Anna, thanks so much for taking the time out to do this interview today!
Thank you, Don.
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Before we get started, I have to say that I’m a really big fan of your “Cellar Darling” album. I hope you won’t mind taking about that a bit tonight?
Oh wow. Thank you, Don. Not at all. I’d love to talk about it [laughs].
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Anna, Eluveitie has been to Atlanta quite a bit. What are some of your favorite things to do when here in town?
Go to Whole Foods [laughs]. We’ve been here like five or six times and we never really knew where to go so we always went to Kroger down the street and bought stuff. We never do much walking and never really made any plans to so anything. There’s not a lot around the venue here.
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Well next time you’re in town we’ll have to go check out Little 5 Points. It’s not far from here and I think you’d really dig it. Lots of good food.
That sounds great!
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Speaking of food, what’s your favorite food to indulge in when touring the US?
Steak [laughs].
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All my European band friends love the steak!
[laughs] That’s because it’s just really good here. I think to get nice quality steak here, you pay about ½ the price than you do where we’re from. We don’t really eat a lot of steak back home because it’s just too expensive. Here, it’s quite reasonable. You guys probably just have fatter cows here [laughs].
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I’ve always been intrigued by Eluveitie but I wasn’t really made a fan until this recent album. Just something about this album connected with me. Being that I’m a pretty new fan, where should I go from here as far as your other material?
Well, there are quite a lot of albums but since you’re open to different styles you’ll probably like our acoustic album Evocation. We don’t have it with us on the tour but you can download it illegally if you want [laughs].
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This style of music you play has the ability to run out of ideas yet with each passing album you continue to evolve your style.
Yeah, it just kind of happens naturally. We do have borders. We have a unique sound. There are bands with lineups of 4 or 5 people with the same instrumentation throughout every song and even though they’re good bands they always sound pretty much the same due to the limitations within the band. I don’t think that would suit us well. We always have new influences and different types of metal in our songs. There are even some rock influences in there. We just like to keep it really diverse and different and to grow more elaborate with the albums.
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When touring in the US, do you feel like you have to change your approach to performing live than when you’re in Europe?
I think we pretty much come at it the same way everywhere we play. We feel kind of awkward as soon as we have to start speaking German or Swiss or even our own language because we’re so used to speaking English on stage. In America, we have such great audiences here. It’s much easier to have a great show because the people are really enthusiastic.
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With seven albums under your belts, which album do you feel best encapsulates everything that Eluveitie is all about?
I think our previous album Helvetius because it’s kind of the new Eluveitie. We started incorporating more styles and more things that are outside of the normal band lineup like orchestrations and choirs. With Helvetius you can clearly hear the old Eluveitie but it has a lot of new stuff added to it.
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I don’t know that I ever really heard a hurdy gurdy before hearing you play it and I love the sound of that instrument. Are there traditional recordings of the hurdy gurdy you would recommend?
I’m not really a traditionalist when it comes to playing the hurdy gurdy. I don’t play it a traditional way. I like the traditional stuff but I really don’t listen to it much. If you want to listen to really old school hurdy gurdy playing there are medieval bands such as Estampie or maybe even find a medieval sampler where there’s some hurdy gurdy music on it. I’m not the best person to ask that to honestly [laughs].
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You said that you don’t play the hurdy gurdy in a traditional way. How does the way you play it differ from the traditional way?
It’s more of a stylistic thing. All the medieval and folky stuff that’s written for the hurdy gurdy can be very limited to just two different tunings and is pretty much the same rhythm. Here, in a melodic death metal band, all the songs are over 100bpm (beats per minute) and I’m just kind of trying to do what a guitarist does or even what a violin or flute would do. I can’t use all the functions of the hurdy gurdy live because I just don’t have the time to tune all those strings in between songs. I often just play very limited.
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Have you ever had the desire to go back and learn the more traditional way of playing or are you happy playing it in the element that you are playing in now?
I really want to build my technique and do different stuff as well but at the moment I just really don’t have the time. Since I also didn’t really take lessons, if I had the time I would really like to take some lessons to learn some more things about it. I’m still not at the point where I feel like I can say that I’m a true professional hurdy gurdy player. I just want to get better.
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What was it about that instrument that attracted you more so than say a guitar?
