Tom S. Englund: “We want to get bigger and better”
Evergrey. That’s really all I need to say. And that in a reverential, almost hushed tone.
Just Evergrey.
Anyone reading this already knows who the Swedish power/prog metal band is. Most dearly love it. So I won’t waste anyone’s time with a warm-up, other than to say I called Tom the day or two after his house had been hit by lightning. So he was on his cell phone and probably not in as fine a mood as he might have been had his house been spared the zap from the heavens.
TE: Hello?
BM: Hello, is this Tom?
TE: It is.
BM: Tom, this is Bill Murphy.
TE: Hi, Bill. How you doin’?
BM: Good. How are you doin’?
TE: Pretty good, man. Pretty good.
BM: Aside from having your house hit by lightning?
TE: Sorry, yeah. Except for that, everything is peachy. [laughs]
BM: [laughs] Did anything happen other than it blew out your electrical? Any damage?
TE: Well, the computer went to hell, but other than that, everything is fine. [laughs] So yeah, that’s why. And I have this sort of broadband telephone service, so I can’t use my phone anymore until I get the fucking computer fixed. So, that’s why we’re doing this on this.
BM: Oh, that’s all right. You know what, this doesn’t seem to be your month here. What happened to your web site?
TE: Well, that’s a long story. [laughs] I just had my drummer call asking about it also. But it seems some people [Tom tells me what happened, but I thought it best not to stir up the waters again by reprinting it.] So it’s a, well, never mind.
BM: Good grief, see all these things you musicians have to deal with in addition to playing music.
TE: Exactly.
BM: Ridiculous.
TE: Yeah.
BM: It’s a pleasure to talk to you, ’cause Evergrey’s my favorite band. You guys are amazing. I saw you in Grand Rapids when you were here on the In Flames tour.
TE: Oh yeah.
BM: How did that tour go for you guys?
TE: Really well. Like any other tour, actually. I mean, it was a bit of an off market, more like a secondary market, which was cool for us to do since we had never done that before. And you know, to be able to go to different places is really why we’re doing this. You know, we get to play for people who we never played to before. And it’s a great complement that we get to go to the major cities later this year as well. Then we have covered sort of the whole of America.
BM: That’s great. Do you guys, do you personally feel that Evergrey has kind of made it now? Are you successful in your opinion?
TE: Yeah, we are sort of successful to a certain degree, of course. I mean, we’re not millionaires or anything, but we all live from this now, which is a major accomplishment I think. As far as my hopes and wishes goes.
BM: Oh, that’s great.
TE: You know, we’ve been living on this for a couple of years now. So yeah, it’s a great thing.
BM: Would you say that Evergrey is where you thought it would be, or better than you thought it would be when you started the band long ago?
TE: Worse. [laughs]
BM: Worse? Really? [laughs]
TE: Of course. You know, when you get your first drink into you, [laughs], you expect to, you know, that your life is made and you will sell fifty million albums in the coming weeks. And of course, things doesn’t work that way. But you know, when you’re young and naive, you believe all these things.
BM: Wow. [laughs]
TE: But I mean, there are, we are happy to a certain degree, but of course we want to get bigger and better and sell more albums and meet more people and whatever.
BM: That’s great. Well, you know you guys, congratulations on getting into Guitar World for the latest issue. How did that happen? How did–
TE: Is that out now?
BM: Yeah, it’s out. I bought it on the stand. It’s a great clip of you and Henrick [Danhage] shredding on your guitars.
TE: Ok, that’s cool. Yeah, that’s right, it’s the Bet You Can’t Play This thing.
BM: Yeah. [laughs]
TE: Yeah, that was cool. Actually they just asked us if we wanted to do it, and I mean, of course that’s an honor. That’s also a thing that we have–and especially Henrick — has been wishing for for his whole life. So it’s the greatest guitar magazine in the world, and the biggest one, and to be able to do that is of course also an accomplishment of greater measure, I would say. So yeah, I just hope that we get to do it again. And we were really nervous when we made it.
BM: Really? It didn’t look like it, ’cause you guys were just playing your asses off. It looked really good.
TE: Yeah, they had, usually they have people there that do like 51 takes or whatever. But we felt like in order to be honest towards everybody, we would like to put it down in one take. And that’s actually what we did.
BM: Oh, that’s cool.
TE: I mean, it’s not perfect. [laughs] It’s got its glitches here and there, but other than that, you know, it was fun.
