WITHIN TEMPTATION vocalist Sharon den Adel is featured in a new interview with Mike Bax at Canada's Lithium Magazine. An excerpt is available below:

Mike: It seems like you took a different approach to making your fifth album. How did you arrive at the idea of crossing your music over with comics and short films?

Sharon: "Well, we just started writing and we knew that we just couldn’t go back to where we ended up at the end of The Heart Of Everything. We were all feeling like we needed to make a change. We felt like we had finalized our sound with The Heart Of Everything. We couldn’t really do it any better in our opinion. So we needed to do something a little bit different. We felt that our music needed a change in a way to keep us interested in making it. If you finalize something and feel like you’ve done everything you can do with it, then you want to try something new again."

"Also, we wanted to keep our minds open. With The Heart of Everything, we had worked on certain styles and concepts that our music could sound like. We didn’t think we could make another album in the same style as The Heart Of Everything. With The Unforgiving, we wanted to challenge ourselves to take a new step with our music, and re-invent ourselves again. We wanted to use influences we had never used before like pop music, in particular the eighties sounds, and some of the bands we grew up with. When we were starting out we wanted to make something different and go away from the bands we grew up with. With The Unforgiving we wanted to get those influences back into our material. We wanted a Kim Wilde feeling, and METALLICA and IRON MAIDEN. We love those bands, but we never wanted to put those influences into our music before, and I think we got some of those sounds into the new album."

Mike: How did the comics and short films fit into your writing process? Were they a part of the big picture right from the start, or did they come out of material you had already written a bit further down the road?

Sharon: "At first, we wanted to just find a great story that we could make a concept album around. We wanted to use a movie for that story, and after talking to a lot of movie directors about doing a cooperative simultaneous release we realized that trying to get an album and a movie out at the same time might be too hard to coordinate. We could see the album coming out and the movie coming a year later because it got held up in production. We didn’t want to do something like that, where it could look foolish, or the film doesn’t get realized at all, right? That could happen as well."

Click here for the complete interview.

Within Temptation collaborated with Beyond Comics on a comic book adaptation of their latest album, The Unforgiving, and the first issue (written by Steven O'Connel and drawn by Romano Molenaar) made its premiere at the Baltimore Comic-Con this past August.

As previously reported, the band recently performed a three-song acoustic set at the Lowlands Festival in their native NetherlandsThey played three songs: 'What Have You Done', 'Faster', and 'Sinéad', from their most recent album, The Unforgiving.

Check out video footage below:

(Photo by Mike Bax)