I saw a German band called Faun and they actually do pretty traditional stuff but they combine it with some electronic elements. I saw them and I thought immediately that this was what I wanted to play.
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Let’s talk about your solo album Cellar Darling. That is such a cool album but it’s definitely a much different direction than what you do with Eluveitie. What inspired you to make this album?
I always write songs and have been doing so for almost 10 years now. I never really wanted to write metal songs myself so I always just wrote whatever I felt like writing. I never tell myself that I’m going to be a blues singer or indie rock or whatever. I just do whatever I come up with and I do that with the things that I have. I have some midi stuff, the hurdy gurdy of course; I play some bass, and piano. The album is really just mix of all the influences that I’ve picked up over the years.
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You did a series of shows supporting the album as well. How was it to go from being a member of a band to pretty much being the focal point when performing your material?
At the beginning I was scared shitless [laughs]. I’m not really someone who likes a lot of attention which is a pretty stupid statement if you’re playing in a band [laughs]. I got into it pretty well, though. It’s really different if you’re up there singing your own songs and you see that people actually really like it. It really boosts your self-esteem quite a bit.
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I also saw some photos of you and Rafael Salzmann doing some stripped down acoustic shows. I’d love to hear you in that setting. Have you considered maybe even doing some recording in that kind of setup?
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it actually. I’m even thinking about limiting it to just hurdy gurdy and some guitar. Just keeping it at a very stripped down thing.
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How did you like performing as a duo versus playing with a full band?
I liked it a lot actually. I was also scared shitless but in the end it was much more fun. In a duo, you just depend on each other and it’s more musical. You can listen to each other, play, and just improvise and do whatever. I really liked doing that and I had never done that before. We’re thinking about doing more shows like that. You know, just going to bars and playing.
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Eluveitie puts on such a high energy performance every night. How do you come down from putting on a show of that caliber every night?
Booze [laughs]. Actually, we’ve calmed down quite a lot. It was never really bad but we do have parties but they’re just Swiss parties. We don’t go absolutely crazy like the Finnish bands. We’re just Swiss [laughs].
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Anna, what are you listening to these days?
A lot of stuff. My newest discovery is Bosnian Rainbows. I watched the True Detective serious and I really liked the soundtrack and one of the songs was by them. I got their album via Spotify and right now I’m listening to that one on repeat. The Mars Volta guitarist is in that band. My all-time favorite band is Manus from Norway. I also like Soft Pillow at the moment which is very experimental stuff. I’m also a huge fan of Archive. They’re all experimental or trip hop kind of bands.
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You mentioned Spotify earlier. A lot of bands seem to be against fans getting music through them.
I feel perfectly ok with Spotify. Sometimes buying a CD for 20 bucks doesn’t always work because it’s just simply too much money especially for young people to spend. I mean, it’s better than downloading stuff illegally. Me, as a solo artist, I’d rather have people just downloading my album and listening to it than not listening to it because they can’t afford to buy it. I’m even thinking about making my own music available for free to people just because I’m tired of doing contracts with people and all that bullshit that involves a lot of assholes and business that I don’t want discuss. There are different ways to support an artist.
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Being on the road can be tedious and you’re waiting around all day just to get the chance to play. What do you do to pass the time so you don’t go crazy?
I do a lot of music stuff on tour. I write a lot of songs and I do some programming. We went jogging today [laughs]. Especially in America, we like to check out shops. I’m not much of a shopper back home but in America I go crazy [laughs]. Especially in comic shops and book shops.
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So you’re actually writing and demoing on the bus while on tour?
It’s always different. Sometimes I just have ideas and sketch them out but on tour it’s not really inspiring for me to write. Instead I might do some remixing of something or programming something that doesn’t really involve much.
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Finally, what’s in store for you and Eluveitie?
We’ll be touring in Europe until the end of the year. That’s all we do is tour [laughs]. It’s going to be really fun though.
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Are you going to have some time to concentrate on some more of your solo stuff?
I think it’s going to be difficult because right now we’re still doing the Origins world tour so we’ll be touring even next year for this album. I’ll find some time in between to work on stuff. It took me three years to write the last album so it might be similar to the new one as well.
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Anna, thanks again for doing this interview. I really enjoyed our chat.
Thank you so much, Don. It was great to see you and to talk to you again.
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