Ville Valo Inerview @ Radio Nova

A: Well no, you can’t call this a dungeon. This is the suite designed by our very own Remu Aaltonen here in the centre of Helsinki. This is a great place as any.

Part 2

Q: Ville, let’s get to the point. Tears on tape, the new album, the eighth studio album of HIM and I have to check this…You always like to make comparisons to certain artists before an album comes out. And you mentioned before tears on tape came out that it’s a Bermuda triangle…It has Smashing Pumpkins, Black Sabbath and Roy Orbison. Now that you listen to the finished product how did that Bermuda triangle work?

Part 3

A: A little like Bermuda triangles usually do. You get lost in there somewhere along the way and never come back. Well, we can never remove the Black Sabbath, because they are such a huge influence for us, kind of like Type O Negative. And this time the Roy Orbison reference…As far as I remember I said it for the kind places that don’t know “Tapsa” (Tapio) Rautavaara.

Part 4

...It was about having the Finnish, a little dark melancholy meeting the heavy guitars like we have done before but this time we maybe tried to make more in a way that all those elements would be in every song.

Part 5

...That you don’t have one very sad, easy (I think he means calm with this) song and one really heavy rock song. Instead you have a really heavy riff, for example “Into the Night”. It has a punky riff you can bang your head to but at the same time the verses and choruses are like beautiful, melancholy and melodic. Sentimental stuff we are known for.

Part 6

Q: Hiili Hiilesmaa has been working on this album, who is your trusted producer. And Tim Palmer, the British dude with whom you have also worked a lot in the past. How did it work this time around working with a familiar team? Were there any arguments?

Part 7

A: There are always arguments but they are positive arguments, it’s kind of like constructive criticism. It would be awful if everybody always liked everything. This time the idea was maybe that we had a pretty clear vision of what we wanted to do with the album sound-vise... that the skeletons of the songs are quite pretty and melancholy and we didn’t want the album to turn out too pretty, we wanted it to be roughness and huge guitars. And no one does it better than Hiili.

Part 8

…Hiili is like a crazy laboratory technician, inventor genius kind of like dr. Frankenstein and our band is also a bit peculiar…After we have made million tracks of that shit, Tim Palmer is great at getting something out of it that is listenable. In that sense this album reminds me a bit of the 2003 album Love Metal. It’s rough, lively, organic, It’s rock’n’roll, it smells like sweat but it’s still pretty and listenable and hopefully memorable. That’s what we aim for.

Part 9

Q: How does Ville Valo write songs? Does it still start with you in your underpants sitting at home with an acoustic guitar playing in a campfire mentality or?

Part 10

A: Nowadays there are no more underpants, I’ve tossed the underpants. I’ve worn them all out. No..Some of the songs are born that way… they’re mainly born from melodies…or with the piano. I am a very bad pianist though. I think it’s very important that the song works alone with very little accompaniment. After that we add the meet and the fat around the song at the rehearsal place.

Part 11

…The second last song on the album W.L.S.T.D was born by me just starting to hum the riff on a taxi ride to the rehearsal place and didn’t have any recording devices with me so I had to hum it for like half an hour. The same riff over and over again in my head before I got there and I quickly grabbed the guitar from Linde and played the riff. And the song itself was born during that rehearsal in like 2-3 hours, the whole idea for it…

Part 12

...I think what’s interesting in making music, especially rock’n’roll, is that the journey towards completing a song is always a little different. Sometimes it starts with tinkling the piano and sometimes it starts with something completely different. It’s nice not to have a routine or a method, like it would always be the same journey from A to B.

Part 13

Q:…Well Ville Valo, I kow you like the band Sisters of Mercy a lot. Andrew Eldritch the front man of the band said at some point that he thinks it’s more important that music touches a few people deeply than large masses…

A: You’ve seen the same interview that I have

Q: How much HIM has had to compromise? Have you had to give in in order to touch as large masses as possible?

Part 14

A: I immediately thought of something erotic about large masses and touching them…I like small masses more…Eldritch is pretty charming, he has funny and dry humor… And a lot of it. I get his point but when making music…when we are at the rehearsal place playing for example the riff of “Into the Night” and we are having so much fun and we are opening the beer bottles and were like: “yeah, this is going well” and sweat is dripping, you can’t know if anyone is going to like it.

Part 15

…The important thing about making music and making an album is that our band feels good about it and we like to play it. Hopefully that comes across on the album and that way it comes across to the listener who will hear something new and wonderful in it.

Part 16

...The songs could be pretty dark or melancholy but it still the kind of melancholy you can dance to, a festive melancholy. You can open a bottle of champagne while you have a tear in your eye. That’s what we aim for. To answer your question it’s impossible to speculate beforehand how big or how small a mass is going to like a certain song. Otherwise we would all be the Beatles.

Part 17

Q: If you think about the history of HIM…It’s been 22 years since somewhere in Oulunkylä you and the bass player Mige fromed the band His Infernal Majesty. And this is where HIM has come to. Eight albums and all kinds of accomplishments. How have you stayed together this long?

Part 18

A: I have no idea. It’s one of those things I don’t dare to think about. It feels like there’s some magic and you break the magic if you start to speculate it too much. I don’t think there are any other reasons besides the fact that before the band was formed we have grown up together. Me, Linde and Mige are childhood friends. Burton and Gas we have known since we were teenagers.

Part 19

…We have been sitting and drinking beer somewhere in front of Uspenski Cathedral back in the day before there even was any band. I think that’s one of the most important reasons. We are friends rather than five ego maniacs who want money and fame. We started playing music at such a young age that we didn’t know anything about money or fame or girls or cars. The only cool thing was Ozzy Osbourne or Mötley Crüe videos on TV. That’s why we got into this.