Eicca Toppinen - Apocalyptica

June 06 2010

It's under heavy rain that, after looking for the wrong hotel, I arrived at the very fashion Kube bar (a classy place that I didn't expect in these particular area of Paris) for a long interview with APOCALYPTICA co-founder and leader Eicca Toppinen. Very nice and friendly, I discovered an artist very talkative, with very interesting things to say, especially to me… We of course talked about their future release to come August, 23th, "7th Symphony"but also about the Scandinavian "naked way of life".

Fab : Could you define your new album " 7th symphony " ? How did you decide to record 6 symphonic tracks, and four songs with vocals ?
Eicca Toppinen (cello): Actually, we didn't had a masterplan before the recording like "this is something that we wanna do". To be honest, a couple of the songs came in really late. I wrote three of the songs after Mikko (Siren - Drums) started his drum recording. So we were really late with the pre-production, which actually made the whole album work very exciting, very hectic, very active, hard work but really fun. We had like almost ten vocal tracks, we were puzzling with different people you know, with the timing, who wants to sing which song, it's hard to do with the time. So, we had a lot of vocal tracks, but anyway, we didn't want to have more than four vocal tracks in the album. Because we still want that the main thing is on the instrumentals. But the vocal tracks bring a good flavor into that.

This time, we really wanted to have the instrumentals to be completely different than the vocal tracks, and not to think about traditional form of the songs. Some of the music is more progressive, they go in different directions. And I think it's kind of a new thing for Apocalyptica. At least…it reminds me a little bit about "Cult" (2000) our third album, where the songs are more classical compositions in the structure "verse, chorus, verse, chorus…". For the vocal tracks, it was obvious, because it was clear that it cannot be a full instrumental album, because of America mainly. The last album "Worlds collide" (2007) was kind of our first release in America, and the two singles had a massive radio status. Most of the American audience, for us, they got to know you through the radio. And with the second album there, it was obvious that it needs to somehow be a logical next step to what we did there. Maybe in Europe it wouldn't have been so crucial, because most of the audience got to know Apocalyptica without any vocals. So, I try to make vocal tracks as Apocalyptica as possible, with cellos, and exciting as a vocal track can be, but when you have a singer in a song, this singer takes the biggest room, you know (laughter). That's how it is. Maybe Tool is the exception, but they're not played on the radio. This is hard in a way…did you listen to the album?

Fab: Yeah.
Eicca Toppinen: So, for instance, the first song "At The Gates Of Manala" and the last song "Rage Of Poséidon", I sent them to Mikko when he has recorded the drums already, so those two songs didn't exist when he went to L.A.. So, I said when sending the demos, "listen to it, with the producer, and if you like it, do it if you can" (laughter). And he goes "oh no, it's cool stuff, but is it 7/5?...what the hell is going on here? I don't know but I just play…".
It was hard for him, suddenly have to learn overnight so difficult songs. I think these are the most complicated songs for a drummer, and for us as well.

And also "Sacra", I wrote it the last week of the recording…I had ideas for this song earlier, but I never had the time to complete it. And I really think that we needed this song which is really important for the album. Every song has its place. We actually had 12 songs, but I had the feeling that, yes, it's nice to have a lot of songs, but it's more powerful and effective if we leave two songs out. And then, we discussed about it for two days, I know that people are happy when they have more music, but even if the songs are great, it doesn't make any sense. It would make the album a little bit lame. So in the last minute, we skipped two songs. For us, it's stronger…sometimes, less is more you know? But it's hard to "kill your darling", because you like the songs, you would like to have more there, but…

Fab: Are they gonna be released anyway?
Eicca Toppinen: Yeah, they'll be on the special edition…

Fab: As you said that you had a lot of other vocal tracks too.
Eicca Toppinen: Yeah, but we didn't record those, they were just at a demo level when we were searching for possibilities. On the special edition, there will be those two songs, and last Friday we filmed an acoustic live for a dvd at Silbelius Academy, in our old school (laughter).

Fab: Oh, that's great.
Eicca Toppinen: There's no audience, but we played acoustic versions of five or six songs with our touring singer, who's gonna be with us on tour. We'll do the single, a couple of instrumentals…People could choose between the special edition where there's more material and the shorter version. I thought that ten tracks is enough, it's like 47 minutes, it needs to be the best. Each song has to introduce something new, that's how I feel Apocalyptica records are very often.

