and went on tour and when we were back home, then we started to write again. But now when you are constantly in the process of being creative, I think that makes a change and I think for this album is really strong and every song is a part of the foundation or brick. If you take away one of the bricks, the whole album would fall apart. It is like building a house, so to speak.
Maybe it is also because all the touring and all the years, you don’t have the need to party so much and Oscar can write during the trip…
Yeah but for him it is never a question what he will do – you maybe read this at some place – but after the show in Los Angeles last year… we toured with Helloween – Oscar went to the bus and he was sitting in the bus, writing, because he had some ideas and one of the songs on the album came to life during that aftershow. While we were backstage having a big, big party with some friends and some producer people that I’d never met before and it was at that party that I met Jay Ruston who became my vocal producer for this album while Oscar was working… well, I think you need to find a balance in a way to develop.
Last album you did the vocals in Denmark with Jacob Hansen, but I think you were really looking forward to going to LA again for this vocal issues, this time with Jay Ruston. What about this experience of working with him in LA?
I am always happy to go to Los Angeles. Los Angeles feels like home away from home. I spent so much time there, ever since I was a student back in 1993 – 1994. To me the studio itself is not as important as the environment. Just being in Los Angeles, feeling the sun, meeting some friends, you can go out on a hiking, you can go to the beach, just the atmosphere… It is the atmosphere that really gives me some extra energy and also a kick in the ass, if I am allowed to say that, to deliver, but of course it is also a matter of who is getting behind the mixing console. I have been working with James Michael for so many years, but unfortunately it did not work out this time. I mean, Denmark, that worked as well, but I did not want to go to Denmark in January/February because it is just too cold and windy and rainy. If I want to have shit weather, I can stay home. I need the drill of going somewhere and just think ‘hey I love my life, let us record an album’. I think that Jay was maybe a bit tougher on me than James and Jacob Hansen was, but at the end of the day, he is there to make sure that when I leave, I delivered my best vocal performance that I could have delivered at this point. Not in my life, because it is not a competition, but at least that I can go home without feeling that I could have done better. It was a great experience, we also had a lot of possibilities to hand and do things out of the studio. We went to a couple of parties. It was the big Grammy’s, so I went to a Grammy party with Jay. We connected in a very, very good way.
I can understand that you prefer those things above the coldness in Scandinavia…
Absolutely, I hate the weather here.
The album has the theme of ‘freedom’, something very important in our lives. What can you tell about that?
First of all, it is not a concept album, but maybe the concept is in between my way I was thinking when I was writing the lyrics. That everything, concerning the song, has the word ‘freedom’ somehow. And also the word ‘hope’. I think the words hope and freedom gives this album a very positive vibe, a positive touch, because the kind of freedom here is the right to live your life as you want to live and be the person that you want to be. Maybe this album might need some contemplation. It might raise some existential questions to the listener IF they are open for it. It is all a matter of taking in these lyrics. If you read the lyrics as a listener, I don’t know, because if you listen on line on a streaming service, you just listen and maybe you can’t really follow in the lyrics. So that is a sad part, because I am so proud of all those lyrics, I really want also the listener to sit down and really think about what I am talking about here. So the lyrics can be as deep as you as a listener want them to be. The first line on the album for the song ‘Avenge The Fallen’, it starts with: ‘what is the worst? Be the one who dies or be the one who survives?’ I think that sentence, you can think about it for a while. That goes really deep, like okay, do you want to be the only survivor or is it better to be the persons who die? So that kind of set a little bit the standard to the lyrics on the album. The whole part is specialized in the song ‘Hope Springs Eternal’, because it starts with the quote: ‘if we’re not in for hope, the human heart will break’. If we have nothing to look forward to, if we don’t have any hope left, like I said, the human heart will break. Nothing to look forward to.
It is kind of the urge to survive deep within. I always follow the lyrics and one thing that struck me was in the last song ‘Time Immemorial’: ‘Time is waiting for no one’ also a sentence you can think about…
Yes and the thing is, with that song, it raises the question – at least for me – that we are wasting time, trying to gain more time. It is better to make every second count. When it is over, it is over. I think we all just have to understand that. Think about it and live like you are going to live forever, I think that is the only way. Make plans, crazy plans and if people say ‘you cannot do that’, say ‘of course I can’. At least I can plan to do it.
That is a very good way of standing in life!
It gives depth to this album, with the freedom aspect and also the hope aspect. It is very simple. This is not brain surgery, these things have been read before, maybe you should see many of these songs as a reminder. When people listen to it, they will think: ‘oh yeah, he is right. Of course it is that simple. I just forgot about it’.
People need some positive vibes, because in the news you mainly read negative things…
I think people should just take a break from the news sometimes, because also, you don’t even know what is the truth anymore.
