lithiummagazine.com (7 septembre 2011)

Mike: You just flew over from home. Did you perform last night?

Sharon: No, we just flew in last night.

Mike: So you flew into New York and then came right up here to Toronto?

Sharon: Yes, by bus.

Mike: Well, welcome to North America. I’m glad to be able to see you play finally. Tonight will be my first time. When was the last time you were over?

Sharon: It was 2007, I think.

Mike: That was with Lacuna Coil?

Sharon: Exactly. One time with Lacuna Coil and another time on our own.

Mike: I don't think you played the Toronto show with Lacuna Coil. I was at that show and I don’t think you were on the bill.

Sharon: I think we played only Montreal.

Mike: I was in Belgium this summer and I was amazed at how much airplay Within Temptation received on radio and television. I think I saw all three videos from the album broadcast on TV the first day I was in Eindhoven.

Sharon: Oh, ok. Wow.

Mike: I just had a music station on when I was in the room, and I saw videos for ‘Sinéad’, ‘Faster’, and ‘Shot In The Dark’. I bet I saw ‘Sinéad’ five or six times while I was over.

Sharon: Oh, I didn’t know we were being played that much. That’s cool. That would be the music videos. The short films, I’m not sure that they would air them.

Mike: What’s the difference between the traditional music videos and the short films?

Sharon: The short films are like five to ten minute stories, mainly images and talking, telling the story of the main characters of the comic. They don’t really get an explanation as to what their background is in the comic itself. That’s why we made the short movies.

Mike: Can fans view those short films on your website?

Sharon: Not on the website. The short films come along with the album and you can find them of course on YouTube.

Mike: Ok. I think I have the standard single disc version of The Unforgiving – that explains why I haven’t seen them.

(Laughs)

Sharon: Yes, there are two versions of our disc available.

Mike: And I have the standard one. Oh well, no worries.

Sharon: The two disc version has our short movies on the second disc.

Mike: So is the comic book printed in the two disc version as well, or is that something fans will have to buy elsewhere?

Sharon: No, it was released separately.

Mike: As a North American consumer, can I just go online and find the comic?

Sharon: Yes, you can buy it online, on our merchandise shop. But now the biggest distributor in North America has picked it up, and they’re going to release it throughout North America.

Mike: So we could buy it in comic book shops here eventually.

Sharon: Yes, exactly.

Mike: It seems like you took a different approach to making your fifth album. How did you arrive at the idea of crossing your music over with comics and short films?

Sharon: Well, we just started writing and we knew that we just couldn’t go back to where we ended up at the end of The Heart Of Everything. We were all feeling like we needed to make a change. We felt like we had finalized our sound with The Heart of Everything. We couldn’t really do it any better in our opinion. So we needed to do something a little bit different. We felt that our music needed a change in a way to keep us interested in making it. If you finalize something and feel like you’ve done everything you can do with it then you want to try something new again.

Also we wanted to keep our minds open. With The Heart of Everything, we had worked on certain styles and concepts that our music could sound like. We didn’t think we could make another album in the same style as The Heart of Everything. With The Unforgiving, we wanted to challenge ourselves to take a new step with our music, and re-invent ourselves again. We wanted to use influences we had never used before like pop music, in particular the eighties sounds, and some of the bands we grew up with. When we were starting out we wanted to make something different and go away from the bands we grew up with. With The Unforgiving we wanted to get those influences back into our material. We wanted a Kim Wilde feeling, and Metallica and Iron Maiden. We love those bands, but we never wanted to put those influences into our music before, and I think we got some of those sounds into the new album.

Mike: How did the comics and short films fit into your writing process? Were they a part of the big picture right from the start, or did they come out of material you had already written a bit further down the road?

Sharon: At first, we wanted to just find a great story that we could make a concept album around. We wanted to use a movie for that story, and after talking to a lot of movie directors about doing a cooperative simultaneous release we realized that trying to get an album and a movie out at the same time might be too hard to coordinate. We could see the album coming out and the movie coming a year later because it got held up in production. We didn’t want to do something like that, where it could look foolish, or the film doesn’t get realized at all, right? That could happen as well.

Mike: Well, it’s good that you thought it all through and were prepared for that sort of thing early on.

Sharon: We got quite far into that process with some directors, and then eventually it came down to deciding on a release date and how to logistically hit that with a movie and album and a comic all at the same time. Nobody wanted to give us a false start or get our hopes up around everything happening when it should. So we ultimately had to take matters into our own hands, and we had to decide if we still wanted to make a movie, or if it should be something else.

