At the moment, we’re working on the reissues of the first and the third record. What we’re going to do is mastering the stuff again and putting on some bonus tracks.

Just some old stuff. For the first record we’re going to have four bonus tracks all in the same kind of direction [of the album], some stuff that has never been released before.

Oh yea! It’s really cool, we’re going to tour in about for weeks and we thought we’d do something special for the fans. They know all the old stuff that we’ve done but there’s still material that we did that nobody knows.

Exactly after finishing the masters I’ll send them over to the manufacturing company, so in about three or four weeks. (editor’s note: OUT NOW)

Of course! Excellent review! (laughs) I like when the reviews are good.

Jesus Christ, hardcore. (laughs) That’s excellent!

We’re not known in Texas, it’s just like you read a review somewhere and you get a cd by coincidence or whatever, we’re not even released in the US!

So when did you get into Jaded Heart? Was it from the beginning or some years after?

What’s your favorite?

(laughs heartily at this one)

The thing is, I can’t tell you why it sounds fresher or better, I did all the stuff by myself in the studio. Maybe it’s a matter of the way we worked with things, it wasn’t on purpose that it sounds “fresher”. I don’t know any particular reason why this sounds different, I’ve done the same thing that I’ve been doing in all the past.

Maybe it is a little bit because of the songs, there’s more dynamics in them. The crispness, it might be we were in a totally different studio. Sonic wise I can’t say anything really special because we were producing in this former studio with this producer guy and he mixed it the way he wanted it. I think that this sound is much better now, but I didn’t do anything that much different than everybody else. I do things just a little different, but that’s because I hear the music different. I can’t see though how it sounds “crisper” or something like that. I really don’t know!

I think that it wasn’t a problem at all. The main thing was that it wasn’t so different than what we have been doing but you’re right we tried to put more spices in the music. Take for instance, Anymore. The riff, the melody, it’s a part I wrote fifteen years ago that we used for the song. Jaded, it wasn’t even supposed to be on the record, because this riff comes from Barrish who was about to use it for his solo project. I heard this main riff and the way he had it, it was a totally different chorus line and rhythm, but I said to him, “This riff is totally cool what you have and the voices are so great. But when I hear this riff and I sing this line, I expect that chorus line,” and I sing what I had in my mind right away. We tried more things out without thinking about them, whether it was wrong, bad or better, and felt very good about the results. We were sitting here for five days, we slept here in the studio, drank a lot, partied a lot, and recorded a lot. Trying things out we’d talk to each other, “How about putting this part here, or what about putting that one over there,” what we never did before. It was very good that we did this but it wasn’t done to intentionally make a different sound, it was just the way we work together and arrange together.

Same here! I see it as a radio song, if it was put out on MTV with all those crossover bands it totally fits into the modern scene because it is different to the typical melodic rock or metal.

That’s right this is pissing me off! (laughs) In this scene there’s a lot of Scandavian bands, all those double bass bands, all this whatever, True Metal stuff. Hammerfall, they play in front of ten thousand people and that’s unbelievable! We’re trying to scratch together one thousand people and sometimes you think, “What’s going wrong?!” But we don’t know actually (laughs).

Yes we do. What we’re doing at the moment since this is our first headlining tour, we’re gonna take this tour to get started with the live situation. In autumn we have a double headlining tour with, nothing’s definite at the moment, but we have been talking with Kingdom Come, TNT, Shy. The main thing is, at that time we will do some really good live recordings because we’d be playing the really big stages, right now we’re still doing the clubs before the bigger stages. Then we can have some camera teams to cut a DVD as well. All that shit are things that we’ve talked about and want to release very soon, and to be realistic maybe at the beginning of next year.

Yea, as a fan myself, I’m not really too into DVD’s that is just a concert and nothing else. I’m very eager to see the backstage areas, how the people are behind the scenes. That’s what I’m interested in seeing much more than the concert. I like to see the bands and how crazy they are, the funny stuff for instance. If we’re going to have this DVD there’s going to be a lot of everything, we won’t be too poor on this. In fourteen years you can imagine how much material we have so it’s going to be a lot of time before we get this together but it’s going to be really great.

That’s a very funny thing because I hadn’t seen that until I went to the mastering studio and Henning, our new keyboardist, he sent it over the DSL line and we watched it during the mastering and we were pissing our pants, it was really funny. He’s done a really good job on this, and that’s what I like, thing’s like that. Much more important than having a great concert, which you need too, but you need the whole package.

Yeah! I’ve really not into Manowar but my friend is and he has this live DVD and we just watched it the over day and it was hilarious! It was unbelievable! Also the old Pantera videos, these guys are so fucked up! Even if you really don’t like the music it’s amusing to watch these things.

Actually, it will be more than half the album, eight songs off of the record. It’s very difficult because this album has gotten the best reviews and responses of any other record and everyone’s freaking on this one. And especially because of this, we have to use more songs off this than we normally would from a new album. We’re not a band so well known from what we’ve been doing in the past, of course we have our fanbase definitely, so we have the highlights off each record which we’ll play, then we’ll have the ones.