The song you mentioned, the ballad ‘Hope Springs Eternal’, is one of the songs that was already – partly – written long before now?
There were parts, Oscar had an idea and he kind of finalized this idea for this album. I did the vocal melodies, except for the chorus. I wrote it like a month before I entered the studio. I think the idea of this song is very, very old, but we did not know if it’s going to work. This is also one of the songs – when I heard it the first time – I got an idea. So I started to sing and that is more or less exactly what you hear. I got a feeling for this song. I think this song is something unique, I think it is very, very strong and I have very high hopes for this one.
HammerFall always add male sturdy choirs to the songs, but this time there a lot of famous people involved, at least they were different than other times. Who was there?
We did two backing vocal sessions: one in Gothenburg where we had Niklas Isfeldt, the singer from Dream Evil, we had the bass player and guitar player also from Dream Evil, we had Jake E from Cyhra and Thomas Vikström from Therion and then we had a second backing vocals session in Los Angeles. And there we had John Bush from Armored Saint and ex-Anthrax, we had Marc Lopéz, the new singer from Metal Church, also the singer for Ross The Boss, we had Björn Englen, a very close friend of mine who is a bass player who has been playing with Yngwie Malmsteen, Quiet Riot, Dio Disciples. He is one of these talented, well-hired bass players in Los Angeles. We have a comedian, Jay Chris Newburg and we had Howie Simon who is out now touring as a guitar player with Winger, but he also played with Nelson, he was is Alcatrazz, he played with Talisman and we also had my daughter Mathilde! I was so happy that John Bush came over and he really wanted to do this. He was so focused. He did not come to party. He came to really deliver a solid backing vocal.
For me he was the best singer of Anthrax and that means a lot…
It does (laughs)
The first single was ‘Hail To The King’ with a video, now we have ‘The End Justifies’ with a black & white video in the rehearsal room… what about the making of these videos?
The most fun was the second one, the black & white one in the rehearsal room, because there was so much energy! We were playing together, we did not have our stage clothes on, but I think you can really feel the energy of the song and our performance. We were really playing on with the song, that was really cool. For ‘Hail To The King’ – being the main single from the album – we wanted to have something impressive, something that people would look at and say ‘wow, this is really cool and massive’. It is not cheap AI, this is really a lot of hard work for Patric (Ullaeus – Vera) to put this together. I think for this song, there were some things that we really needed to have in this video, especially ‘the sun is rising’ part, because in every verse I sing ‘the sun is rising’ twice and this is a song of hope. Hope is reborn when everything else is forlorn, no matter how dark the night be, the sun will always rise and wipe the darkness away, so hail to the king! The king is dead, hail to the king. There is always something good out there.
In the artwork there should also be freedom for Hector, because he is going his own way. Can you shine a light on that artwork?
What he is doing, he is breaking the chains that were holding him down. On one side you have the evil warriors, on the other side you have the more angelic symbols, a hammer and this is Hector’s way to mark or to make a statement that he is the master of his own life. So he breaks free from evil and the good and he kind of dictates his own rules. The way I see it is that there might be something good to use from both sides. From the evil side, from the dark side and from the light side, that is up to me to make good decisions. A lot of what happens on the artwork, is in the song ‘Rise Of Evil’. It is not the title track that defines the artwork or the album as a whole. If you listen to ‘Rise Of Evil’ you get kind of a story which is written – from my perspective – I am walking with the devil and with the angels. I both listen to them and at the end of the day, I say: ‘thank you, I am fine, I am going to live my life the way I want to do it’.
And why did you choose then another album title?
The album title is one thing and since that is the opener on the album and the phrase I mentioned before: ‘what is the worst? Be the one who dies or be the one who survives’. Think about it for a while. That will be standing like the standard for the rest of the album and also for that song. As long as you have a voice, you should make yourself heard. If you are the last person left, it means you are the one who survived. Make a difference. Do something good with it. Maybe that is what I see here. Hector is the last man standing in these days and he breaks free from the good and the evil side just to be the trailbraser that he is.
To occlude let us have a look at your plans to go on the road…
We are doing a lot of festivals this Summer to finalize the tours for ‘Hammer Of Dawn’ and also we are implementing the new songs. So now we play both ‘Hail To The King’ and ‘The End Justifies’. When we are done with this, in August, then we are going to rehearse a whole new set list for the special guest tour we will do with Powerwolf. Then we have Australia for January next year. We have this 70,000 tons of Metal cruise and then we have a lot of plans for the rest of 2025 and we will see what happens, but the plan is that it is time now for HammerFall to go out back on the road and present the biggest headline tour ever. That is the plan for next year later.