We all grew up with comics when we were younger, so we started thinking more along the lines of a comic book. It doesn’t matter what form you do it in, we just wanted to have a good story to follow. Comics we were comfortable with, because we like them. But it could have been a novel as well. We talked about that option early on. We approached Romano Molenaar; we knew from the Chronicles of Spellborn with The Heart Of Everything. Spellborn is an online comic book game. Romano became a friend of ours and we felt that if we were going to do this, we wanted to do it with Romano, which he did. We then asked him if he knew of a scriptwriter and he came up with Steven O’Connell and we just started talking to him.

We asked if he had anything lying around, some kind of ideas on what we wanted to maybe pursue with our concept. He didn’t really have anything lying around that we could use, but we could see that he was a really good story teller. So we gave him some things that we wanted him to think about - just the basics; what kind of story it should be, what kind of ingredients, how it should start, and what the build up should be. We had some events we wanted to see happen in the storyline, things we thought could be high points, and we fed it all to him and let him work up an overall storyline to follow. Along the way, we were working also on the short movies and the director of the movies also had some really good input for the storyline, actually. We started to get these ideas into the short movies and the videos and the comics as well. Steven rewrote certain parts to get these concepts into our comic book storyline. It constantly grew and grew. We had people all around us contributing to this overall idea. Everyone liked where it was going and enjoyed watching it evolve. Eventually it became the storyline we would follow on the album.

Mike: Because you were doing all of that stuff at the same time, I’d imagine it took a bit longer to iron everything out while making The Unforgiving.

Sharon: No, it went very smoothly actually. We started writing the new album last year in January and we finalized everything in the summer of last year. So it took a half a year to write the storyline together with Steven. We recorded the short videos over three months.

Mike: Wow. That’s pretty quick. The videos look nice and clean, lots of nice camera work and editing. Very polished.

Sharon: Yes, exactly. It was all done in a very short time. People around us were calling us crazy to be starting music and films and comics all at the same time. Eventually, it took less time than everybody thought it would, INCLUDING us. We were surprised. It turned out very well in our opinion. Especially when we realized that is was all done in such a short time. We had a really good team of people working with us on this project.

Mike: If I asked you for a short version of what the concept of The Unforgiving album is, could you summarize it, in say a thirty second blurb?

(Sharon laughs)

Sharon: Ok, I’ll try. I like to use a lot of words... but here goes. The Unforgiving is about people getting a second chance. These are basically good people who have made bad choices. They get a second chance at life. They have to do certain things to get their ticket into heaven, rather than going straight to hell. To get this second chance, they have to chase criminals.

Mike: Cool. What kind of comics did you guys read when you were younger?

Sharon: I liked the Wolverine a lot. so much so that I called my son Logan (Laughs).

Mike: You know, whenever I see the name Logan now, I always think of Wolverine. I can’t help it.

(Laughs)

Sharon: Robert (Robert Westerholt, guitarist in Within Temptation is Sharon’s life partner) read a lot of comics. I’m not sure which ones of them he really liked, but Wolverine is one of his favourites as well. Ruud (Adrianus Jolie) is also into comics, but he’s into different titles as well. Everybody has their own stories and characters that they like a lot.

Mike: It’s neat that so many of you are into the medium. Usually you’re lucky to get one person in a room who knows about comics. Most people still have a (scoffing noise) mentality about them.

Sharon: No, no. We really like them. Ruud downloads a lot of them and keeps them on his iPad to read when we travel. He will have ten or twenty comics that he’s reading at any given time.

Mike: Personally, I hear a bit of Jim Steinman (Meatloaf) in your material, at least on The Unforgiving material.

Sharon: Meatloaf? Ok. I can see that.

Mike: I’m thinking of the big operatic vocal crescendos and sweeping choruses on some of the Meatloaf songs. I don’t know if that’s an artist you took inspiration from, but I hear some similarities on a few of the songs on The Unforgiving when I play it.

Sharon: Well, Meatloaf is not for us a direct influence, but I can understand similarities, because he was also very big in the late seventies and early eighties. I must say that I do like them, and I played a lot of their songs in the eighties. For us, mainly we were inspired by symphonic bands. I grew up with ELO for instance. Robert grew up with a lot of classical music, so there is a combination of that style of music on The Unforgiving. We also like heaviness in our songs. We listened to bands like Deep Purple and Pink Floyd – more into the prog rock. That’s what we grew up with. Everybody in the band has different influences… Jeroen (van Veen) for instance is really into prog rock. He likes Rush very much, and Marillion; those kinds of bands. You might not hear the influences directly, of course. These are just bands that we love.

