Leif Edling’s Adventures in Light and Shadow
When Swedish doom legends Candlemass wrapped their touring for 2007, bassist and primary songwriter Leif Edling, whose riffs make me get all Jodie Foster in Contact — “Should have sent a poet,” etc. — had a couple weeks to himself. Accordingly, he wrote a solo album.
Songs of Torment, Songs of Joy, released in November 2008 by GMR in Sweden and March 10, 2009 by Candlelight in the US, is the resulting work, culled together from a host of musical ideas ranging from homage to Jules Verne to simply wanting to write a song about a serial killer in out of space. These are the most sincere of inspirations. Joining Edling in this endeavor is Candlemass keyboardist Dr. Carl Westhelm, guitarists Bj?rn Eriksson and Chris Laney (also engineer) and drummer Lars Sk?ld, all of whom, as we’ll see, are apparently quite busy people.
Note: If you’re the type to stop reading the interview halfway through (it happens to everyone), make sure you catch the part at the end where he talks about his Black Sabbath collection.
There’s already been a review (and not a short one), so without further ado on my part, after the jump we join the Leif Edling interview, already in progress…
…Actually, I wanted to talk more about the solo record than the Candlemass.
Yeah, exactly. It’s bad timing, though. I wanted the solo album to be out before Christmas so it wouldn’t coincide with the Candlemass album, but of course (laughs), the release got delayed and I’m sitting here with twice as many interviews.
It’s been out in Europe, right?
It was out in Scandinavia in November and it was supposed to be out in Europe in November, but I think they changed distribution or something. That was my thing, “It must not coincide with the Candlemass album.”
So much for that.
Yeah, typical one of those things. You just deal with it.
When were the songs for the solo album actually written?
October 2007. That was directly after the European tour [Candlemass] did. We got home and I got bored like a week after, thought I should write some songs before I started on the Candlemass album. It took me about a month.
Was there something in particular that made you want to write songs not for Candlemass or Krux?
I just had some time and I had been discussing with Dr. Carl, the keyboard player, that I wanted to make an organ album, so I started on that. The first ideas that we had, it wasn’t supposed to be any guitars on the album, just keyboards and mainly organ. So it was supposed to be an organ album, it was written like one. When we started to add drums and bass and stuff, it showed pretty quick that we missed some guitars (laughs). But I wrote for an organ album for a month.
So you wrote those songs without the guitar? The organ came first?
No, I always write on guitar, but I recorded the bass first around Christmas [2007], so I only had bass to listen to, and the bass was playing the riffs. And then we added drums a couple of weeks after, the first week of January [2008], and it sounded quite okay, actually. Good bass and good drum sound and we added keyboards to it so we had the bass and the drums and the keyboards and it sounded pretty good. But there was something missing (laughs). It sounded really powerful and I think Dr. Carl was like, “Hmm, maybe we should keep it like this,” but I think it would have been pretty empty and I don’t think anybody would have understood it. It was just a very slow paced organ album (laughs).
It seems like an odd process to go from writing the parts on the guitar to getting rid of the guitar.
Not if you have in mind that it will be on bass. You have it in your mind that it will be kept very simple on bass. It wasn’t odd at all. It depends on where you aim at.
Was it different for you considering vocal parts for yourself, as opposed to for a singer?
In a way, yes, but in a way, no, I guess. I’m not a singer, so I guess it was a little bit more difficult to visualize the vocals, because when I write for Candlemass, you always know exactly how it’s going to be and you know your vocalist can do pretty much anything. So considering that, it was maybe a little bit of a challenge because I had to arrange the songs pretty carefully; if the songs would have more vocals or less vocals, do I want to sing a chorus here or shall we keep the vocals to a minimum on this song? The first song, “The Scar,” I think I had in mind maybe I should sing on that little chorus part that comes in after the vocals, but I said no, don’t do that, so I kept it very simple instead of overdoing it and maybe not being able to make it 100 percent. I kept it very basic and I think it works pretty good. I’m not ashamed of the vocals. I think it sounds pretty good. It fits the music, anyway. It’s an album like that. I don’t think anybody would be looking for a classic vocal style, hard rock vocals from an album like that (laughs). I think that would sound really silly, actually.
