It’s going really fucking good. We can tell that the response in general is so much better and we notice that Character has had quite an impact compared to the previous albums. Even though the first tour we had a good response but you can tell that this is on a different level. It is so much bigger, there are much more people in the crowd actually knowing the songs and singing along, and almost all the venues have been completely packed so far. Things are really strong for us as well having four Scandinavian bands, obviously Soilwork are doing really well with their new album so this is a good package and things are doing great.

Yes, although we don’t really think so much about the commercial aspect. Breakthrough albums are more for pop music or for groups that release one album and then fade away. I think that in terms of sales and feedback and in terms of getting the names out to people that might like the music, Character looks like it could be the defining album of the band. We met with record label people in California some days ago and they told us that Character has already outsold all the other previous albums. Of course its a lot about marketing and getting out there and playing shows. The US is one of those territories where if you’re not touring or playing gigs you aren’t on the map, no band is selling any records if they aren’t touring which is what we are doing now and what we will be doing when we return late this year.

As soon as possible. I wish it would be as easy as a band deciding, “Hey, let’s do a headlining tour,” but there are so many people that have to look through all the details and get their seal of approval and also someone will have to pay because any tour is really expensive. There are few tours that break even just from the playing so the record label has to fork out a lot of money to make it happen. Also it’s a matter of evaluating the opportunities like if we are a headliner on one side or a support act for a major band on the other hand then its all down to the record label and the management and what the powers that be decide to do. Our opinion isn’t worth anything when it comes to touring, the people that actually pay for it are the ones that make the decisions. We are hoping for [a headlining tour] as soon as possible, of course its great to be on a tour like this but when you have seven or eight albums out and you have to confine yourself to playing for forty minutes it becomes really hard to pick out a setlist that makes everybody happy. But that’s the way it works, most bands have done support tours five or six times before doing their first headlining, like In Flames, like Soilwork. This is their first headline tour and they’ve been playing here six times prior to this. It’s all a matter of building slowly, from playing more and more support tours to eventually getting to the point where you can do a headline tour.

I think both MTV2 and Headbanger’s Ball have played it. I’m not too sure exactly because I don’t follow the record label reports that much but I do remember it being played on Headbanger’s Ball a few times. I think the Century Media guys told me that its being shown on MTV2 as well. We are actually doing a new video for the song The New Build which should be finished by now. When we left Sweden it was in post production and it’s a matter of time before its finished. Hopefully its done by now and we can get that one out as soon as possible.

It’s totally live. We had the director follow us on the European tour with Kreator for I think five dates, London, Paris, Barcelona, all really packed gigs where the audience was getting into it and he filmed everything. He’ll edit it out to where it’s a one hundred percent live video of us performing in front of an audience. There might be some old stuff I’m not too sure but the general idea is to make it almost exclusively live.

Either stupidity or devotion I guess (laughs). We are a band and this is what we do. We always love playing anywhere and we get really good feedback here so its worth it. Of course we make a lot of sacrifices just going and touring, we don’t get any money to speak of, we’re living on that red submarine getting showers I think… actually I think I’ve gone six days without a shower on this tour (laughs). It’s a really primitive lifestyle but there is a lot to love about it as well. The thing about being a band that is so far away from home and being able to play your music to people who appreciate it is a great feeling.

We’ve gotten quite a lot of emails and before that with regular mail from people that said this and that song or lyric affected him or her deeply. We also got a few from people who said that our music saved them form suicide which is really humbling more than it is flattering. Also there have been some real cute love stories from people who said they found each other on the Dark Tranquillity message board or at a Dark Tranquillity concert. People get touched in different ways and even in our case, some of our best friends we know because of our music. It’s something that can touch everyone regardless of nationality or wherever you might be at the moment.

Its really hard to have much of an opinion about it. On one hand its really flattering every time our music influences someone and it says that our music has made a difference. It would be really arrogant of me to complain about a lot of bands out there that don’t have an identity and emulate the basic riffing styles and not doing anything new with the writing to give their songs a true identity. Every band is like that in the beginning though, our first demo tape was totally early Kreator no one is completely original in the beginning. It wouldn’t make any sense for us to be stuck doing exactly that because at the time we were nineteen twenty years old and we really did our best to come up with something new and something that people would recognize as being different and original, we really tried to make that effort. With that reasoning it would be a bit lame of us to repeat ourselves. On the new album we have some leanings toward those earlier records, faster drumbeats and some riffing techniques that we used on The Mind’s I album, but at the same time we’re trying to take the music to a slightly new area every time. A lot of bands sound like what we did on The Gallery and some of them are extremely good at it with excellent musicians and good songwriting, we can’t be against it, its flattering.

We all are. If you look at it there are so many musicians playing since forever, struggling and working really hard to get nowhere and here we are in another part of the world living in a small stinking bus but at the same time we have the privilege to actually travel around the world and play to people who appreciate the music. That is just humbling, you can’t be too caught up in your own hype. We have been doing this for sixteen years. If we had started this band yesterday and all of this had happened yesterday then yes we might have a “rock star attitude” or be caught up in the moment but we’ve been doing this for so long and we know that you can’t take anything for granted. It’s all about hard work and appreciating where the hard work will take you.

Not on this tour. We only have forty minutes of playing time and we want to focus on Character more than anything else. We are playing some old songs of course but we haven’t really thrown them into the set for that reason it is just how we usually divide our forty minutes. When we do our headliner tour and get to play a longer set then we will throw more of those songs in.

It depends on what is important and time consuming at the moment. For example, when we write songs or when we do a tour with Dark Tanquillity that is a full time priority. At the same time when we aren’t active for the band and are just coming up with ideas back home then I will work as a graphic designer as my day job. It’s all a matter of what the band is doing and what kind of commissions I have in the meantime. It is pretty much fifty / fifty at the moment.

