POWERWOLF interview. New album, ‘Wake Up The Wicked’, out July 26th.

Here with Matthew Graywolf from Powerwolf, thanks for joining me.
Tell us what POWERWOLF have been doing lately. You’re just about to come out with another new album.  
How long did this take to put together? How much time did you take from touring? Tell us all about the process.

Well, writing ‘Wake Up The Wicked’, and recording the album took us like almost one and a half year, which, for POWERWOLF is a pretty long period of time, and we did that intentionally. We really took the time off from touring to really focus and give all the energy to the album. In the past, we had shorter periods of writing, which was a conscious decision as well, but this time, we just wanted to give the songs enough time to develop and to come to the final versions in the way we have recorded them just on this album.
 
As usual, POWERWOLF are writing about magnificent topics like, uh, legends, Beast legends, or this sort of thing. 
How close are you to running out of beasts to sing about?

That’s a very good question. I don’t believe we would ever run out of topics, because we’re just nerds who read way too many books. It’s like I have the huge list of topics I would really love to write songs about but that always has to kind of happen. You just can’t, you know, pick a topic and immediately write a song about it. Usually it is like I have tonnes of little notes about possible topics, and it takes me years until I find the right melody or the right atmosphere to really let it happen, for instance, ‘1589’, this story of Peter stump, one of the German werewolf trials from the 16th century. This is a topic I’ve had on my list for like a decade. I always wanted to write a song about it, but it just never happened that I had the right atmosphere for it, and then it happened. Then when we started writing, ‘Wake Up The Wicked’, I had this piano based theme that just reminded me of the story of Peter Stump, and then it emerged into a song. That’s how it happens.
 
Okay, we’ve seen the film clip for that, which is, once again, pretty spectacular, in typical POWERWOLF fashion. Tell us about the film clip for that.
 
Well, we spent, I think it was four days in November in the South of England to film the video, and as opposed to what a lot of artists nowadays do, like shooting videos in front of a green screen or have CGI stuff integrated, we chose the very old school approach to shooting a video, like no SFX, no post production, no nothing. We really wanted to have it all on real sets, and it was an awesome experience, I must say. We had this huge cast of actors, this huge film crew, and it was really the very classic way of filming, but at the same time, it was really a hard process, like I mentioned. We had been shooting in middle of November in England, so it was freezing cold, the weather definitely was not on our side, so all the suffering you can see in the video was real.
 
Well, it’s worth it in the end. Very good clip. Tell us about some of the other ones on the album, like track three ‘Kyrie Klitorem’.

‘Kyrie Klitorem’, as we call it, based on Latin. I mean Kyrie is in Latin, is a, how can I say a praise, a song of praise.
So, as you can derive from the from the title, it’s a song of praise to female anatomy. You know, in the past, we in the past, we had written quite some songs with tongue in cheek about male anatomy, like ‘Resurrection By Erection’ or the ‘Coleus Sanctus’. So every now and then the question came up, how about writing about counterpart? So here’s ‘Kyrie Klitorem’. That’s what we did.

Who is writing the songs you mentioned? 
Who else contributes and what? Who’s contributing? What parts where?

Well, in general, I am the songwriter I write about, well, almost everything
Attila is, so to say, my counterpart, who is commenting on my ideas, and that’s very important,
He’s like a sparing partner, where I throw ideas at him, and he’s like, in general, the most honest person I know. So he’s a guy who has no problem telling me what’s It’s like, I remember I had one idea. I can’t remember what it was, but I threw it at him, and he was like, ‘You know what? I’m gonna sing this when I’m 70’. And I was like, okay, oh, well.
So yeah, you know, he’s the one who, you know, directs my ideas, so to say, and that’s a very, very important process when songs are being written.

Tell me about ‘Joan of Arc’. How did that one come about? Is that another one that you had an idea in your head for quite some time, and then it came to you?

Not exactly. I had the idea to write about that when I visited the city of Rouen in France, where Joan of Arc had actually been executed, and I was standing there on the place where the pyre was, and I immediately felt like I got to write a song about that. I could almost breathe that history in the place, and I remember this was a pretty spontaneous one. I actually wrote the chorus line to that song the very same day.
But as opposed to that spontaneous chorus, the rest of the song took about half a year until it was completed, because we wanted to do justice to the ambiguity of 
the life of Joan of Arc in the music. I mean, if you look at her story, it’s pretty interesting how she became the hero of a nation, then she became sort of a scapegoat and was executed for heresy, and after her death, she was sainted. So, you know, how twisted can a plot be? And you know, that’s what we wanted to do justice in the music as well. Like we have this heroic chorus line, it is almost like giving an uplifting, happy feel about, you know, the heroic nature of the story. And then we have the verses that should display the tragic twists, so to say. And it was pretty interesting, like the story, so to say, was the guideline for how to write the music that hardly happened in the past, and it was pretty interesting to write and finalise this song.
 
