It’s something that you learn to do over the years. When you start you’re partying all the time no matter what and destroy yourself (laughs), you go to bed drunk and wake up still drunk. After awhile you begin to realize that it is just not possible to continue doing that all the time. You begin to realize your limit and you [party] until you reach it. If you have to tour for more than two months for example, you can’t spend all your time drinking, partying, and going to bed really late. Although we still do that although we try to take it a bit easier than we used to (laughs).

Oh yes, especially in the beginning. We have been around since 98 with this lineup and we have done a lot of tours together in almost ten years. In the beginning when you release your first and second albums you don’t make any money and that is something that almost every band has to deal with unless you’re Linkin Park or whatever. So there are a lot of these really terrible moments where you think to yourself, “What am I doing, I have no money, I can’t pay rent,” and when it comes time to go back home you have no idea what you are going to do you just know you have to get a job to earn money because on the road we’re not making anything. Luckily things have started to change after Comalies got so popular here in the States which also affected us in the European scene. We are not rich by any means, we aren’t driving Ferraris but we can at least survive with our music now. We don’t have to back home and look for a job to tide us over until the next tour happens. This is pretty cool. There have been those moments though where everyone was thinking if it was really worth it to go on or not, but when we see that with every album that we released there was an improvement [in sales] we realized that it was worth it to keep going no matter what. We’ve been through the dark times but hopefully now we have seen the light at the end of the tunnel. Karmacode has been out for a month and selling good, this tour with Zombie is going great, and we’re going to do Ozzfest again so I think it is worth going on to see what happens.

We had a very strong first week with about thirty six thousand cds being sold, and then the second week it dropped a little bit to around sixteen thousand which to us is still pretty good. We can’t really complain on how the album is selling and since this the first tour for the release we are most likely playing to people who haven’t really heard of us before they are mainly all Zombie’s crowd. They probably heard us just by the name, although there are still our fans out there most of the people are here for Zombie. This is still very good for us because this gives us the opportunity to play for people who might never have heard us and to expose ourselves to new fans.

A lot of years have passed since we released Comalies and we have been on the road for so long. Basically since 2003 up to today we have spent our lives touring, especially in the United States with a lot of different bands. Each of these bands have influenced somehow. Take Opeth for example. We were totally shocked by this band. To be able to see them every night and to see how the people reacted to their show was amazing. Same with Anthrax and Type O Negative, a lot of these bands are really heavy, much heavier than we are. When you play live for so long there is a lot of energy between the crowd and the band onstage. It is actually pretty cool to see how the people react to what you are doing onstage and the most aggressive songs that we had at the time which were Swamped and Tight Rope were the ones that had a bigger impact on the crowd. It wasn’t really planned but we went in this heavier direction and we found out that it was something that was very natural, an evolution of what we were doing before.

This is not really something new for us. Think about the Half Life EP for example. On the title track there you can also find some Middle Eastern influences. In Italy, especially in the south, a lot of the music there is actually influenced by Arabian culture. We have also used these influences in Swamped too, the whole verse, the guitar part has a Middle Eastern atmosphere to it. It is just something that we like and we use whenever we can. It is not like we sit down and go, “Ok now we have to put some Arabian scales in here,” it’s just something that comes out. On this album I guess we just had more time to develop all these different elements and put them together in our music.

That was actually the first time we used keyboards that much on our albums. We have used keyboards before obviously but they have always been background carpets to the music so to speak. In the Half Life EP we had the chance to work with new software on the computer and had the chance to program new parts and do things that we have never done before. We probably overdid it a little bit, partly because it was new to us and partly because we liked it so much (laughs). Then we learned how to make this into a part of the music itself. IF you listen carefully even now with the songs on Karmacode you can find all of these electronic happenings in the music but you just don’t realize it because it is so well integrated with the rest. If you analyze the music that we play today there are a lot of different layers which is something that you don’t notice right away. There is so much stuff that is going on that we try to make it fit with the rest so that it doesn’t seem so complicated. That’s the difference between the music that we do today and the Half Life EP, back then we felt that we had to show this new sound off.

We actually tried this before we recorded the In A Reverie album. It didn’t really work out We are a metal band and the keyboards were taking away something that we felt was important to the music. There was one guitar player, myself, and this keyboard player and it didn’t really work out the way that we thought it would. So we thought to ourselves, “Let’s just go back to the good ol’ rock n roll lineup.”

Actually I am not too sure about that. There have been a few discussions and it seems that Enjoy The Silence might actually end up being the next single that we will release.

It will be released around Ozzfest and will also be put on the sampler. I don’t have an exact date but the I am fairly sure that the next single will be Enjoy The Silence. We just want to release the next single as something special, we still have so many songs to choose that we feel are really good so we don’t know yet what will be the final [third] single.

It always depends on the song. Even though we have very aggressive songs, as you said this is probably the most aggressive album that we have done, some parts have to fit the music. When we first started we were listening to bands like At The Gates and Paradise Lost, very metal bands. Of course we were very influenced by these bands and we wanted to put elements of them into our music. I think that today our music is a lot more complex and sometimes like with Angel’s Punishment on Comalies we felt that the death metal growling fit very well with the topic of the song and the music so we used them. On Karmacode we didn’t use any because all the songs that we wrote didn’t really require them. We didn’t not use them because we wanted to become more commercial. It’s the same thing with guitar solos, we don’t have many guitar solos in our songs but that is because we have so many voices with our music, the two guitars, the keyboards, the orchestration that sometimes it is just not necessary to have the death vocals or guitar solos. It always depends on the song and how the song evolves from when we start the writing until it is finished. I’m not saying that we will never do them again it is jus that they have to fit the song.

