Cult Of Luna [Interview]
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Metal bands tend to get a bad rap in more mainstream circles. However, beyond the negative stereotypes lie a group of people who, like everyone else, want to be heard and understood, and would prefer it if we could allow each other a basic level of respect.
With Cult Of Luna’s brand new album Mariner dropping on April 8, I talked to guitarist / vocalist Johannes Persson about the story behind the music, space, religion, and the easy way to respect performers at gigs…
Your new album Mariner is coming out this Friday. How’re you feeling right now?
I remember the period between delivering the master and the release used to be unbearable. Now, I have too much to think about!
I just reflected on it this last day; [Mariner] is coming out on Friday, but now I hardly reflect on it, to be honest. It just hit me that it’s out on Friday!
Mariner is the result of a collaboration between Cult Of Luna and Julie Christmas. How did that collaboration happen?
We were doing a festival, Beyond The Redshift, and I’ve been a fan of Julie’s ever since Battle Of Mice and Made Out Of Babies. And most importantly, I’m a big fan of her solo work. The Bad Wife is one of my favourite albums; I discovered it in 2012, or something like that, and it’s been in constant rotation.
We were both [going to play Beyond The Redshift], and our agent said that she couldn’t. I wanted to make sure, so I asked for her contact [details], and then we started talking.
For some reason, I honestly don’t know exactly how it went, but we were not going to tour for a while. We were going to cut down on the touring, but I still wanted to write music. So I thought okay, let’s do an album that’s impossible to tour!
So I asked [Julie] if she was interested in doing something, and she kind of liked it. We decided to try out one or two songs, and see if we could work together. I started sending her drafts and demos in summer 2014, if I remember correctly.
I remember we got some drafts of vocals for one song, and it was like, this song is very strange, but we’ve got a good feeling, so let’s just go ahead and do a full album. That was basically how it went down.
So what was your creative process while writing and recording Mariner?
The last couple of years now, we’ve lived in different parts of Sweden. Luckily we all live in Sweden, but that hasn’t always been the case.
But it kind of works. We work separately, so we write drafts of songs, and then we meet up in the rehearsal room every now and then, for like a weekend. And then we start to work on those ideas, and then we pretty much let go.
So the song in itself, it’s very free as soon as the form is done. So everybody is pretty much free to do whatever they want. There was another variable this time, which was Julie of course. So when we had a draft that we felt was okay as a first draft, we’d send it over to her – and one thing that was scary at first…she came back with ideas about the song structure, and [we thought] is it really a good idea to get another will into this band?
But it all ended up really good! We didn’t have one conflict; it wasn’t [really a case of an extra will]. Some ideas that came back we really liked; some we modified and sent back. That’s how it became a collaboration, you know?
Yeah.
Her ideas spawned ideas from our point of view, so we sent it back maybe not exactly how [Julie] wanted it. It was the same thing with the vocal ideas; some of the songs are hers, some of the songs are ours, and some of them are very collaborative. It worked out much better than it could have been – it could have been a mess of conflict and ideas, but we were very open to her ideas, and she was very open and respectful to our ideas. So there was no major conflict, as far as I can remember.
How have you evolved, as musicians and as people, over the course of creating Mariner?
Questions like that are really hard to answer as a person. It’s like my kids; I don’t see them grow up, but from the outside, if [someone else meets] them in three months’ time then you’d say oh, they’ve grown so much!
It’s impossible to know, because I’m only looking out of my eyes! I just do the ideas that pop up in my head. There’s probably some kind of evolutionary lineage from the macro perspective of our career overall, but you’re probably in a better position to answer that question than I am!
I can see what you mean. If you’re looking at your life from the inside, then you have that moment to moment awareness of everything that’s going on. Whereas someone on the outside can see things changing over time. It’s totally true.
I basically have been doing stuff for twenty years. Somebody could probably do some sort of analysis of that. I don’t know.
I would gladly read one, but I don’t know.
You mean in terms of a biography, that sort of thing? Have you ever considered that?
No, I’ve never considered that [laughs]!
Fair enough! So Mariner is based around a space exploration theme. What first inspired that general theme?
Apart from it being incredibly cool and inspiring?
We’ve known that we need to go out into space for quite a while now. We were stuck in a kind of rural environment when we released Somewhere Along The Highway and Eternal Kingdom in 2006 and 2008. From 2006 to 2010 we were stuck in the inspiration of the rural environment of our home town. And when we came back after a couple of years of hiatus, we decided we wanted to do something completely different.
At that point, we knew that we were going…well, on that album, Vertikal, we got inspired by the idea of a mechanical city, a futuristic city, but also inspired by German expressionism and Italian futurism from the 1920s rather than the obvious Blade Runner theme.
Was Fritz Lang’s Metropolis part of that?
