Interview met Marko Hietala
Marko Hietala: “Sometimes I have to kind of consciously step back from my own idealism, because it starts to hurt too much. That is why I often end my news moment by reading scientific news. They have some fine things, signs of a better future”
Als er één band uit Italië het gemaakt heeft qua internationaal succes, dan komen we toch wel bij Lacuna Coil terecht. Een vaste waarde sinds de jaren negentig is het, maar zij begrijpen de noodzaak om mee te gaan met de tijd, zonder identiteitsverlies. Steeds wordt de muziek geïnspireerd door wat er in de wereld om ons heen gebeurt en dat is natuurlijk een nooit opdrogende bron van ideeën. Het tiende studioalbum, met als titel ‘Sleepless Empire’, is klaar om boven de doopvont te houden en dus overliepen we met zanger Andrea Ferro de stand van zaken vanuit zijn thuisbasis Milaan.
Vera Matthijssens Ι 14 februari 2025
How are you doing?
Pretty okay. I am doing some video interviews. I’ve got a new album coming out, so life as it is for me.
Yes, but there will be more calmness in your life than when you were in Nightwish. Can you tell something about the inspiration for this second solo album ‘Roses From The Deep’?
Inspiration? I don’t know, I just tend to write stories that feel personal, whether it is personal or just a story. For instance if we take ‘Frankenstein’s Wife’. Lyrically it is kind of gothic splatter romance with quite a lot of humour in it. It is a song with a story that doesn’t relate so much to life, but then you got something that is very personal, like for instance ‘Left On Mars’. It is very much about the alienation, feelings of not being understood and also being incapable to understand why some other people are like that and you end up as an alien in a lonely place and you need someone to bring you back.
Indeed, recent years were not so easy for you, because you struggled with inner conflicts…
Yeah, they were pretty heavy and they took a lot of years out of my life, while I was just holding on by the skin of my teeth. In hindsight I probably should have walked away from everything earlier and dealt with these things earlier, but it was also somehow, you know, human beings are relentless towards themselves. We don’t want to give up.
Always doing the utmost to come up to expectations, I can imagine.
And I should remember, already in 2010 my psychiatrist said: ‘The graveyard is full of people who are most important.’ Or actually, maybe the most correctly if you translate it from Finnish, would be ‘The graveyard is full of irreplaceable people’. That’s the right way of saying it.
Whether you want it or not, you think that way. Deep within you always want to please somebody. We are raised that way…
Yeah, pretty much. Then feelings of alienation, feelings of worthlessness loom up. For every extra sensitive person, you get hundreds or thousands more moments of criticism, already just as a kid, compared to what basically normal humans do, because we are always late, you are always in your own thoughts, you don’t listen, you don’t do things. It is a pretty hard condition. So it is no wonder that it ends up being a nerd with side effects like depression and anxiety.
I think we see our art, something we write or compose, as something like an escape from all the things you don’t understand…
Indeed and that is one of the things that I do have the hyper focus on. When I am in the process of writing something or doing musically, it is affecting things or when I am going into the studio, adding something, then I can go for the whole day. I forget to eat if there is just enough coffee and all that, but then I like things that I don’t necessary like. It is a hell of a mental rock to turn, gathering all your strength in order to stay somehow attentive when things are not yours or when you feel that it is of no use to me. It is a struggle, but then again, you have to learn to live with that.
Indeed and afterwards you feel better…
For sure, this being the ruler at the front in a rock-‘n-roll band is probably a pretty good compensation.
One of my favourite songs is the long track in the middle of the album, called ‘Dragon Must Die’…
It is the prog metal epic of the album, definitely. The lyrics of course are heavily symbolic. We live among all these different heads of this particular monster, trying to influence us. Politics of fear, religious oppression, political oppression, whatever… For this particular song, we had some pieces already pretty early on, already like four years or so, but it took a while for us to put the whole song together, because it was realized pretty early on that this could be the prog metal epic of the album. And then also my band mates, Tuomas Wäinölä on guitar and Vili Ollila on the keyboards at that time (now he is not in the live band anymore I should say but some changes are inevitable) did some magic. These guys had a really big part in making this song this big and this versatile.
You make solo albums and have some ideas, but the other members are also very important, isn’t it?
Yeah very much. The first album was basically more of a solo album, but already also a band album. I tried to find that kind of a group with unification and we actually had rehearsals for some songs. Also preparing for tours is with rehearsals and everything. So capturing this kind of a thing was essential and for a long time I roamed between different band names that I would maybe like to use, but then the guys in the band were like ‘Marko, you are the one they know, let us go under your name’. So that is what happened, but I do not feel any kind of personal satisfaction or get a kick out of it.
Do you meet the members also outside the working environment?
Yeah I do, because on the tours we are also being quite some time together. Sometimes with other projects, like for instance the Finnish Heavy Christmas thing, that tour is every year and this time it was the twentieth anniversary this Christmas. I have been on that tour for nineteen years and I think Tuomas has been there for seventeen years, so we know each other for that long with interchanging ideas and playing instruments and all that. We have a pretty good vibe together. Anssi, the drummer, I met first time when I was fifteen and he was sixteen at a musical camp. I was there with my Spanish bass so to speak. He has a place two kilometres away from me. These are guys that I like, we have a great bond. Of course they are like me, and there is also trouble with some weirdoes every now and then, but luckily we recognize the fact that we are all troubled weirdoes sometimes. We can walk off and leave it behind on the spectrum of the passed age.