How was the actual recording process, aside from the guitars coming in later? Was it any different for you seeing this album unfold from Candlemass?
Yeah, a little bit, because when we record the Candlemass, you’re in the studio for 10 days, perhaps. Now I didn’t have that much studio time, I didn’t have much money, so I had to plan things very carefully. I recorded the bass first and got a deal at a studio and did the bass in one day and it sounded great, and then we did the drums in one day in the Polar Studio in Stockholm. Excellent studio. I paid for that, then I was pretty broke for a while. The entire procedure took one year to record the album, from when I started to write to the point it was finished. Because so many people were involved, it wasn’t an easy thing to record it. You had to check with your friends when they were free. Bj?rn Eriksson, for example, my friend who plays guitar, works in industrial design. He designs cell phones. He goes to China, he goes to Tokyo, he goes to Prague for two weeks, just all of a sudden and out of the blue, and he thinks, “Okay, we can do it next week,” and you phone him in five or six days and he’s not there and he’s buggered off to Prague for two weeks. So it was planning stuff like that, logistics, administration, that was a little tricky. In the end, we recorded Bj?rn‘s guitar in his house, and Chris Laney, the producer at Polar recorded the other guitar in Polar when he had free time over there. I did the vocals in the mixing guy’s bedroom, so we could be there when the wife was out (laughs). It was a little bit tricky, because the people are pretty busy with theirs. Chris was pretty busy with producing and recording at Polar and Dr. Carl is a doctor, so he’s pretty busy with that, working days and nights a lot. That was the thing, to record with really busy people. So it took a year.
Well, the album sounds coherent, like a band. There’s a good flow.
Oh yeah, it’s good people and Polar Studio is great, so it was one guitar recorded there and the bass and drums recorded there. They’re not digitally recorded on an ADAT or something or at home with a cheap ProTools system. It’s recorded properly, and Bj?rn‘s guitar, he recorded at home into his computer and sent the files over to Stefan [Fand?n], who was mixing, and Stefan got class-A, top notch stuff, state of the art things in his bedroom, so he can really polish a turd (laughs). Some of Bj?rn‘s stuff didn’t sound great, but he got them to sound great. And Bj?rn has got this fucking dumpster sound in his guitar. I never heard a guitar sound like that, it’s just massive and evil. If you hear something massive and evil, it’s Bj?rn‘s guitar on this album (laughs). Chris Laney‘s guitar sounds more classic metal.
That organ sounds pretty evil too.
Yeah, it sounds great. Dr. Carl has got incredible sounds in his library. He’s just a super-highly trained musician and he’s got the sounds. He doesn’t keep bad sounding organs or mellotrons or Wurlitzers, whatever sounds you want, he’s got the best fucking sound possible. If it’s not super, super good-sounding, he doesn’t want it. I spent a lot of evenings at Dr. Carl‘s house, working with him on the organs and mellotrons. We wanted a lot of organ on the album to make it sound really epic and big, and so we did that. It’s great to sit there, it’s pretty relaxing because he’s got huge aquariums in this room. On two walls, he’s got enormous aquariums with tropical fish in them. To sit there, and he’s playing around with his sounds, and sometimes it takes a while for him and I’m just there looking at the fish, feeding them and stuff, in a pretty relaxed atmosphere (laughs). Fish swimming around. And he’s actually collected some of them himself. He goes to Africa a couple times a year and he dives and collects fish. He gets paid for it too because he works for Doctors without Borders, that organization. He works for them and goes down to Africa and does a little bit of diving. It’s cool. It’s really nice and they really appreciate it too. They don’t get much pay and they don’t want it too, it’s just something for him to help needy people and to do some good and when they get back here, Dr. Carl, anyway, he works around the clock and he gets the money and so he’s well set (laughs). He was in Africa, he just came home the other week, actually. He’s been down there, diving a lot and working a lot too. He’s a heart specialist. (Laughs) Yeah, you’ve got this industrial designer, this heart specialist and then you’ve got Leif the Loser (laughs).