I mean, when there's "2010" (ndlr: With Dave Lombardo on drums) it's something different from what was before, and after that comes "Beautiful" which totally something different, then comes "On rooftop with Quasimodo", etc…everything is like it has its own rules, its own character and I like this kind of album when you can always…it's a journey you know? You don't know where you end up, but it's bringing you somewhere.

Fab : Once again, the cello sound is so powerful that for some people, it's almost hard to know it's cellos they're hearing. The new sound is always bigger than the last one.
Eicca Toppinen: Yeah, Joe Barresi, our producer…, we actually chose him because we really want to get deeper into the development of sounds. And we knew that he produced the TOOL album for example, and he's a guitar tech so he was tweaking the sounds...that was the main thing and, he's so experienced at that stuff, it's his passion, he loves all kinds of pedals. He has like 300 different effects pedals at home, 100 guitar amps…he has all the gear because he loves it, he loves the sound that comes out of those. So, he was probably chosen in that sense. With him, we play all the riffs with Real Amps, we had a big selection of amps. We tested like 10 different amps, and picked up the ones we were gonna use the most, but all the time that I was playing here, he was sitting there, recording, and there was this table with 10 different pedals, etc…It was really experimental, and we were so inspired by all that, that now when we got on tour, we spend almost a month or more planning the new sound jam for the live set-up. We have Real amps and Peavy amps, and a cabinet simulator, and all the channels goes to the effects, so we can balance with those tools. We get real power from the amps. We tried this in America already; it definitely makes things different now.

But still I think it's very organic, it's breathing, because we did all the sound decisions while we were recording, so whoever started to play, Joe was like "What are you gonna play? Ok, let's find a sound for that". And he was thinking that for every song we recorded, even if it's classical cello, it needs to sound special, exciting and interesting. And that was something new and different for us. We've been very much used to just to record, and after that, then doing the mix with the plug-ins and stuff, but this time, it was really done the other way around. I'm very happy with the result. Also the fact that the drums there are not samples, we didn't use any samples, only maybe on one or two singles just because when they go to radio, they need to sound "solid". But in general, the whole sound is organic. For me, it sounds even more natural than some of the previous albums…even if there's more effects there.
It was a lot of fun, but we were working hard, fourteen hours a day, six days a week…

Fab : Is there a special meaning on the cover, or it is just beautiful art for the sake of art ?
Eicca Toppinen: We wanted to have something that would describe Apocalyptica. There's some decadence, there's some darkness, but also a lot of beauty and a romantic aspect as well. Actually, I really like the artwork really much, we came to the right place. I think the artwork is important, because if you're buying the record, you take it in your hand, you check the cover, and you open it, and you see...that's the introduction to the music. It's why we put so much attention into the artwork.

Same thing for the video. We shot "End of Me" two weeks ago, and it also has the same theme. A lot of romance, there's a bad, evil one, and a good one, we have Gavin (Rossdale) struggling, as there are sirens, because they try to get to Gavin (laughter). It's very beautiful, full of beautiful pictures. We did that with the same director who did "I don't care". Lisa Maan. We really liked her style on "I don't care", we wanted to continue this feeling, like a continuous story. I mean, not a story, story, but the same elements will stay.

Fab: This new video will be on the special edition too?
Eicca Toppinen: No, because it wouldn't fit with the acoustic live on the dvd. It's better separated. I think it's gonna be out soon. They got the final cut done on the week-end, and then they need to have the color correction or whatever finalizing stuff. Then, they need to make the copies. I guess it will take a couple of weeks for the release.

Fab: Concerning the guest vocalists on this new album, you have Gavin Rossdale from Bush, Lacey Sturm from Flyleaf, Brent Smith from Shinedown, and Joe Duplantier from Gojira, our local guy. Even before you started writing things, how did you proceed in choosing who's gonna be the singer for the songs?
Eicca Toppinen: It's always different every time. I knew Gojira, but I have a friend publisher, since ten years now, a really great guy and he knows Joe very well. And he was saying at some point "Eicca, I think you should meet Joe, maybe you should write something together". He had a feeling that we'd come along very well, and then we had two days here in Paris, and we wrote that song "Bring Them To Light" which is on the album, already two years ago. Back then, we just left the demo, because there was no place to use it. And when we decided to plan this album, I thought we needed to have, beside those kinds of vocal tracks with single potential, we needed to have something else with vocals, something more crazy. And we had this great song with Joe, you know, so I thought that we should be doing it now, for this album. So that was the background history of that.