In my mind, Trust is pretty much just like IV. Both of the records are pretty similar and what I figure is this. What I see at the moment is that we do seem like we are getting further on with this record, we have more doors open now. My opinion is though that we should have deserved this a few years ago with IV because we had great reviews then too and all that shit and I wrote a song for the Ice Hockey championship that was all over German TV here, and we had so many doors open but we didn’t have the record labels doing anything about it. On the other record [IV] we had songs that could have been put out for radio and especially with this one. Jaded, Love is Magic, these are typical radio hits. One thing is that yes I do believe we are going further, the second is we could go much further with the right background.

…Not really. I used to be a fan of Bon Jovi, like the first three records up to Slippery When Wet. After that Bon Jovi became weak and poor and not a rock n roll band anymore.

That’s something that they do say about me, I have this reputation of being some Bon Jovi singer since I was twenty. I would sound like him, especially on the first records, and everyone would be saying that “Oh this is the new Bon Jovi,” or whatever. As for songwriting, I never sit down and write songs, I write constantly, it flows out of me wherever I am. I always have my phone with me and even if I don’t I’ll call home and sing to myself on the answering machine the melody or whatever I have. Usually my songs are done in ten minutes, I have everything that I need. I even speak on the phone who will start which part. In the recordings I’ll go in and play my songs, what I have and then everyone will pick the ones they would like to have. After that we work on the songs that are there, sometimes it’s like Anymore, but we don’t go in saying that it will be this certain type of song, it’s just one of those songs that I wrote.

Sure you can! You know, these songs that we did, we never went in and recorded them for the meaning of “we need a cover tune.” For instance, on the second record we have this Help song that we played live before and was a unique version. For the next session I said that I wanted to do Easy Lover since I was eighteen because I had always heard it as a rock song. So, we were in the studio and I suggested that we try this song because it is a typical rock song with this riff and everything. We played it in the rehearsal room and thought it sounded great so we recorded it and it worked fine. But we never looked around specifically for “a song that we need to cover.” As for the next record or the one after that I can’t really say anything but there will definitely be something like that again.

Actually, that was one of those songs we talked about here and there. The drummer was like, “If you really would like to cover a song there’s this Larger Than Life song from the Backstreet Boys.” We then had Henning come into the band right before we went to the studio and he said, “You know what song we could cover? Larger Than Life by the Backstreet Boys.” So he was another person to say this and we weren’t even really talking about it (laughs), so we just said “Why not just go ahead and do it?” and it worked pretty fine so we just put it on the record.

Actually, I’m the only guy who is living off the music now, I’m not doing nothing else. Let’s just say that I write a lot for other people, I produce, and I play in some cover bands to make a living. Since about two years I’ve been making a great living off music, before that it was you know, from the hand into the mouth. I do write a lot but I never focused on this. What I do in the future, I tried more to get myself into the writer scene to write for other people. I did that here and there but never focused on this because I was always busy with something else, myself, Jaded Heart and so many different projects. Basically, I wrote here and there and still write for other people in any direction it doesn’t matter, whether its pop, or metal or even German Schlager music (laughs) its everything.

No, no hits yet! Keep your fingers crossed!

Oh, there’s been a lot of proud moments. I started pretty early as a kid, even after one or two years playing I was with my school band and we were winners of a talent competition and were on TV when I was very young. For Jaded Heart, I was definitely very proud that we made it, even after this music is pretty dead, that we made it as a German band to America to record in Denver with Bobby. That was one of my great moments because nowadays no record label is willing to pay you any bucks to be sent over to America where the music comes from. I was also very proud, for me as a German guy, that I was invited to write songs for (editor’s note: I can’t make out this group, if anyone knows please email me so I can correct this! Jaded Heart is on tour right now so I unfortunately can’t email Michael himself) … and I was there as a German guy to write lyrics and everything. That made me personally very proud.

No, no. For us the basic core of the band like Axel and Muelle, we’ve been together for fourteen years. The three of us are more than just musicians we are like friends and family, especially in the first years where we go through a lot of shit together, and now whenever we are together it’s like fourteen year old boys, like little kids. We just play together and we have fun with each other. That’s Jaded Heart, its just like a friendship, its not like a deal where if this bands not working I’m going to quit this and go to another one, it was never like that.

Yea until its time for the reunions!

Of course! But we don’t want to go off we would rather go on.

Some are some aren’t. If you’re talking about Fucking Hating You, then yes this is a real story. Whenever I write songs like Trust, a lot of them are pretty much what I’ve been through and personal experiences with myself. You cannot write only bullshit, I did that with the first record, it wasn’t really what I was living through, it was more like “Ok, I have to write some lyrics now,” and I wrote them.

If I could, YES! To be honest America is such a big country and we already have such a hard time to get our asses out here in Europe because no one’s really into this music anymore. If there’s a chance, better yesterday than tomorrow.

Don’t let go and do everything in the name of rock n roll. We would love to come over to America and rock ALL OF YOU!