BM: Yeah. Well, tell me about the band itself. You’re considered by many people, especially the ProgPower crowd, as being one of the best bands in the prog/power metal world. They love your combination of light and dark and different sounds and everything. Who or what were your influences when you started Evergrey? How did you get this great sound that you have?
TE: We, of course, we at that time we were in the time where Dream Theater had just broke. And that’s what we wanted to do as well. I mean, we wanted to sound like Dream Theater, but we sorta discovered that we weren’t at all able to play like them, so you know, we figured we better do something by our own. And since we came from you know, death metal background, we wanted to bring, sort of bring the darkness but use melody to it as well, and have somewhat ordinary vocals.
BM: [laughs]
TE: So, our other influences, aside from that, everything from Iron Maiden to King Diamond and to Queensryche and everything in between.
BM: Yeah. That’s really good. You’re first couple albums, you went through some big personnel changes for a while. Did that have an effect on you as a musician? Or did you just take it all in stride and make your third album?
TE: I mean, of course it has an effect on us. We, usually the people you have in the band are people you enjoy being with, but it comes to a point also where things get more serious and people find out that they are not made to do this. And not suited for the job. Then I mean, I think it’s like a football team or a hockey team, you know, where we have to get better players or players that suit us better in order to continue. Now we have a stable lineup for the last, whatever, four years, whatever it is now. So everything’s great.
BM: Oh yeah. Let’s talk about Monday Morning Apocalypse. I liked it the first time I heard it. But some of the fans were put off by something about it. I’ve read reviews of you where you essentially say, “That’s bullshit, this is the best we’ve ever sounded.” What about this new album do you think changed that put off some of your longtime fans?
TE: I think what changed initially was the music. And all of a sudden we were having outside producers on this album, and we did that on purpose. We did that to stir up some shit, and you know, we knew that even the 14 year old kids would freak when they saw the other names he worked with, such as Britney Spears and whatever. So of course, that is something that also made up their minds already, from the beginning. Without hearing the album at all, they already decided they would think the album was shit. So you know, and we don’t bother too much about that. We have gained much more fans already than the 10 or 12 or 15 highest on the top of the line. That’s one thing to say that you don’t like it, but it’s another thing trying to sort of provoke other people to think the same. And that is mainly what bothered us. But the main thing that bothered us was of course that people complained about it before it was out, which proved that they downloaded it. It’s not really experience, you judge the product on downloading, especially if they don’t really know if it’s the official product or if it’s a promo version unmastered, or whatever. But I mean, usually, I don’t have a goddamn clue what they don’t like. And if you would listen to our first album and our third album, you would of course hear the difference, and it’s the same thing with the third album to the fifth album, there’s a major difference. And I mean, the thing that happened when we recorded this album was that, I mean we recorded a live album before that and we toured a lot, so it was two years between the song writing for the The Inner Circle album and the Monday Morning Apocalypse album. So I mean, of course that affects us. And also our music. So that’s the main sort of explanation I have for the album. Some may not like it.
BM: Well, I think it sounds great. And I really enjoyed it from the first time I played it. I couldn’t hear what other people would see was wrong with it. [laughs]
TE: Exactly.
BM: Well, you’ve got a lot of albums under your belt now. Which is your favorite Evergrey album?
TE: Oh, that’s so hard, actually. I mean, I like, I love all albums for different reasons. I mean, it’s also a collection of memories for me and the time I was in the process of recording each and every album. So it’s an impossible question to answer, but if you ask in ten years, you could ask me which of the first six albums I love the most and I might have an answer.
BM: [laughs] Do you have one album then, that when you were talking about the memories, do you have one that you remember most fondly putting together?
TE: Most definitely the first one. Since everything and recording an album was an experience, a big thing for us when we were 20 years old or whatever. So yeah, that is the album that I have the most memories of, being the most impact on me as a person. But I also remember Recreation Day being one of the toughest albums and one of the toughest album and one of the most tough periods of my life when it comes to recording music. That album was not enjoyable at all to record, it was a hell of a lot of work in it since we did most of it ourselves. So that’s why we decided for The Inner Circle album that we would do everything ourselves and also you know, have control over the time we spent recording it. We spent like five and a half months recording it, which was great it some ways and also not the perfect scenario in other ways. But I think we found the perfect working situation for us now with the latest album, and it’s nice to just be able to concentrate on the actual recording of the music, instead of having to fiddle around with the fucking computers or whatever.
BM: [laughs]
TE: That’s fucking awful, you know?
