It's been over a decade since Evergrey first popped up on metal radars with the release of  The Dark Discovery and in that time the band continued to build on their trademark dark melodic metal sounds. Now, two years since the release of Monday Morning Apocalypse Evergrey are back with new album Torn and HRH caught up with mainman Tom Englund to find out more:

Torn is about to be released, it feels like a long time since Monday Morning Apocalypse. 

Tom Englund:  Yeah, what is it, like two years, two and a half?  Yeah it’s a fairly good long time, but we toured a lot for the Monday Morning album, and for us it didn’t seem that long.  So yeah, but that is what you hope for really, to have as long time in between albums as possible if that means you will tour, so it was a healthy situation for us. 

I read that Torn was actually completed several months ago. 

TE:  Yeah, it was actually completed in December.  But that has only been positive though, that gave us a lot of time to really not listen to the album and then start listening to it again and see what we, you know, thought of it with some real objectivity, and we’re really happy with it.  I mean we were negotiating with different labels for a long time and we ended up with SPV and that took a long time.  But we were really determined not to cave in on any of the points that we wanted to have for it, so it was a bit of a struggle but now we are in the position where we want to be, so it was worth the wait. 

For Monday Morning Apocalypse you went for the big producer and everything and you said that it is something that you wanted to do, but you haven’t this time.  Why is that? 

TE:  Because when we decided we should do that, that was the first time we did decide to go with a producer, and it was something we needed to try.  At that time we had already written an album that was more straight forward and could benefit from an outside producer.  So it wasn’t like he came in and we rewrote the songs, we had written the songs beforehand and then we decided to get a producer.  So you know, you make choices in your lives and so did we and we’re extremely happy with the result.  With not doing Monday Morning Apocalypse this album would not have sounded anywhere close to what it does today, so it has had it’s effect on anything and everything that we have gone through since. 

Monday Morning Apocalypse did well in the charts, but you read that fans do not hold it in such high regard as the older material, is that a disappointment? 

TE:  Of course.  The day that you become numb to negative critique or whatever, that’s the day when you should step back and do something else.  Of course it provokes us, but it doesn’t have that big of an impact on us that we would change our song writing or lose confidence in what we do.  We do what we find to be best, and this is our band, you know, people with all these comments about we should raise the keyboards and you should do this and do that.  If we would have listened to people like that since the beginning of our career we would have been a totally different band.  We have always stayed true to our hearts and what we believe in and written the songs that we feel should be written. 

So at the same time, as I said, it doesn’t have that much of an impact on us, but of course we care about what people say but it comes to a time when you also grow bigger and bigger and you have more and more people wanting to dislike you.  It’s positive in a weird way, it’s not only your mum and your girlfriend who loves you. 

People have said that Torn brings back some of the old Evergrey, but you can still hear some of Monday Morning Apocalypse in the music, is this album the here and now of Evergrey? 

TE:  I mean this is it.  This is by far the best album we could have produced at the time.  Of course Monday Morning Apocalypse has influenced both the song writing and production ideas and other different approaches when it comes to the music.  So it had a big impact on the sound and the overall outcome of the album.  So I think we have the Monday Morning album to thank a lot for how Torn sounds today. 

  

Tom Englund

Your first single is going to be Broken Wings, why was that chosen? 

TE:  Broken Wings, yeah that’s the video.  Probably because… actually we didn’t chose it, we had three songs that we wanted to make a video for and it was just the decision of which one we should do first.  So we let the management and the booking company and the record company, of course, to decide that for us.  Instead of us making a decision that nobody else would be happy about or whatever, we just said these are the three songs that we could live with, so you make they choice.  They sat down, actually it took them a good while to decide for either Soaked, Broken Wings or Torn, so then they chose this one.  So blame it on them. 

So does that mean that Soaked and Torn will also be released? 

TE:  Hopefully, I mean it all depends on sales, that’s the funding for the next video.  So that seems like now with all the responses and radio ads and stuff we have received so far things are going fantastically well, so I would say Soaked would be the next video. 

Having listened to the album, I personally enjoyed Soaked, so I hope so. 

TE:  Yeah, so do I.  I mean it’s such a good melancholic feel to that whole song, and at the same time it has a bit of a rock feel to it as well, more in the Monday Morning vein, it’s a cool song. 

Your music has a dark edge to it, as do the lyrics which aren’t exactly the happiest.  Does that represent you, or is Evergrey a way for you to get it out of your system? 