The other singers were picked up after we had the songs. We had lot of songs that we were talking about with different people, trying to find the right person for the right song. Like Gavin Rossdale, we made a remix for BUSH, in the end of the nineties (ndlr: 1999) for the b-side of their single "Letting the cables sleep". And suddenly, we remembered : "hey, what about Gavin? What is he doing nowadays?"… No one knew, but we had to check him out if he'll be willing to sing this song, and he was on board.
For SHINEDOWN, we met them in a festival in America. Many times in the past, we meet people in festivals, we talked with them and we find out that they're big fans of APOCALYPTICA, and we're big fans of them, so the connection starts there. And whenever it is the right moment, it's easy to hook up again.
We want to have collaborations which can happen easily. We don't want to work with difficult people, difficult record companies, or greedy people, you know. Everybody needs to want to do it. Not for money, it needs to be for the music, for good feeling. If not, it's so much hassle, it's not fun to do it.
And Lacey Sturm, we've known her for years. We are on the same label in America. She's doing a great job on "Broken pieces". It was the obvious female track. I wrote the track with Guy Sigsworth who is a British songwriter who've been writing for Bjork, Britney Spears, Madonna…He has his own crazy process, he's a really cool guy. I have to song write with him, and "Broken pieces" is the result of that song writing. It's "Brit-pop-electro"! (laughter).

For the whole band we think that it's very fresh, a new style of Apocalyptica. And to be honest, we skipped one song I wrote with Beratu. It's a good song but we didn't want to have it on the album. The reason why we skipped it, it's because it was a so typical Apocalyptica song, it sounded like old Apocalyptica. We wanted to focus on being innovative and modern, try to leave it musically to the next level. So, all the time for us, the inspiration for ourselves is that we get the feeling that we are finding something new, we are learning something new. If we start to be satisfied, and go the easy way…It would be easy to continue and make songs like those we've made five years ago, but I wanna learn to write better songs. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail. You'll never know if you don't try. And I wanna try, it'd be boring otherwise, our band would die if we were too comfortable. And normally, for many bands, that is the end, when they stop exploring. Making albums is always crazy, it's for lunatics (laughter). It's so creepy and so fun and so horrible. It's up and downhill.

Fab: And you put a lof of pressure on yourself too.
Eicca Toppinen: Yeah! Because if you don't put yourself on the edge, if you don't really get crazy and excited about what you're doing, then nothing stays in the record. This way you deliver the emotion so that the listener can experience it. You really need to go for it. I know too many bands that don't do that, and it sounds so boring.

Fab : Whose idea it was to record "Beautiful" naked ? Will you make a calendar ? ?
Eicca Toppinen: (burst of laughter). We are not enough in good shape to do that. Joe really wanted for us to record it live. And I said that we only had three cellos, that we cannot play everything, and he said that Mikko could play double-bass. He never played it, but Joe said that it was not the most difficult part to play. So, he rehearsed for that, and then we get in the room for recording, and Mikko said "I am the bass player, the bass player is a monkey, I have to be drunk and naked!"( laughter). So he opened the beer, took his clothes off…And then we tried a couple of takes, and he said "you know guys, I think you should be all naked" (hilarious). So, we did it!!

Fab: Where are the pictures??
Eicca Toppinen: (more laughter) I don't know, I don't know!! I don't want to know!! We were sitting around like a circle, just facing each other, we had microphones in the middle, and then we were playing, and it was much better after we got naked! I don't know, maybe it's a Scandinavian thing, people like to be naked, I don't know why. People get in the sauna naked… I don't know, people in Europe sometimes are so shy that don't want to get in the shower if there's other people, in the common shower. They don't want to go in a sauna naked…For us, we are so used to it. Whenever there's a good party somewhere in Finland, somebody is getting naked at some point for sure.

Fab: Don't forget to get dressed before going on stage…
Eicca Toppinen: (laughter) Yeah, you know, we have made some soundchecks naked in Strasbourg, at least twice. It's good to be stupid sometimes. It might be very inspiring.

Fab: Whatever it takes!
Eicca Toppinen: Yeah! Exactly! (laughter).

Fab: Did you compose "On Rooftop With Quasimodo" on the top of Notre-Dame?
Eicca Toppinen: (laughter). No, it's Mikko's song. I love this song which is great, and also because this is a new type of Apocalyptica song. It's very sound driven.

