Metal Israel spoke to DARK TRANQUILLITY singer Mikael Stanne recently about a number of topics. Here are a few excerpts from the chat:

Metal Israel: You have inspired a multitude of bands globally and people copy you a lot. What do you think of all of that?

Stanne: "Well, I guess imitation is a great form of flattery. It’s kind of cool that people look at us for inspiration and decide to form a band because they think our music is special. That’s amazing to me. But then again, when people are actually copying and kind of forget how to be original and they lose their identity because they want to sound like us or like some other band, that’s kind of sad. But people will eventually get it and perform something new. That’s exactly what we did when we started. We took our main influences and tried to sound like a little bit of that band, and a little bit of that band, and form something new out of all of that inspiration and those influences. That’s a positive thing but it freaks me out and kind of blows my mind to think that there are actually people out there that look at us the same way that I look at my favourite bands. That just doesn’t fit into my brain, that’s just too much to handle for me. I think that that’s so weird and so amazing, but it’s just hard to trust because it’s just too far out there."

Metal Israel: With the Fiction album, you draw on a host of different styles. Did you do that purposely?

Stanne: "Yeah, absolutely. Going in, we wanted an album consisting of all different songs. Instead of having a certain theme to the whole album, we wanted the theme to be diversity. We allowed ourselves greater freedom, I guess. We told each other, 'Let’s be more open this time around, let’s explore the music we like instead of just discarding it if we feel it’s not good enough immediately.' If someone has written a piece of music and we go, 'Nyaaaah, it doesn’t feel right,' and then like, we throw it away, but this time around we felt, 'Let’s keep it a little bit longer and see if we can change it, alter it, whatever, to make it good.' And usually we found out some of the best stuff on the album by doing that. And also we said, if the song has to have a certain feel to it, like an old melancholy feel or whatever, then let’s stick to that instead of like putting some really melancholy stuff and some really aggressive stuff and you know, mixing that up. Go with the feeling of the song instead of just trying to mix everything up like we usually do. Cause on the inside it’s out of fear, like you feel like aaaagh it’s just going to be boring if we just keep playing slow, and it’s going to be boring if we just do a really fast song. But we said fuck that and see what happens if we just go with our gut feeling. It felt great to write this lively album and it felt great to record it. It worked out for the best."

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