It has been down for two years. It really sucks I know that it is totally bad for business but I’ve been so busy with other obligations that I haven’t been able to finish the new website. I am also really perfectionist when it comes to doing things for myself and I have started on doing three or four different versions only to get tangled with paying work that I’ve done and when I get back I want to start over and do something else with it. I have a version now that looks promising but at the same time it will take some weeks of full time work to actually get it done with and at the moment I am too busy with the band and with other work and have to put the website on hold. People ask me constantly about it and it makes me feel lamer and lamer every month. It’s a good kick in the ass though whenever its brought up.

It is really hard to say. I would like to think the Dark Tranquillity albums because those are the ones I am most involved with on a personal level. They take a much longer time because I always consider the opinions of the rest of the band. We work in a way that we provide lots of different alternatives and then try to pinpoint everything down to two or three directions and I work on them and develop them further and eventually we arrive at the finished product. Its much more intense and intricate when doing something for the band because of my personal involvement. I take the liberty to analyze everything much more, getting really into the lyrics and music. They are the hardest to do but also the most rewarding when everything is finished.

In a way because I did something like fifteen or twenty totally different ideas and sketches that covered every facet of what you can do for an album cover. I think among those we had something that is quite reminiscent of the cityscape cover, an embryonic version that progressed. The first sketch from that idea was really early you could see the hints but it wasn’t fully developed. Its always like that though you start off with an idea and the final version can end up being something totally different.

Basically we were totally fed up with the whole Gothenburg sound. I remember when we were recording the Mind’s I album we were really pleased with how the songs turned out but we also said to each other that we better do something else next time in order to maintain interest. Being in a band at that time we were quite young, everyone went to school still, and it was an effort to put so many hours into rehearsal and writing songs it was a sacrifice. Because of this we really had to be satisfied with the music in order to feel that it would be worthwhile to continue. We decided to challenge ourselves and come up with something really different for the next album otherwise there would be no point because we were thinking that this band is doing exactly what we felt like and not conforming to a certain sound. At that time everything was hyped and blown out of proportion with everyone expecting the Gothenburg bands to all sound the same and we started seeing bands from all over the world doing the same thing. Again it was really flattering but at the same time it felt like people were just stealing the surface from songs, stealing the sounds and the style of playing but not capturing the actual essence, we were tired of it. When we made Projector it took about a year of songwriting to have everything done and we wanted more of Mikael’s clear vocals. Even on Skydancer he did some clear vocals so we knew that he had a really unique clean voice and we decided that now was the time to incorporate it and put it on the songs for Projector. Shortly after the recording our old second guitarist left, well actually he was fired because he didn’t have any time to devote to the band anymore, so Martin switched from bass guitar to the second guitar and we got Michael as a new bass player and at the same time we recruited our keyboardist Martin as a permanent keyboard player and that made Haven sound much more electronic.

It’s really hard to tell. When you are playing in your own band you get so tangled up with your music and spend so many hours working and rehearsing to perfection, that at the end of the day you can’t listen to your own music like you would listen to another band. I wish it would be like that that way you could put on your own album and say that “This rocks” but you get so much more analytical with your own band. I really would like for us to be original in the sense that you can’t pick out any other band out there that sounds like us. There might be someone but I don’t listen to music that way it is really hard to compare other bands to what you are doing yourself..

We haven’t really began thinking about the next album but I personally think and hope that it will be a bit different. Character stays within the framework of the previous albums and for the next one its time ofr us to do something more experimental and strange again. We haven’t written a single song or a single riff so that remains to be seen but hopefully we will have something more challenging and will surprise a lot of people in the same way that Projector did when that came out.

We are six members and each person has their quite different opinion of music and direction. Everything we do is a combination of opinions of people in the band, maybe some of the other guys want to do an old school death metal album I have no clue. Hopefully we will have something that is bizarre or a bit more weird.

You’re absolutely right that is a really good point that I haven’t thought of but it does actually make sense. It is the way I feel as well that the next album will be a transition album or something radically different just to stir things up a bit. It usually takes us a long time to write an album and in that time we end up abandoning a lot of things we only keep the material that everyone likes. It’s a long process and we will start looking at that after this tour. Its about time because Character was recorded early in 2004, a year before it was released.

Yes, we have always been totally satisfied with Century Media. They are really devoted, hard working people and do a lot of good work for Dark Tranquillity. At the same time when our old contract ran out we would have been kind of stupid not to at least check around and see what kind of offers were available. We had lots of good offers from most of the bigger record labels but at the end of the day we chose to stay with Century Media. We know them really well and there’s always the risk of jumping to a new label and entering into a new relationship. Century Media and us have the same goals and are on the same page so it felt like a natural choice. They do so much hard work for us and we can really tell the difference. The first three albums were on labels that had no US distribution at all which meant that for a lot of people Projector was our first album in the US. You can really tell the difference from a label that actually pushes the album to people because if it isn’t in stores people won’t buy it unless they are really hardcore and order it from mail order stores.

It’s pretty cool when I’m asked about the dream tour or dream gig but I don’t think in those terms like “I hope someone would make this happen.” I’m quite happy doing interviews in general and if there is something on my mind that I really want to get out I would bring it up myself or steer the interview into that direction. It wouldn’t be talking about gear because I am totally handicapped when it comes to equipment and the technical process. I play and know what I like but I’ve never been interested in what goes on beneath with all the gadgets. Our other guitarist is much more into the technical side of things and has his favorite strings, pickups and everything else. I just play.

Thank you very much for reading this, feel free to check out the new album and come out and see us, Like I said we are working on getting another US tour later this year and are really sure it will happen but we don’t know when or what form, if it is going to be a headliner tour or not. We definitely will be back and hope to see you there.