Yes and no. We started sending inspirational material back and forth – what kind of colours we wanted to use and get musically inspired by – and a lot of the pictures and imagery were German expressionism.
Of course, Metropolis is like the crown jewel of that kind of style. We were sending a lot of Metropolis pictures back and forth. We knew at that point, where do you go from there?
What you do is…the album is called Vertikal, which means “vertical” in English, so that’s the way we go. We went from down, to up. We kind of hinted at that on one of the last songs on Vertikal – In Awe Of – and Light Chaser, which was on the EP we released afterwards [Vertikal II].
Also, the artwork of Vertikal II was inspired by, you know if you look up at the clouds at night over a city, you kind of see spotlights?
Yeah…
That was it. So we knew that was the place to go.
Mariner was inspired by an imaginary space exploration. It’s imaginary because it’s based around the idea of leaving some kind of wretched state, like a dying Earth, and you leave to find a new home.
The title Mariner is kind of a reference to the old seafarers who left without knowing what was going to be at the end of the horizon. But it could also be a double meaning, about leaving a safe haven and exploring new parts of whatever. I love people with passion who just do what they love, without thinking of the consequences – to a certain extent, of course.
That’s the kind of person who drives the world forward – people who dare to take a step outside of the box. But apart from that kind of ideological idea, we used basic physical inspiration, not just space travel, to help us write the music.
For example, the first song (A Greater Call) is like the blast-off; listen to it and think about walking up to a space shuttle and blasting off and trying to conquer gravity. Then when you’ve finally conquered gravity, you drift off into the vacuum of space. Think of that when you listen to that song again.
The last part of the final song (Cygnus 1) was inspired by the stargate scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even though it’s physically impossible to breach the outer limits of space because you can’t travel faster than the speed of light; it would take you billions of light years to get there; and it’s constantly expanding. But in our imagination, you can imagine what it would be like to move faster than the speed of light and reach the outer limits of space and reach what’s called the redshift – the furthest we can see into physical space. Then we breach the limit, the final border, and BAM! Go out into the pitch blackness…or is it?! [Laughs]
Yeah – nobody knows what’s behind that final limit…
We hardly know what’s outside of the universe. We know that the more we understand, the more we know we don’t know.
Yeah – that’s actually one of my favourite sayings. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.
Exactly! Imagine what the world would look like if more people actually had that attitude…
That actually takes me on to my next question. How would you like to see the world change?
If people could just be nicer, it would be nice!
This is as highly unlikely as a space journey faster than the speed of light, but I’d like to see the death of religion, first of all. Death of irrational thought and irrational behaviour. People will always have conflict of different sorts, but I think that would at least take away one aspect that is exclusively religious, the idea of life after death.
The thing is, religion has exclusivity to the advantage of divine permission. They have the idea of a life after death. And that in itself is the cause [of much conflict]. Hence the idea of martyrdom; I think if you could just remove that from mankind, the idea of the honourable death, we would really be immune to a lot of bullshit and violence.
I don’t live in the illusion that if religion dies we’re going to live in some sort of, ironically, paradise [laughs]. I don’t believe that at all, but it would definitely be a big step forward.
You’re touring this month. What’s the weirdest thing that’s happened at one of your shows?
[Laughs] There’ve been a lot of things that have happened at our shows over the years. One thing I remember clearly is…about twelve years ago, we were playing a show in the UK, and there was a guy [in the audience] who was really making a mess with the support acts. I told the others guys that he’d be a problem during our set too.
He stood just in front of me, and when I’m onstage I used to have a much shorter fuse than I have today. But at that point, I’m full of adrenaline and I’m playing this softer part, and after annoying me for half the set, he grabbed my guitar. And I punched him – I punched him in the face.
But the funny thing, thinking about it, is that that guy came back like a week later, to another UK show, and apologised! He had been, let’s just say “intoxicated,” and he was a fan of the band, so he came up and apologised and it was water under the bridge.
I get very angry very fast, but if there’s anything that can justify that, I calm myself down maybe quicker than anyone else. I don’t even know if that’s good…
I mean, people can be annoying all the time. We have a lot of softer songs, and people don’t understand that if if they’re shouting, that’s something…write this, please. If you talk over the music, so your buddy will hear what you say, then I hear what you say. Because you’re talking over the music.
I mean, I can’t make out every single word if everyone’s talking, but if you’re watching a band play softer songs, and you want to talk…get the fuck out. Seriously. Maybe if you want to talk you can go outside for a second. Easy.
I totally agree! I get into a lot of arguments with people at shows when they do that, because I’m the guy who’ll go up to people at the bar and be like “…shut the fuck up…”
That’s brave, if you live in the UK!
Yeah – trust me! One more question. Beyond the album release and the tour, what do you have planned for the future?
We have four more shows in Scandinavia, and then we have no plans.
Cool. That’s all! Thanks for your time.
No problem. Thanks for your patience, too.
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