TE:  It’s both, of course, I mean of course it represents me in every possible way.  All the lyrics are based on things that I have been through myself, or somebody close to me has been through, or an event that has provoked me enough to write about it.  Writing lyrics for me is like talking to my best friend, you can tell him everything and he listens and doesn’t come with any judgements or anything, I’ll spill my guts and he listens basically.  I just write it down and hopefully some person in the world will find that comforting in reading those lyrics and know that he is not the only person, or she’s not the only person, in the world who has been through life when life is dark and demanding and frustrating, when you’ve been Torn basically. 

In the build up to the album the band have been through a lot, for one you’ve changed bassist (Jari Kainulainen formerly of Stratovarius), have they settled in now and are you back to being a band? 

TE:  We are extremely happy with him and he is by far one of the best bass players I have heard, ever, and I’m counting everyone.  So yeah it’s a good thing to have such a great instrumentalist in the band.  But there has also been a lot of other changes, we’ve changed the record label as you said, and the management and the booking company, all of the people that have worked around us we’ve tried to… we’ve tried to step up a notch basically. 

Having signed to SPV, they now have your back catalogue, so I have to ask, are there any plans for it? 

TE:  No.  As I said to them ‘you can buy them or whatever, but the day we’re gonna re-release them we have to do something special with it’.  Either make it like a DVD/CD double thing and add like an hour of unreleased video material, which we have a lot of that.  So that it makes it worth it for people buying it and not just re-releasing it and ripping people off, because we have an extra track or whatever.   

So with all the changes happening over the last couple of years, did it have a major impact on the band? 

TE:  I wouldn’t say a fresh start, but it feels like a positive continuation of something that we started ten years ago.  Right now the feeling is really positive and, as I have said, all the reviews and everything coming in so far is fantastic.  So adding that to all the changes we have done makes it feel like we have done the right decisions and hopefully we keep on making the right decisions as well. 

And over that time unfortunately you pulled your tour with Brainstorm, and sadly Progpower UK was cancelled.  

TE:  Things happen, as for the Progpower thing, I don’t know what happened, but the tour we just decided that we couldn’t go out and tour for the third time in Europe on the same album; that would be really stupid and not bring anything new to the table.  So that was a conscious decision more than anything else, because originally the plan was to release the album in January, but when that didn’t happen it felt really weird and stupid to go out and tour again.   

Now that the album is being released what are the touring plans? 

TE:  For the first time we are doing it the other way round than we have done it before.  Start doing Scandinavia and more obscure places, places that you don’t pass on a European tour, like I know we are doing Russia and Poland and Romania and places like that where you’re not immediately passing by on a European tour.  Then we are hopefully going to get in South America before the end of the year as well, and then we are going to do a tour in, I think it is February, next year opening for another band, which I can’t tell you yet, and then it just continues, America I guess after that and then the summer festivals and then our own headlining tour.

 

So will the supporting tour see you come to England? 

TE:  I would think so yeah. 

Will that be announced on your website when the timing’s right? 

TE:  Absolutely, as soon as we have all the financial details sorted and whatever, we will announce as soon as possible. 

I notice that Kamelot are touring around that time! 

TE:  It’s not Kamelot, they wanted a band that they didn’t have to pay anything for.  More than them in different parts of different countries and they sell more than us in other parts, so it would have to be a co-headlining tour and they weren’t interested in that. 

It would have been amazing. 

TE:  It would have been cool, but you know there’s a lot of people that you have to feed. 

Are you looking forward to getting back out in the touring cycle again? 

TE:  Yeah, very much so.  We’ve been on the slow path for almost two years now… not two years, one year maybe.  It’s a great feeling right now to be starting up again. 

Your wife sings on the new album, was there any time when she recorded something where you had to say that’s not quite right?  

TE:  Oh yeah, of course.  When I record with her she’s like any other musician I work with when I produce other bands so it’s not like a husband and wife thing, we argue a hell of a lot until I get what I want. 

You do produce quite a bit, is that something you enjoy? 

TE:  Yeah, when I have the time I think it is cool to be able to participate on younger band’s albums and stuff like that because I think it gives them a sort of a push in the right direction and it’s also our way of thanking them for acknowledging us and, I mean it would have been awesome if Bruce Dickinson would have sung on our first album.  It’s a cool thing. 

Finally, is there anything else you would like to add? 

TE:  Just check out our website www.evergrey.net for the latest we have coming up and hope to see you in England soon. 

Darren Brushneen