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@witchquisitor

mostly Ghostly // meme lord // rat man // 23 // he/him
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tisthenightofthewitch

Tobias Forge talks about Ghost's 'Impera' chapter

By virtue of its unique clergical concept, Ghost has the luxury of rolling out a different leading man, of sorts, with every tour cycle.

The Swedish metal band made the switch on March 3, 2020, when it wrapped its “Prequelle,” tour with the demise of Papa Nihil and the elevation of Cardinal Copia to the title of Papa Emeritus IV.

The new Papa is another twist for singer Tobias Forge, who formed the band in 2006 and fronts it with a collection of costumed Nameless Ghouls delivering the heavy riffs, big hooks and bright melodies of the arena-rock bands of the ’70s.

Ghost, which plays the Petersen Events Center on Monday with Volbeat and Twin Temple, is on tour in advance of its fifth album, “Impera,” which was initially planned for 2020 but was pushed back, due to the pandemic, to March 11.

In the wake of “Prequelle,” an album set in the medieval times of the Black Death, “Impera” concerns the fall of empires, reported to be inspired, in part, by the Timothy Parsons book “The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall.”

On Friday, we talked to Forge about “Impera,” which he worked on with producer Klas Åhlund and Swedish co-writers Salem Al Fakir and Vincent Pontare, whose credits include, believe it or not, Madonna and Lady Gaga.

You finished your tour on March 3, 2020, and planned to take that year off to work on the album. It’s like you knew the pandemic was coming?

Yeah, that was surreal because we did the last show in Mexico and then from there I actually went to LA for a few days and then home, so it was very close to everything shutting down and just turning bad real fast.

What did you set out to do with this “Impera,” musically, in terms of these big hooks and riffs?

When you’re writing, you just wanna make a really good record, drenched in as many hooks as you can possibly muster. The only problem with trying to create records for me, besides ability, is trying not to repeat myself. I always try to write songs that I have never written before. I always try to add songs to our repertoire that we don’t have already and, lyrically, I also try to not use the rhymes that were done in the past. That’s probably the hardest because you sort of run out of rhymes and words and phrases and, thus, you need to really sharpen up. Sometimes it comes out really good and sometimes I can look back on lyrics and I’m like “yecch.”

So, the collaboration with Salem and Vincent, how does that play into that?

They are good friends of mine and we’ve written quite a lot together. If we set a date to work and spend a couple days in the studio, we always come out of there with something that sounds rockin’. Usually, I come in with a few ideas to work with and then we take it from there. Since they are very professional and they work together and also together with a lot of different artists, they will always give me a little bit of outside perspective. But they have another objective to what I’m doing. Where sometimes I would dismiss an idea of my own, just because I found it predictable, they can turn around and say, “We should do that, that’s how the song should be, because it sounds so much like Ghost.” “Oh, ok.” If I were alone in the room I may not of thought that.

How did Fredrik Åkesson from Opeth become a part of it?

When we were asked to do “Enter Sandman” for the Metallica record, in the original song there’s a solo over the verse and pre-chorus and chorus. It’s a long-ass solo, and with a lot of the melodic features in the Ghost version, the solo can be really exciting. However, as much as I’ve been playing guitar in my life — and I started playing guitar when I was 7 years old, and in my teenage years in my 20s I was relatively good — during the last 10, 12 years touring with Ghost, I’m not playing guitar. So I’ve sort of gone beyond my peak and just fell back. I know what I want the solo to be like. In the studio, writing songs, I can fake things, because you can just put everything together that you want. If I’m doing the hard part, I can sit and play the hard part for 20 minutes over and over and over and over again and then I can record it and splice it in and piece it together and fix it, just to make it sound a certain way. But it would sound so much better if someone like Fredrik would play it. He’s almost 50 years old, practices five hours a day, he [expletive] rocks anything, so I asked him to come in and play that solo and he just nailed it. So, going forward, I just felt like making a record and the amount of guitar work that goes into making it, I don’t have time for that, I don’t have fingers for that, I don’t even have the ability to do that, so, “Fredrik, anything that’s on the demo, can you just play that and please improve the solo?” “Alrighty.” And then you do that and he did it really well.

Can you explain how the theme relates to “The Rule of Empires”?

I think if you’re referring to the book, it’s been completely blown out of proportion. It’s just that I have always been interested in history, and if you’re interested in history, you automatically bump into an empire or two, and you know that empires fall. They are built up and they fall apart. Some last thousands of years and some shorter, but they always crumble, and it’s just like a suicide mechanism that comes with building a tower too high — it will fall over after a while. So when I was in Seattle in 2014, I went into this bookstore and saw this book “The Rule of Empires,” with that subtitle [“Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall”], and I understood immediately what the book was about. I bought the book and eventually went through it, but it wasn’t like this thought had never occurred to me and I read the book and wrote a record. It’s just that I saw that and decided then and there that I’m going to write a record at some point that deals with the rise and fall of an empire. That is not to discredit his [author Timothy Parsons’] book. I’m just saying the book was not the inspiration that laid the ground for the entire content of the record. It’s just like it was also in my mind to make a plague record at some point

So, the record comes out in March and you’re on tour already, playing just one new song. Why is it happening that way?

Originally, the album was meant to come out in January, but then things played out in a better way, I guess, because now what this tour is is a pre-album co-headlining tour, so it’s obviously not your equivalent of a new-album-fresh-on-the-counter two-hour show, which, in a way, with the nature of how things are in the music business right now, it’s not a bad thing, because putting on a tour right now is very hard. I hate to talk shop. We are having fun, but from an industry standpoint, it’s uphill because you have all these protocols that really throw a wrench into the whole machinery. People are sent home in the morning just because they test positive, even though they’re not sick, and that leaves a labor shortage every day, so the crew are really working their asses off trying to put the show together every day, and we have two bands headlining, with a headline production each. It would’ve been very hard for us to do like “the full monty” at this point, so we’re doing “a great monty.” The tour feels very solid, people seem very happy, but I’m glad it ended up being before the album came out because if the pressure was on for us to play eight new songs, it would’ve been very hard to pull off under the circumstances.

How is Papa IV different from Cardinal Copia?

Well, he’s the same guy. He just has different attire. Early on in the tour that’s always an issue because cloaks, they always look striking but may be hard to wear and hard to manoeuvre in. That’s why years ago, we went from an all-papal look to a-little-papal look but then jumpsuit, because I need to be able to jump and that’s a no-go in papal attire. For a show that’s one hour and 40 minutes or so, it wouldn’t be entertaining if I’m just standing still.

Pittsburgh Post Gazette

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mzmagzart

And lastly Hershey pt.7 What an amazing night.

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mzmagzart

Although I'm totally onboard with the new era aesthetics, I'm going to miss seeing Ghoul eyes. This is as close as I'm gonna get lol

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