GAMMA RAY Recording New Album; First Photo From The Studio Posted
January 13, 2013, 11 years ago
EarMUSIC has posted a photo from the studio after visiting GAMMA RAY in Hamburg, Germany on January 9th, where frontman Kai Hansen and bassist Dirk Schlächter were working on the band's as-yet-untitled new album. Stay tuned for updates on the new record in the coming weeks.
Following is an excerpt from BraveWords' recent interview with Hansen about the new Gamma Ray live CD/DVD, Skeletons & Majesties Live:
“From a fan’s point of view, I’d be happy to see one of my favourite bands doing a completely different setlist because I know all their songs. If I go to a JUDAS PRIEST show, rather than hearing ‘Living After Midnight’ I’d rather hear stuff like ‘Dreamer Deceiver’. That’s much more interesting even for a diehard fan that knows all the songs in a band’s catalogue.”And there you have the motivation behind Gamma Ray's new outing Skeletons & Majesties Live courtesy of frontman/founder Kai Hansen. Call it a case of the band challenging themselves and the fans by daring to be different, building a tour setlist in 2011 that reached all the way back to their 1990 debut Heading For Tomorrow and dusted off some of their more obscure tracks for the stage.
“It was really cool,” Hansen says. “And the great part of it was seeing that it actually works, that those songs aren’t weaker than the ones we play all the time. They just don’t get the attention they deserve. There are always the album favourites and the ‘real’ great songs, but that doesn’t mean the other songs are shit. When you do festivals and tours, sure, you include your ‘Best Of’ songs to make most of the people happy, but it was a lot of fun for us to do things this way.”“That was especially at the rehearsals, when we were saying ‘Do we really have to practice ‘Send Me A Sign’ again?’ We’ve been playing that song for a long time and it’s quite simple, so there was no real need to go over it again. The songs that we hadn’t played in such a long time – or never – there was a totally different motivation to rehearsing them and improving ourselves.”
Go to this location for the complete interview.