Mike: I can hear bits of those bands, bits of Rush, and I’m a really big Marillion fan. They were never super popular over here, Sharon.

Sharon: Oh, really?

Mike: Marillion were quite big in Europe. I use to love them. I saw them tour with Fish in the band twice.

(Sharon laughs)

Sharon: That’s a pity that they weren’t big over here. They were really good.

Mike: Could you talk about a song on The Unforgiving that went through the most changes as you were creating it?

Sharon: Hmmm. I must say that this album was probably the easiest album that we have ever written. We put ourselves out there to be open to new influences and the songs could utilize some different styles. Previously we were pretty focused – not tunnel vision – but we had a pretty direct goal on what we wanted to sound like. It was more difficult, because we put everything we had into this really focused end result. For this new album we really felt like anything was possible. We just all tried to go with the flow and see where some of the songs would go on their own, without trying to steer them into a preset sound. Ok, so maybe ‘Fire And Ice’ is the song that changed then most. We thought it would never end up on the album when we were working on it, but is in on there and it sticks out a little bit because it’s one of the few ballads on the album. Even with all of the orchestration and the dramatic feel of the song, it still seems to work really well on the album. It didn’t change too much, but the orchestration that was added to it increased a lot.

Mike: Ok, cool. When you’re writing, do you try to get together and jam your music, or do you write independently and bring ideas in after you've each created them?

Sharon: No, we never jam. Never. Robert writes songs a lot with our producer and I write a lot with Martijn (Spierenburg) our keyboard player and sometimes I work with our producer. It’s all dependent on who has time, really. Sometimes things will come out of these sessions and sometimes they don't. So together, the four of us will sit together and try and figure out what works and what doesn’t. We will go towards one overall sound as we are working on these songs together.

Mike: It's easy for fans to play your albums and form their own opinions on how you have changed and progressed as a band. Their opinions are all quite subjective. How would YOU say Within Temptation has changed and progressed over the years?

Sharon: I think we started coming out of the Death Metal period. This was before I was even in the band. There was a band called The Circle with Robert and Martijn. They had a band together with Jeroen, and it was the same kind of music that we started out making as Within Temptation. They didn’t have a drummer and used a drum machine. The record company had a big name for it. They called it “Doom-Metal with female voices & atmospherical with female voices”.

(Laughter)

Mike: That just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?

Sharon: Exactly. So that was our corner. We went on tour with a band called Orphanage which is more like Meshuggah with female vocals and grunting vocals in their music, still very melodic in places but with rhythms like Meshuggah has. With our second album we used a lot of orchestration for the first time and became ‘orchestral metal’. I think this is what they (the label) were calling us. (Laughs) And then Evanescence got popular and we were being called ‘New Metal’ because we were being categorized in with Evanescence. That wound up becoming more symphonic metal as time went by. That’s where we are now, I think - symphonic rock-metal.

Mike: You took a hiatus after The Heart Of Everything. Was the band in need of a break? Did you feel revitalized when you came back to make The Unforgiving?

Sharon: Yes, we were at a dead end actually with the last album. Especially the second North American tour really got to us, I think. It was a good tour and we had a lot of fun and we learned a lot from it, and then we came back and we had to do a tour in Germany that had been postponed from before – and we were all so tired. We had been touring for a long time at this point and we really didn’t like each other on that tour anymore. We really hated each other, actually. We were on stage doing our thing, you know? But when we were off stage we really didn’t like each other. We needed a break from each other and from the music, and to figure out what we wanted to do in the future. We came close to not existing anymore, but with a lot of talks and some down time we got together again and continued onwards to where we are now.

Mike: Cool. Well, the new music is great. I’m glad you managed to pull it together and create such a neat album. Are you selling any unique merchandise on this North American tour that is different than what you sell in Europe?

Sharon: I’m not sure honestly. I don’t even know if we have merchandise with us tonight. We flew in and I know we didn’t fly anything in. For the first time now we have a merchandise company working with us, but I’m not sure if they got anything here for us to sell. I hope so, because we do have a lot of neat things for sale around this album. Especially from the comic – we use a lot of drawings from that. We have all sorts of neat looking things for this album, but I’m not sure if they flew anything in for us to sell just yet.