Interview: Evergrey

Before Evergrey’s show, I had the chance to have a quick interview with Rikard Zander, the keyboard player of the band, where he talked about the European tour, the new album The Atlantic, re-mastering the old albums and other stuffs.

Hi everyone, I’m here with Rikard of Evergrey, hi Rikard and welcome back to Romania, how are you?
I’m very good! We played in Cluj last night and now we’re in Bucharest and it feels really good, 2 shows in Romania.

So you’re actually now touring over Europe, promoting the new album The Atlantic, how is the tour going so far and what is the response on the songs from the public?
It’s going very good, seems like people like our new albu very much, we got a really nice response from the fans, we are really happy doing this tour right now.

The Atlantic is actually part of the trilogy…
Well, it wasn’t really meant to be, but it became part of the trilogy, you can say when we started to write The Atlantic we felt it would fit with the two previous albums.

So is actually a concept album.
Is a little bit of a concept album…

I also noticed that the sound is a bit different, it is more dark, do you agree with it?
Yeah, maybe. Is always hard to I mean we just tried to make good songs and I think we with this album we did not really care if this would be longer or whatever, we just tried to make as good music as we can. It is a bit darker but it wasn’t really our intension to make it darker, it just happened.

I really like the video of “The Silent Arc“ because it has somehow, a melancholic vibe because of the sea sight, what is the story behind this video?
I think that song more or less, gives the whole album what is all about, because it has heavy parts, more melancholic parts, it has pretty much everything. The video is to give more atmphosphere, is like a lyric video, is nothing we got much to talk about.

As the album speaks by the name itself, from the cover that is amazing, I would say the main keyword for this album is `the sea`.
Yes, that’s right! We had that in mind when we wrote most of the songs, we came up with  this album title The Atlantic, so I guess you can sense the inspiration of the sea in a lot of the songs.

You had also an unfortunate event that you had a break in the studio, you got stolent some of the equipment. What did you do then, did you lose what have you recorded?
It was actually a break in to our rehearsals space, and we got a bit delayed, it was not so much of a big deal… I’m not sure what really happened because I wasn’t there at the time, I don’t really know.

Recently you re-mastered your old albums, why came up with this decision?
Because a lot of people were asking about those albums and we didn’t have any copies left, that was a good idea to re-release them again and re-master them, make them sound a little better. The reason was to make them avaible again for the fans.

After this tour will be over, what other plans do you have, will you be touring more?
Yes, we will be touring quite a lot more, first we’re gonna have some festivals in the summer, then we’d probably go to the US and then we would have another european tour in the fall and then a South American in November or something.

As a last question, which actually my mother wants to know about it, because she likes how Floor Jansen sings, and she also saw that you have worked with her. She wants to know how was it to collaborate with Floor J.?
It was nice because she’s a good friend of Tom, so we asked her if she wanted to be on one song and she said yes. Became a different experience for us and the people seemed to like that song with her.

Thank you Rikard for your time having this interview, can’t wait to see you on stage, again!
Thank you!