BM: You know, I asked Lance King of Pyramaze a question about his favorite, and he had the same response about ProTools. He said the first Pyramaze album was a nightmare because he didn’t know ProTools, so it was a lot harder than it should have been.
TE: Mmhm, yeah, exactly.
BM: Well, do your albums get easier then? I mean, is it harder to produce a–I don’t want to say the word “hit album”–but you’ve got a lot of good albums out now. So does it get easier for you to do an album? Or is each one harder than the previous one?
TE: Well, it depends. I mean, as I said, the In Search of Truth album we recorded and wrote in like two or three months. And the same with this last one. You know, it’s a, it’s totally different. I can’t really answer that in a good way, either. It depends on the working situation we have. And the pressure you have. And now we have our own studio, we can pretty much do whatever we want. We really decided we wanted to put money on the producer team, because we want to offer our fans the best we think is possible. And that’s a decision we made for that album. And we might not do it for the next album or we might do some other producers. So whatever. Or we might produce it ourselves. So you know, we’ll see.
BM: We’ll see. What’s your favorite track to play off Monday Morning Apocalypse? What’s your favorite one to play live? Is there one that really grooves for you?
TE: I mean, we’ve only rehearsed three of them so far.
BM: Ok.
TE: And we’ve only, actually we did in Grand Rapids as well, we have only played three of them live. So we haven’t had that much time to rehearse them all. But of those three, which are “Monday Morning Apocalypse,” “Obedience,” and “Still in The Water,” I would say, well, that’s hard as well. All depends on the crowd. [laughs]
BM: Yeah. [laughs]
TE: You know? I mean, “Obedience” is an extremely hard-hitting song, but at the same time “Still in The Water” is an extremely atmospheric, cool song to play live. There are such dynamics to that song that really comes through live as well.
BM: Oh yeah.
TE: So, and “Monday Morning” is more of a hit song. So you know, it’s hard. I can answer that when we’ve rehearsed all the songs and play them live.
BM: Well, you’ve played ProgPower, this will be your fourth time. You were at the first one, the second one, the fourth one. What is it like for you to play ProgPower USA? Why do you like coming back so many times?
TE: It’s a great gathering of great people and it’s a great opportunity for everybody to portray ourselves in the best possible way, really. And I mean, we did somewhat co-headline the last time with Kamelot playing after us, which I didn’t think they thought was that funny. [laughs]
BM: [laughs]
TE: ‘Cause everybody left. But I mean, [laughs] it’s called The Evergrey Effect now I’m told.
BM: [laughs]
TE: So this time Glenn has us playing at the ultimate last spot. But I mean, it’s a cool thing. It’s a cool thing for–I mean, Glenn was also one of the three persons that has been with us since the beginning. I mean, we had [name unknown] and Glenn, and [name unknown] as well, and it’s sort of a tribute to them as well. Of course, they are the ones who started this sort of underground thing for us in America and you know, brought us over there and paid our tickets and whatnot. And you know, so fucking hats off to them, man.
BM: [laughs] What can audiences expect from your show? I understand you’re bringing the string section and choir with you. Are you going to recreate sort of the feel of your live album [A Night to Remember]?
TE: Yeah, of course, I mean that’s what Glenn wanted. He wanted A Night to Remember Atlanta version. So yeah, I mean, that’s of course what we are trying to do. But we will also, I mean, the string quartet we are using are from Atlanta. We of course have to include the new songs, but I really tried to set it up as good as possible with choir and string arrangements to it, so you know, we might do it in two sets. On the first half maybe the new songs, second half with all the DVD material. Well, not all of it, but most of it. So yeah, it was a cool thing, and it will be a cool thing to bring it to America too. Since I know that people over there are extremely jealous of what we are serving people in Europe. But it’s all a money issue of course, so Glenn made it possible for us to come there, so it’s all good.
BM: You did a lot of touring around the world. How are audiences different in other countries? Is the audience in America different from Sweden let’s say? Or is it the same?
TE: I would say that is also impossible to answer, since they are really different and every audience is different. I mean, I guess we could play two venues in the same city and we would have two different crowds. But I mean, people in America are very idolizing, and people on the Europe tour are not, I wouldn’t say most of Europe but Sweden and Germany are more spoiled with having great metal shows, so they are not that impressed each and every time. So I mean, things are starting to happen in America now, there’s a lot of tours going on and it’s a great thing. I think metal is bigger now than ever.
BM: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Do you have a road story? Like of all the places you’ve played, is there one that sticks out, or is there a great experience, or a funny experience, or a tragic experience? What’s your favorite road story to share?
