How are you doing?
I am fine (laughs). I have been extremely busy, because this whole Summer, forming a new band while I was already busy with Omnium Gatherum and Insomnium, is not that wise, but it has been a crazy busy summer and we are doing very well in the US with Cemetery Skyline. Last weekend we were in Romania with Insomnium and now I have a little bit of time off. I am going to celebrate that next weekend with playing in my local pub with an Ozzy Osbourne tribute band. So that is free time for me, business as usual (chuckles).

Oh yeah you are like an octopus…
Yeah busy playing guitar… I like playing guitar, because I do it all the time.

The previous Omnium Gatherum album ‘Origin’ came out in 2021  In the meantime the pandemic is over and at that time there was a new line-up and struggles with the old one, covid-19 was still going round. Everything is back to normal a bit in the meantime…
Indeed, because I think, as this is the tenth Omnium Gatherum album, but it is only the third time that two albums in a row have exactly the same line-up. ‘Origin’ and the new album have the same line-up, so nothing has changed which is very nice. Of course, when we did ‘Origin’, there was this pandemic and the world was really strange. Nobody knew what was going to happen. Luckily when everything opened up, we could tour a lot after ‘Origin’. We actually did like three European tours and three North American tours after ‘Origin’, so we toured quite a lot and all the other stuff of course, like Asia and Finland and stuff like the festivals. Now when I am thinking about it, it has actually been very busy with Omnium Gatherum, also after the previous album. Of course there was like a four year gap with this album, which is the longest gap we have had between two albums, but we released this ‘Slasher’ EP in between which was like a middle work. There was a new song on the EP that was kind of a pathway to the ‘May The Bridges We Burn Light The Way’ album. After ‘Origin’ was ready, I felt that the album a little bit lacked fast songs. It was mostly middle paced songs. Some of them were quite epic with a lot of layers and clean vocals and then ‘Slasher’, the song, was a lot faster. The idea for this new album was, since it is the tenth album, it has to summarize somehow the whole career and we are still a death metal band, it is about kicking people’s ass, We did quite a short album: nine songs, forty minutes. I remember some albums were quite long. We wanted energy and faster songs than on ‘Origin’. We concentrated on arrangements and really make them efficient. I was throwing a lot of stuff in the trash bin when I composed this album and I edited these songs a lot, so that all the bullshit parts went away and leave the songs in their draw form. This album is quite fast paced.

There is also a kind of ‘walking through memories’ when it comes down on lyrics. I know that singer Jukka is writing the lyrics, but there should be a going back to the beginning and the essence such as the street corners you grew up at and metal and dreaming about a career in metal. What can you tell about that?
Jukka always has a lot of meaning in his lyrics, but in the past they might have been a bit too philosophical and meanings were hidden for people. All the people were not getting what he is singing and I asked him to do like a really easy kind of concept for this album, something like Omnium Gatherum for dummies, because the music is also like Omnium Gatherum for dummies. This must be the most catchy or easy-listening Omnium Gatherum album since the beginning. Jukka wrote his cool concept about streets and how everything happens from streets and rises from the streets and different kinds of characters that are in the street, like the good and the bad and the poor and the rich and then we linked that to our teenagers, because it is the tenth album and the band was formed in 1996. This links highly to the nineties. ‘Origin’ was Omnium Gatherum’s eighties Miami Vice album, this album is highly having a nineties nostalgia and kind of like when we were kids and teenagers in the nineties, everything happened in the streets in our lives. There were no cell phones and there was no computer. We were playing in the streets and when we got older, we did skateboarding and driving in the streets with racing cars and most of all visiting your friends in the streets. This is a celebration for our teenager years in a way.

It must make you nostalgic…
Yeah and the title tells it, that you cannot please everyone. It is said in the street language, because the older you get, the more people you get pissed out, if you want it or not. Some people just piss you off and then you have to get rid of them, and may it light your way and go further and don’t stress about them or about yesterday. Forget all this bad news and bad people and just don’t care. Empower you through these bad memories and stuff.

That is a smart vision. It is better to leave someone behind and look to the future, even though it is difficult sometimes, because as humans we have all these emotions, but letting go and leaving behind is a solution sometimes…
Since 2020 people seem to be very easy upset. If you want it or not, aim it or not, but many, many people are upset and there is nothing you can do, so may it light your way when you are marching ahead. Most of them are lost in the big space, which is lost in the internet, which is not real. You see a too nice view of the world, or too bad view of the world. In one second everything is at your attention, that is not always a good thing. There are a lot of good things in that, but it also makes people crazy.

When you grew up, was it in a town or in a rural area?
Not in the woods, even though Finns are forest people (laughs). It was in a small town, Karhula. I am still living in a small town Kotka. It is only 50.000 people. So it is not a tiny village. In Finnish standards it is a normal town, but there is a difference with Helsinki. I like the nice easy lifestyle here and if I want to get some business in my life, it is one hour to Helsinki and there I have everything. Especially when you get older, you need your space and silence. I am still living like in a city suburban, but it is a five minute walk to rural area, 15 minutes walk to Baltic Sea and five minute walk to forest. I am in a city downtown and there is enough space to dwell with my dog in the forest and get my crazy racing cars on my yard.