Are you interested in things bigger than us humans, like space and astronauts and the sixties and seventies vibe when they were heading for going to the moon and other planets?
In that technological era, there was ambition. It also had more freedom to build that ambition without all kinds of science restricting things coming up; like for instance Putin’s war.
In that era there was the Vietnam war…
Russians for instance, their basic level of technological culture is not there that much, they have shitloads of oil, they are behind in the green movement. They have to get rid of their barrels, so why not ignoring all the things that the green movement has done and a lot of the countries see from other countries: ‘okay we can still sell this stuff’, because we did not die of it yet. It is useful for a lot of people and a lot of companies and countries, also to have that war going round the world going on. Keep people ignorant, then they are easy to control. So it is a weird world. We even don’t know if and why we have to be left this way. It seems in so many ways so inhuman to me, while in the end everybody who walks on the street really would like to have a safe place to spend their night, a safe place for their children and family to spend the night and some food on the table.
And you feel helpless about that…
Yeah sometimes I have to kind of consciously step back from my own idealism, because it starts to hurt too much. That is why I often end my news moment by reading scientific news. They have some fine things, like okay, this condition can maybe save us with the water from the moons of Jupiter and provide life and things like that. These are things that interest me and they are signs of a better future.
In recent years one of the challenges must have been that you have been acting in a Finnish TV series…
Well, not actually acting. It is more of a reality TV, so I was as myself, but I think it is a nice concept. I think it is a Dutch concept and it was in Germany too. You have a bunch of vocalists and they put them in the woods in a mansion and everyone ends up singing the other one’s songs. You have like a ‘team for the day’ and the team of the day switches at the end of the dinner and lunch table and the other ones perform the king’s songs. Basically I am of course very sceptical about reality TV, and taking part in it, but this was really like a musician friendly environment and we had a really good bunch of people there. They came from different ages and different parts of the genres and so on, but it ended sincerely as an open supportive group, like one for all and all for one. That was something that really surprised me and made it a real fantastic experience to do that. It came in the Fall and ended up just before Christmas. All of the song performances that I did there can be seen at YouTube, if you are interested in it. There were a lot of nice moments that I got to jump out of the usual box and do something totally different and surprising.
I like it that there are also a lot of folk influences on the album…
That is good, because it isn’t an ambition of mine… I mean, even the simplest things can make really big changes in how you perceive the atmosphere and mood. If you put in some things that can arrange that are sudden and even complicated, the song itself might really sound catchy. Combining different elements, how to arrange it and trying to catch the emotions of people is always a tryout and a journey.
The song ‘Tammikuu’ is sung in Finnish language. What is it about?
It is January, my birth month and the song starts pretty much from the things that I stripped out from my childhood in a tiny village in the middle of Finland, but then all kinds of things go into a kind of re-birthing yourself and going through all kinds of weird happenings. It definitely speaks on the side of imagination.
Was there a certain reason why you called the album ‘Roses From The Deep’?
The song itself already existed. I got the idea for this song when I was trying to create a romantic ghost song. There is someone in limbo saying ‘I never told you I would come for you’, but she did. Thus, a romantic ghost song therefore, but as an album title of course it is more symbolic. It just fits, because then you get where your imagination and your thinking and all the subconscious things come up into the kind of stories you write, which is pretty clear – symbolic then – even with the cover.
What are the plans for the near future?
First of February I have to travel to Finland, doing rehearsals with the band. We probably do a couple of album release shows over there on the Finland side. A week after that we will head to Baltic areas, Tallinn and all that and then in Europe we do a co-headlining tour with Tarja. We will do shows with both bands again and we will end up singing a few nice lines and songs together, yes!
That is nice! What about Tarot, your so-called baby band with your brother?
We got a little bit of a comeback, doing festival shows last Summer in 2024 and it was a good serious fun and it just took quite a long while for us to find ourselves in a situation of ‘okay, bringing the songs in a live situation feels good’ after our friend and former drummer Pecu Cinnari died in 2016. It was a bad situation for quite a few years, but now we started doing shows. We cannot get in real touring mode, because my brother is basically a nurse for his invalidated wife, but we already agreed that we were all back for touring here and there and we are all in Finland next Summer. We will get together and see if we got some old stuff, unused stuff that we can use and turn into real songs and release them and also, if we get inspiration, that might result into something new. We are going at least checking it out.
You said: ‘I am going back to Finland’. Where are you now then?
I am in Spain. I got myself a winter base to escape the darkness for a while, because it was affecting my depressive threads. Me and the family, we also spend few times here.
Who created the artwork?
In fact I took quite a lot of photographs myself that I used. For the rest it is a lady we are working with now, one that also did finished artworks for our guitar player’s solo albums before. So we started to put the whole thing together and it was her demo that actually ended up being the full cover, because her idea with this split head strikes. This catches the eye, let us see what it brings.
To occlude some words about the video clips…
We now released already four video clips. I think when the album comes out on the 7th of February, we have one in the works. So probably there will be a fifth video clip.