TE: Actually, we actually woke up in a tour bus one morning and by the bus going back and forth, and sounded like it was slamming things. So we all woke up and went up to the front of the bus and we saw our driver being taken away with the, what are they called, Atlanta police, Georgia State Trooper, yeah.
BM:[laughs]
TE: So we just discovered that some guy in a Jeep tried, didn’t let our bus driver into one of the lanes, so our bus driver got really mad and tried to, you know, drive him off the road.
BM: Oh!
TE: And of course, he called the police, and the police took him away, and told us that we would have to move the bus. “Well, it’s pretty hard to move the fucking bus when you have our driver in your back seat, you know.”
BM: [laughs]
TE: “Well, you’re gonna get a ticket.” “Well, can I move it?” “Do you have a driver’s license?” “No.” “So you’re gonna get a ticket.” “Well, that’s the status quo.” [laughs] So yeah, that’s pretty funny.
BM: Where did the ideas come for your albums? They seem to have an overall kind of dark and moody tone to them from time to time. You don’t necessarily sound like a dark and moody guy on the phone. Where do these ideas of yours come from on the album?
TE: I mean, they do come from experiences that we have had, all of us. I mean, they’re primarily the stories come from things that either happened to me or somebody close to me, or things that have affected us in some way. Yeah, it’s all pretty dark. Even if they are based on true happenings, we always try to add some fiction to it in order to make it not that real, or more interesting or whatever.
BM: Well, how would you say you’re progressing as a musician? You’re a great guitarist and you’re noted for being a great singer with your band as well. Would you say you’re a better singer? Or a better guitarist with Evergrey?
TE: I would say I’m a better guitar player.
BM: Oh really?
TE: Yeah. That’s my personal view. [laughs]
BM: [laughs] I noticed that your wife sings with the band. What’s it like to record with your wife? Does she tour with you as well?
TE: No, she did this DVD with us, and now she’s coming to Atlanta with us of course as well. For special occasions she does show up. Other than that, she doesn’t. I mean, she doesn’t want to tour. If she would have liked that, she would have started her own band, you know? And besides that, we have a daughter, and someone’s got to be responsible.
BM: [laughs]
TE: [laughs]
BM: Yeah, that’s true. How about the album cover for Monday Morning Apocalypse, I guess some people were critical of that, ’cause it looked, the felt it was not quite as representative of the style of music. Who came up with the artwork for the new cover?
TE: Me and Henrick and our producer actually sat around speaking about it. And we felt that we were done doing all these triangles and demons and monster picture for the time being anyway. And we felt we wanted to do, once again, do something that would stir up some shit. We knew that people would notice that album along with 200 other album covers. That was the purpose. And we also, we have never, ever had any questions about our covers in any of the one million interviews we have done for any of the albums, and for this album, everyone is asking about the cover. So I mean, that’s really what we set out to do, and Evergrey, the rest of the world, one, nil.
BM: [laughs] What is it, in your opinion, what is the state of the music industry these days? Is this a great time to be a musician on the road, or is it a bad time?
TE: Musician on the road is a great time. ‘Cause more and more people are coming to the shows. But I mean, sales wise, [laughs], of course now the downloading problem affects the album sales. But I mean, at the same time, this is the way the world works these days, and this is something that you have to accept and work in other ways if you want to get your music out and get the money you want to deserve.
BM: Yeah. Your web site, I notice there’s an Evergrey chat channel, you guys can stop by and chat with fans. Is it important to you guys to stay connected to your fans?
TE: Absolutely. When we have the chance to and when we have the time, you know, we love to do that.
BM: Will those pages, will that MySpace and your web site be up again fairly soon?
TE: Oh yeah. Tomorrow, I would say.
BM: Oh really? That’s great. Very good. Well, I don’t want to take up any more of your time, Tom. I really appreciate it.
TE: No problem, man. Thank you.
BM: Thank you. Take care.
TE: Ok man, take care. Bye bye.
Don’t know about you, but I’m thrilled to be able to see Evergrey more or less recreate their A Night to Remember album at ProgPowerUSA. Thank you, Glenn, for making that happen!
Oh. One more thing. I spoke to Tom before the recent news of the departure of his bass player. I tried to get a follow up interview with Tom after the news broke but, so far, have been unsuccessful.
Evergrey’s CDs can be found all over the place. You name the CD store, they’re likely to have them in stock. Me? I get my CDs from Ken Golden at LaserCD.com.
Evergrey’s official web site is www.evergrey.net.