I don’t know really, it’s something I’ve always wondered myself. If I’m a fan of a band unless they change their style to obviously go commercial and make money I’m not going to say that they sold out just because they are selling more records. If you play good music and more people like it then you are going to sell more records, that’s obvious and that’s what we did. I don’t think between Comalies and Karmacode you can actually say that Karmacode is more commercial. People probably will though because it will sell more but we didn’t write it with the intention of selling more. We just wrote songs that a lot of people have liked so we are at peace with our conscience (laughs). I’ve never judged any band for what they decided to do with their music. If you think about Paradise Lost and what they did with Draconian Times, they were very popular and sold probably a million records. They got a little successful and people thought to themselves, “Oh they’re getting more commercial.” Then they did Lost and all the old elements disappeared from their music and people got angry. I agree that bands shouldn’t change so drastically like that but as an artist I understand that you want to evolve your music somehow and experiment with new things. On the other hand I can also understand how someone who follows a band since the beginning can be put off by a band that completely changes from one album to the next. Look at Metallica. I used to love them when they first started and loved them up until they did the Black Album. When the did Load and Re-Load they began to not interest me anymore which is normal. When some people they buy an album with a certain safety in mind, “I’m going to buy the new AC / DC album and I know what it is going to sound like.” For some fans this works. For others it is the other way around, they want to find something different. It may sound obvious but the answer lies in between. You should be happy for a band when they sell more records because this means they will put out better material in the future. With the success of Comalies we had the chance to have a higher budget for Karmacode and spend more time in the studio. More time in the studio meant that we could spend more time on the songs and work on the arrangements, we could actually for the first time record an album with real strings which we could have never afforded before. People should realize that most bands love writing music and want to do better and better all the time.

We collect stuff all the time from shows. We would love to put out a DVD but we want it to be a mix between a live DVD and backstage behind the scenes stuff. We are actually trying to gather as much material as possible and will release something when we are one hundred percent sure that it will be something that we like. I’ve seen so many DVD’s out there that were only done because the record company wanted it out there and when you watch it you’re just like, “Ehh, what’s this?” (laughs) and it’s not interesting. I really love the Vulgar Video from Pantera because it is something that is a lot of fun, it has a lot of stuff you wouldn’t usually see as a fan.

I think that because people have realized that you have to be a long haired, bearded, tattooed man to be a metal singer. There are a lot more possibilities when you have a woman singing in a band and also thanks to bands like us, Evanescence, and Nightwish, it is getting a lot more interesting nowadays. What we do is probably different than bands like Nightwish or Epica or any of the other European bands. We have two singers and it’s not like the female singer is the “angel” voice and the singer is growling devilish “beast”. We never really thought about our music this way. With two different singers we have a wider range of possibilities. When we have a really heavy part you would think that Andrea would sing it but a lot of times we go the other way around and put Cristina’s voice into that aggressive part and it works out really well. I think that it’s pretty cool to take these chances. Girls can rock too and it seems that people are starting to realize this.

There is a slight difference. Being from Italy a lot of our music has been influenced by European acts but we have always liked American bands, especially the production that they use like Korn or Metallica. The sound that most American bands have is really big and very different than European bands. The only European band I can think that has an American [production] sound is Rammstein. We’ve never had the chance to use this type of production whether it is due to time limitations or money but for the first time on Karmacode we could actually work more on the sound and production. We got closer to the American sound even though we have European elements to our music. Because we lean more towards the American sound that is why when we toured America people were able to like us a bit more than most of the other European bands./ When we did Ozzfest even though we play, let’s call it European music, we do it with a certain American touch so we probably have more chances to be popular over here than other bands from Europe that play a very specific style of music that was born in Europe and is really popular over there. It is always hard to analyze these types of things. Look at Nightwish. They got so big in Europe but if you see what they have done over in America it is almost nothing.

It is because America is so big and the music industry is so strong over here. In Europe there are a lot of different countries with their own cultures and their own markets. America is one huge market. Even though there are many different states it is still one country, one market. If you make it big over here in the States that means you get the whole territory. If you make it to the American radio you make it through to the whole country. If you make it to Italian radio then you’ll only be there in Italy, or France, or Germany, whatever the country you “make it” in. In Europe each country is it’s own individual market and territory. If you do very well in Germany that does not mean you will do as good in the UK. When we started selling records in America this also reflected our sales in Europe. People were like, “This Italian band is selling records in America? There must be something special.” Because of this we start selling more records over in Europe. It’s a weird situation, I can’t really explain why it happens. For a band like us to make it in the States is a big goal because we know there are a lot of people that go to shows and can like our songs if we manage to get through to the radios and MTV.

Over here you have Canada, the States, and Mexico and none of them are the same thing they are three different countries. Europe is the same thing with each country attached to the other but each one has its own language, its own culture, and of course its own market. It’s easier in a certain way since the countries are much smaller than America but on the other hand you have to get them all separately which of course is not easy at all (laughs).

This is a really hard question! Having just put out a new album all of our favorite songs are on that. After you have been touring and playing the same songs for four years your favorite songs are not those anymore! I can’t imagine Slayer having to play Angel Of Death again and Metallica doing Seek And Destroy. People have memories that go with their favorite songs that is why they love them but for the band it is something completely different. Although Heaven’s A Lie is the song that made us to become so popular in the States and in Europe, that doesn’t mean it is our favorite song (laughs). We have two separate “trademark” songs, one for the band and one for the people. If I really had to pick one song it would have to be Swamped but as I said listening to the new album I think that every song can be a “trademark” song. We’ll have to see if and when this album becomes as big as Comalies and then see what people think about that.