When it came time to do the lyrics for Songs of Torment, Songs of Joy, was there anything in particular you were looking to express?
It’s called Songs of Torment, Songs of Joy, and it’s about light and shade, actually. The cover is like that, with me standing in the fires of hell with the halo over me. That is part of the heaven and hell thing, and most stuff on it is about light and shade, because we all have it inside of us. It is a small theme on the record that I have half the record is pretty dark and depressive and semi-scary and half of the record ain’t. You have the small “Butterfly” thing, you have a song like “On the Edge of Time,” you have “Nautilus,” some pretty light stuff. To me, anyway (laughs). Those songs, “The Scar,” “It is Not There,” “Angelic til I Die” and “My Black Birthday,” those songs present the darkness, the blackness. I didn’t want to keep everything super-depressive and suicidal and everything. People always ask me, “Oh yeah, you must be hungover or suicidal or depressed all the time.” I ain’t, really. Most people have got that. They’re happy maybe when they’re with friends or at work or something, but they come home and you can be depressed for an evening or a weekend, or whatever. A week. I think all people have that inside of them, but I do something with my dark side. This album is like that.
How in general have your feelings about heavy metal changed over the years?
I don’t think it has changed much, actually. I still listen to metal mainly here at home (laughs). Yesterday I listened to Mercyful Fate, I listened to Pentagram this morning. I listened to Anvil yesterday too. It hasn’t changed much. I’m still a big fan of the ’80s style of metal. Maybe I’m a bit old or whatever, but I really dig that kind of metal because you had great riffs and great songs. You don’t hear that much in today’s metal. It’s a lot of muscle metal and power metal, but I prefer the classic style because they had some cool songs and mean riffs and stuff. We’re working to get Anvil over to play with us next year when we have our 25th anniversary with Candlemass. Paying your dues to Anvil. And we had Trouble over in 2003 in Stockholm and we recorded a DVD there with them at that Stockholm show we did. We did that, so now it’s time for Anvil to come to Stockholm.
Last year Candlemass did the US tour. Are there any plans yet around the new record?
We’re gonna do a big European tour at the end of the year because we’re gonna do the summer festivals first and then we go to Japan, and some dude wants us to go to Australia with Megadeth and Testament, something like that. Candlemass squeezed in between those bands (laughs). I don’t know, we haven’t heard much, just an email last week and this was in September, so I think October/November for a big European tour because we have an album coming out that the record company thinks can do pretty well. The pre-reviews that we’re getting now are incredible here in Europe, so I do a lot of interviews. The interest is fucking huge. I hope it can be like that in the States too. I know the Nuclear Blast people are working pretty hard now in America. They’ve got pretty good distribution, so hopefully it can sell in the States too, because to be perfectly honest, the previous albums have done okay in the States, but it’s like a fart in the wind, really. With this album coming out in the States and hopefully with some muscle behind it, I think can do pretty well, then hopefully we can be back to the States on a real tour, maybe opening up for a bigger band or something. That would be cool.
But I must actually say something. With the solo album, I was speaking about light and shade. I can mention that some of the influences on this album, like “On the Edge of Time,” for example, it’s the Hawkwind album, Warrior on the Edge of Time. I was thinking about what kind of lyrics would I write to the song that I had, but I couldn’t come up with the lyrics for it, a theme. Then I had the Hawkwind album right here in my apartment and I was looking at it and I saw this fantastic cover with the warrior and this cleft and this mirror world in front of him, so I wrote a lyric about that cover. That’s kind of unusual, but I think it’s cool. I really like it, that lyrical content. “Space Killer” is also one that I like very much, because it’s totally, totally weird and stupid, about an intergalactic killer blowing up planets here and there, and now he’s come to Earth and the Earth‘s defense system is trying to fight him. I like to do that because it’s totally something different from what I do with Candlemass.
That’s very classic metal.
