Metal Psalter Sabaton's Pär Sundström Interview Page 1

Philip A. Wickstrand is a contributing freelance writer for Metal Psalter Webzine. He had the opportunity to speak with Sabaton bass guitarist Pär Sundström on July 11, 2010.

Sweden's SABATON have been cranking out melodic Power Metal anthems since 1999. While there may be many bands that specialize in this particular field of Metal, they manage to stand out from the pack musically, but especially lyrically. War is the order for the day with a SABATON song. With their recent signing to Nuclear Blast, they have unleashed their newest opus, "Coat of Arms", an album dedicated entirely to WWII.

Phil: First off, tell us a bit about the new album, "Coat of Arms".

Pär: The new album, "Coat of Arms", is the first one out of our new record Label, Nuclear Blast, which means we can now also reach new places where our music was previously unavailable. Also, this is a great thing for us and this includes the U.S. for the first time; we had never got a CD out in the U.S. before, so this is something that will be new for us. The themes of the albums are usually events around war and we decided to focus only about World War Two because it's such a big event and such an important thing of the 20th Century, so this is one of the reasons why we decided to stay around it. Also because, around this war… this is history and there are a lot of facts about it - the first well documented war. Earlier there are not just concrete facts - around World War Two, most of the things are facts, so we decided to stay around that. And also, there's a lot of exciting things and a lot of countries involved, so this is why we decided to stay with the new album around World War Two. If you compare the new album musically, if you make it against "The Art of War", which is our previous album, you will see that "The Art of War" is more dark and epic and the new album is more open and it's easy listening. I mean, it's just simple rock songs, simple Heavy Metal songs, not so complicated and epic as the previous, so more straight forward Heavy Metal.

Phil: How much research went into World War Two on your part?

Pär: When we make an album, we start first, on the past two albums at least, we ask our fans to send in ideas. On "The Art of War", our previous album, some hundreds of ideas came in, but some of them actually made it to the album because we don't know about all the events, of course we cannot know everything that happened everywhere, so we need our fans for this, to tell local stories that they may think that everybody should know about but nobody does. Also, when it comes to us, we get information from the fans and we say "Okay, this might be a good idea" and we start to research around that current event or battle or something like that. And we ask the fans who contributed with the ideas, like "Do you have any ideas of documentaries or books or something we something we should read?" and the fans are very helpful with providing us with material for this. They have been amazingly helpful on the last album - we got around ten thousand ideas sent in by fans worldwide and most of them we made in to the album. And we could also communicate with the fans a lot and ask them to provide us with more information and this way make it more real. I mean, if we're doing research by ourselves, we maybe find the facts from a certain point of view and we are always trying to get it as objective as possible. So on the new album, it's worked out very well, the cooperation with the fans and the band.

Phil: What was the song writing process like?

Pär: Joakim, our singer, is the main song writer and he usually starts with writing an idea for a song, comes to us and he asks "Hey, what do you think of about this guys?" and we're like "Yes or no" and if it's a yes, he goes back and starts in his own little studio and creates the song and comes back. Sometimes it's completed, sometimes it needs a finishing touch and we all start together and make a finishing touch, but usually he is the one who is doing most of that. And when we are ready with all of the songs we are going to make for the album, I and Joakim then start to research and we write the lyrics. This how it usually happens.

Phil: What was the time in the studio like for recording "Coat of Arms"?

Pär: This time was very interesting because we couldn't do it in one session because we wanted to do the album with Peter Tägtgren, but due to that we had to do a tour in the U.K., which we couldn't deny… we really wanted to do that tour, so we had to reschedule the recording and Peter Tägtgren could not be there with us then. He could only be there with us the first week, so we decided "Okay, we should to his studio and record the drums". And after that, Peter left on a tour with HYPOCRISY and we took all the rest of the recording into our own studio where we recorded guitars, the vocals, bass guitar and keyboards. And finally, we picked up Fredrik Nordström, who was on tour with his band, DREAM EVIL, for the mixing, so we had three different studios and actually three different producers involved in the album. It went good, but I'm sure that it's not the best idea to do it like this. If we can decide in the future, we're definitely going to work with only one person because it was like a little bit of interest that Fredrik Nordström's like, "I don't like the sound of the drums" and Peter says "If he changes the sound of the drums, I'm going to kill him!" (laughter) They have different ideas. There's nothing wrong with any of them, but it just isn't the same, so if you wanna work with several producers, it's not a good idea, I think.

Phil: Yeah, too many cooks in the kitchen.

Pär: Yeah, exactly. But it went good, it went good. And we are happy with the outcome. But it was a little bit uncomfortable when Fredrik says "I hate the sound of the drums, I'm going to try to change it" and Peter calling from being on tour, like "If he's touching the sound, I'm going to go kill him!" (laughs) But it worked.

Phil: What are your favorite songs off the album?

Pär: Personally, I would say the song "Saboteurs" because it has for me a special thing - around ten years ago, Joakim first showed the riffs and the chorus of that song, he's like playing on my guitar and I was totally like, "Wow, this is a really great song" and when we did our first recording off of that, I said "Oh, we should record that song" and it's like, "Nah, it's not such song" some other people in the band said. Joakim was like, "I can't find a way to write the words in the right way", so we waited for the song and we waited and we waited, I waited - I wanted it on every album and finally I got it here. I always thought it was one of the absolutely strongest songs SABATON had. And even before I heard the full song so… and now it's recorded. I really like that song and to play it live is great. It just has the swing.

Phil: Tell us about the filming for the "Uprising" video.

Pär: Normally when we make a music video, it's like going into a room and put on some lights and play a song over and over and over again until we get very tired. But this time is completely different - it was more like a movie recording where we had two hundred people working three days for creating this. And there were a hundred and fifty actors involved in this and a lot of scenes with a lot of people.