Fab : Yeah, after just a few listening, I was impressed by the very moody 'soundtrack like' intro of this song and the very powerful fast part of " Rage Of Poseidon ". It really shows the scope, or at least two sides of what you can do
Eicca Toppinen: Yeah, the ones you mentioned are very picturesque. That's why "Rage Of Poseidon" is called that way. Because when I listened to the final song, I really got the feeling that… (making rowing sound on a slave ship) you can hear these guys you know, two thousand years ago rowing the big boat on the Mediterranean sea. Then comes fucking Poseidon, with his fury, he takes the boat and brings it into the depth of the sea. That was kind of what I was feeling when listening to this song. It was not the concept to do this, but that was the images I got. So, I wanted to name it based on that. It might not have anything to do with the song itself, but it was a strong vision.

I really wanted the songs to be named with some kind of meaning, because in the past, some of our song titles are horrible (laughter). There's many "ion-ending"…"Distraction", "Resurrection"…whatever. It's why this time we only name one song with "ion".
So "On Rooftop With Quasimodo" is a good name. We also have "Through Paris in a postcard", wich is also a Mikko's song, but that's gonna be on the special edition.
On "On Rooftop With Quasimodo", we had whammy pedals, the sounds was like "where does is it coming from?". A very cool atmosphere.

Fab: As a former violinist myself, was is not hard to adapt the classical way of playing and sounding to a much more modern way, with a whammy pedal for instance, as you've mentioned it? Even if now, you're used to it?
Eicca Toppinen: Actually, the first time I use a whammy pedal, as you need to play with your leg, I had to learn the pedal, on how it reacts, how strong you need to push it, how far. What I love about being in Apocalyptica, it's an endless musical adventure, you study, you create…it's the biggest fun. That's why I don't miss the classical world so strong because it's much more creative than playing in an orchestra.

Fab: Also because in classical music school, you have to play music from others, that were written hundreds of years ago.
Eicca Toppinen: Yeah, you are not allowed to do it your own way.

Fab : Speaking about this, after all these years, do you think you succeeded in definitely get rid of the classical musicians complexes who love rock and metal, to throw away the classical label and its stereotypes ? I personally play keyboard, but started with violin, and it's true than it's not the always most popular instrument when you're young (approving laughter from Eicca).. Your success is maybe a kind of revenge for a lot or people…
Eicca Toppinen: I think it's so great because in the past, when I was carrying my cellos, I was ashamed in school, but now I'm very proud of it. Somehow, we were able to turn the image of the whole instrument, it's no more the nerds who are boring that know nothing about life, it's just an instrument. And the instrument itself has a pretty cool image. Actually I found out for that a lot of people, cello is their favorite instrument, the cello sound. I'm happy that we encouraged people to be brave with their own instrument, and play the music they like. What was bothering me in classical school was that, I was able to play in the best orchestra in Finland, I played in radio orchestra, contemporary music, played some great ensembles, etc..and I enjoyed it always when I liked the music, but I think half of the time, I didn't like the music.

Fab: I know exactly what you mean.
Eicca Toppinen: In orchestra, I was like, it's nice to play a symphonic concert, I like the Silbelius Symphony, but these fuckin' pieces in the first half? Horrible shit! Why do we have to play this at all? So, then I realized that maybe the orchestra was not my place. I can't control at all what's gonna be played, and I have to play these hideous symphonies I hate...It's not worth it. Now, I have the songs I like.

It's crazy, you like your instrument, but you can't play what you want. It's what I've been saying to everybody, let the kid play what they like. If they're excited about their instruments, they should able to play the music they like, and not what the teacher tell them. And if you want to start to be professional, study a certain repertoire. You need to learn certain concertos, certain sonatas, that's for sure. But beside that, feel free (laughter). If a ten year old wants to play Britney Spears, the "Toxic" song (singing the fast parts) It's difficult, and he will practice his ass off you know? And learn a lot of technical things. When you're ten years old, you don't want to play a funeral march…

When we were in America, students told that they originally started to play cellos because of Apocalyptica. And I know a lot of people who actually started to play cello, but it was the first time I heard somebody started because of us. It's the greatest feedback you can get, to inspire other people.

Fab : Last word for your French Fans, as you are back in paris the 31th.
Eicca Toppinen: I must say that we're very impressed about how our fan base has been growing in France. And that we're happy that we did all the work. I remember very well the first show we played in Paris, for 300 people, then step by step, we get bigger venues and now, amazing venues.

Fab: I guess the Zenith it's 6000-7000 capacity.
Eicca Toppinen: Yeah, I hope that somebody will come there (laughter). Because an half-empty hall is not so nice when it's a big venue. But we're very happy how we've taken now in France, really happy for that. And we promise this Paris show will not be the only one.