Metal Kaoz recently conducted an interview with Jarkko Aaltonen and Juho Kauppinen, the bassist and accordionist of Finnish Folk metallers KORPIKLAANI who talked about the US tour, the new album Manala and the band's future plans. An excerpt follows:

Q: The new album has also a bonus CD where there is an English version of the songs; so why did you do that?

Jarkko: "Because so many times we’ve been asked why all the lyrics are in Finnish and no more English as we had in the beginning. And most of the people asking this were from the US of course. So, we thought to record two versions of the album, one in Finnish and one in English, and release them on the same day to see a couple of months later what version would be the most popular. Even though we were sure it would be the Finnish version, so we could say to the people asking for more English songs ‘sod off’ (laughs). Then we realized this was a stupid idea since we would ‘force’ the actual Korpiklaani to buy the two versions but we are not GUNS N’ ROSES. So, we let this idea on the side but then we thought to do it like a bonus disc and put a different price on it (add a couple of Euros on the price) and let you decide what version you like the most."

Juho: "In fact, there are even more than two versions of the album available. The digipak version of the album is a double-CD, one of them sung in Finnish and the other one sung in English. We thought this would be the best way, so that whoever wants the English or the Finnish album will get both at the same time."

Was it difficult to adapt all the vocal melodies to the English lyrics?

Jarkko: "Yes, it was terrible and we will never do this again. If we had known how much work it would be, we wouldn’t have started. All the lyrics were written in Finnish and then we had to translate them; first, we did a rough translation of the actual text like what this is about and we always ended up with twice as much text as we had in the Finnish version. Then we had to start cutting down the length of the lyrics and at the same time keep the story intact. Next, we had to make the lyrics rime and then try to make them fit the song’s original melody. That was a lot of work, so I’m fairly sure it won’t happen again.

Juho: I was given the task of translating the lyrics from Finnish into English. It was at times challenging, but perfectly feasible, because I was free to translate the lyrics in my way. I did not even try to keep the same singing rhythm, because it was almost impossible to keep it unchanged. In addition, the harmony found in the Finnish lyrics was also impossible to be expressed in English, at the same time with delivering the meaning of the lyrics. We knew about all these factors, but still wanted to carry out this experiment which more and more reinforced the thought that Korpiklaani's prime language will always be Finnish."

Q: There was a story or should I say an internet rumor that Korpiklaani stole the music for Kunnia from a Greek musician.

Jarkko: "Yeah, I learned about this when we were in Czech Republic and got an e-mail about this issue. I understand that people who cannot really understand music think that this is copying and not just two songs having similar elements. I really don’t care about this and it was the first time I listened to that song from that Greek artist. I mean, how you can even hear about this, when you cannot use their alphabet in the computer and even google that guy…"

And this means that there is no legal issue on this matter, right?

Jarkko: "As far as we are concerned there is nothing going on about this."

You can read the entire interview here.