Yeah, but not classic for me (laughs). I haven’t done it before. It was really nice to do something very different. With “Nautilus,” for example, it’s influenced by the Jules Verne novel, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. The Swedish title is something completely different. I think the French original title is something completely different as well. I really liked to do that and I went and bought the novel, a new translation, a fluid translation and it was a fucking brick to read, but it was nice. It took a month to write it and then it was great to not write a lyric, after writing that song. “Hmm, I don’t think I need to write a lyric about it, the music shows everything anyway,” so I didn’t [write lyrics] after reading the book, because I felt it was completely unnecessary. I just did those verses in the end, the spoken voice at the end of that track, which I think is pretty cool. It was good to do some traditional lyrical topics on the album and something that’s completely out there, completely different. I liked it very much and it was a blast to record the album with your friends, to work with them, to work with Stefan in his bedroom. It was a blast to do the vocals there. I had a couple glasses of wine and we just went for it. I like that a lot.
Do you think you’ll do another solo record?
I hope so, but I’m so fucking busy now with the Candlemass album this year and next we’re gonna do a Krux album and next year we’ll have the 25th anniversary of Candlemass, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be busy next year as well. I think we’ll try to go and play different cities and make some kind of special evening where we play some unusual stuff from the back catalog. Maybe 2011, because that’s the next time I will be free to do something. It’s like a big Communist five-year plan, but you need to do that, otherwise you’re fucked. If you’re not structured, oh man, you’re totally fucked. There’s so much happening and you need to plan stuff really, really carefully to make it happen. If you’re not structured, you won’t get many things done because you have to plan so much ahead of things. You have to have a one-year plan at least. So 2011, man: Next solo album. But I won’t be lying on my back next year. I think it will be busy.
I know from reading Martin Popoff’s Black Sabbath book that you’re a huge collector. I was just wondering if you’ve gotten anything new lately, anything good.
Yeah, I got a few things, actually. I just bought the first album, the Japanese original in mint condition. That cost me a lot, but it was worth it. I got Paranoid and the others, but I don’t have Paranoid with the Obi [strip], and that will cost a lot too (laughs), so I have to save some money for that. I got the Black Sabbath live album a couple weeks ago, the Live in Chicago bootleg from ’72. It’s got four covers, four different covers and it’s actually two different covers with two colors. It’s got two black covers and two red covers. I got two black covers and one red cover, so it’s one red cover that I’m missing and that’s the most rare of them all. But I’ll get there eventually (laughs). There’s not much stuff that I don’t have now, so I’m starting to collect the posters. I try to do that, but they’re expensive as fuck, those old, big, original tour posters. I’m trying to do that.
I’m sure you have it, but you know the Convention Hall in Asbury Park, NJ from 1975.
Yeah, the Don Kirschner thing.
Yeah, I just got that a little while ago.
Yeah, that’s fantastic. It’s a really good recording. I think I’ve got four or five of those and it was called, the one that’s most common, Accidental Overdose. It’s fantastic. Great show and great versions of those songs from the Sabotage album. I would like to see the whole show, because I heard they recorded it, but on that Kirschner thing, I think it’s only five songs, unfortunately. I would love to see the entire show. Maybe some day, because they release all the old stuff now. Hopefully we will see the California Jam ’74 show, I think three songs are out, the entire Kirschner thing. For us fans of the old Sabbath, we only have the Paris show from ’70, and that’s fantastic. I like all eras, but my friends love that Paris show. We play it all the time. They just love it because that is Sabbath in the beginning when they were young and hungry and looking scruffy and stuff, but they play like fucking demons. Then you have the ’75, that’s Vegas Sabbath, and they’re a little bit fatter and a little more tired, and my friends are like, “Fucking hell, this is like Elvis in Vegas,” and I’m like, “Shut the fuck up, this is just another phase of Sabbath!” They were at their peak in ’75. They were at their absolute peak. Just listen to the versions. You don’t have to look at Ozzy, he’s not singing perfectly or anything, but it’s fantastic still – the sound, the performance, Geezer‘s white bellbottom pants, his white cord that never touches the floor. Fantastic stuff. Hopefully one day they will open up the vaults and you will be able to get it somehow.
Right, you can buy five more versions.
Yeah, exactly. But I don’t mind. I got time (laughs). I’m not in a hurry.