Now, with an album that’s taken so long to write, how long did the recording, the actual putting down of the music on tape, if you like, how long did that part take in studio? 

Usually, we are quite a strict working and fast band. We don’t spend too much time in studio, and there’s a philosophy behind it.
I feel like the biggest challenge nowadays when recording an album is to really bring the spontaneous fun of playing to the album, and that just doesn’t happen if you have already spent six weeks in studio and you’re playing your 123rd take of a song, you know, we really want to add, we’re a band. We’re very well prepared when we go to studio, we have the songs mostly written until the smallest detail, and when we go to studio, it’s all about enjoying yourselves while performing the song, and try to bring that to tape like a bit of like imagine going on stage and play this song to an audience. That’s how I approach playing my parts in studio, and that’s what I’m always happy about, if it shines through in the final versions on the album, 

The keyboards on this album, are they done in the church like they have been in the past? 

Yes, we’re stuck to this like we’ve always, I think from the first album on, we have recorded the church organ in an actual church, just to capture the feeling of it, and as well, we’re kind of used to it, and sometimes we need those kind of rituals to do that. It’s always big pain in the **** for every engineer to do like, you know, you have this huge room, and they gotta cope with it some way. But we enjoyed that much that we can hardly imagine not recording a church organ in a church, though it would be easier not to do but, you know, sometimes you just gotta go all the way. 

Yeah, I’m a big fan of that. So yeah, keep doing that. 

We will. We will keep doing it.
 
I see tour dates. I see a mass of tour dates. You’re going out in North America with UNLEASH THE ARCHERS, and then Europe, with HAMMERFALL and WIND ROSE. A lot of dates there. How are you liking the touring? It always amazes me how bands you do date after date after date living out of a suitcase. How do you go with that?

Well, we love it. If we wouldn’t love it, we wouldn’t do it. That’s a simple answer. It’s, I mean, there’s not much in between. Either you like the lifestyle on tour and you can arrange with it, or you won’t do that for a long time. It’s really like,   I’ve seen people who really struggle when being on tour, and they don’t do it for a long time. For us, it’s like it still feels like going on a holiday with my best friends, honestly, and if that should ever change, we would probably stop. But I mean, the band is more than just a bunch of musicians who randomly play together. We’re really like best friends. And all the time I set foot on a Nightliner, I feel like this is just amazing. I’m going on a holiday with my friends.

Was there ever a moment where you’ve come off stage and you’ve looked at each other and said, Holy Crap, did that just happen? Something happened out of the ordinary that you’ll think, Whoa. Did that actually happen? Has there been a moment like that?

Well, there’s tons of these moments, but to pick one is always bit hard for me. There is one moment I will always remember. And funny enough, it’s an embarrassing moment, but years later, I can really laugh about that. It was like we played Graspop in Belgium, major festival, there we had like 50,000 people in front of the stage. I Went out, and even before playing the first chord, I just fell, and I was laying on my back like a bug. My first thought was, hopefully there’s no camera on me so people don’t see this happening. And I watched the LED walls on the side of the stage, and there I was. So there was really, like, the most embarrassing way to open up a show ever. But funny enough, that kind of thing, everybody was laughing about it. So it kind of, you know, set the atmosphere for the show. It was really like, Okay, what can happen now? I mean, the most embarrassing has already happened, so let’s just enjoy ourselves. And it became one of the best shows we did.
 
You mentioned those European festivals. How much do you get to enjoy that? Is it like a blur when it’s happening and then you look back on it? Or do you really get to be able to soak it in? And what is your favourite one? Do you have a favourite?

It’s hard to name a favourite festival, because every festival is really unique in terms of atmosphere and in terms of the memories you have of the festivals, but one which is always special every time we come there is Hell Fest in France, is they have this super, super, amazing festival site with lots of Pyro and stuff on the festival site itself. It’s just an amazing place to be, and I honestly enjoy every festival. It’s really like all the time I’m there, know, be it other bands I like to watch, or be it that you meet with other bands. Festivals always are like wonderful happenings all the time, definitely.

The new album, ‘Wake Up The Wicked’, is coming out on 26th of July.
What’s happening for you immediately after the album comes out,
 
I think we will be into some serious pre-production of the touring to come, We still are kind of a do it yourself band, and so you can imagine, the bigger the shows and the bigger the venues get, the more we are really, really busy with preparing the shows, preparing the visuals and all of that. So I guess we will have quite a busy summer until we will hit the road by end of August.

Matthew, I would like to thank you for your time, and I wish you well with the album release and the tours that follow. And if you find yourself
looking to come down to Australia again someday, then please be our guests. 

Youre welcome and yes, that would be awesome. If that would happen, there’s plans, so let’s keep fingers crossed.