Dead Rhetoric: I wanted to play a little free association with some of the tracks through your discography. Feel free to tell me whatever comes to mind in terms of stories related to these songs. First up off the self-titled debut album is “Electric Raga”.
Ståvlind: Yeah, I was listening a lot to Indian music and I had a sitar I bought at the time. I even took it home to my girlfriend, who ended up being my wife. I think “Electric Raga” was the first Wolf song ever written, even though “In the Shadow of Steel” was when we decided this is what we were going to do. We had a couple of demos that we recorded where we were experimenting to find our style and when I wrote “Electric Raga” it just came to me, myself and the bass player said we would play this type of music. We lost the drummer, got a new one and changed our name to Wolf.
Dead Rhetoric: Next would be “I Am the Devil” from Black Wings…
Ståvlind: Oh yeah. The title and the lyrics came from the drummer (Daniel Bergkvist). He was very good coming up with great song titles, and he often stole them from other songs. I later discovered for instance that the title “American Storm” he stole from Bob Seger (laughs). That is so typical of him, but he just had a way of putting these words and titles into another context. Anyway the song “I Am the Devil”, after the first record we were very Iron Maiden /Powerslave oriented, we were really going back into the Iron Maiden discography and started listening to the first two albums, especially Killers. With this song you can tell we listened to that album a lot at the time, that was pure. I love that song, the vibe to it.
Dead Rhetoric: In mentioning the 80’s era of Iron Maiden, had you discovered Bruce Dickinson first as a singer and then gone back to re-discover the Paul Di’Anno years, or were you aware of both all along?
Ståvlind: When I first discovered heavy metal, Iron Maiden was the first band with Bruce Dickinson. That just blew me away, before I was listening to music that my father exposed me to like The Ventures and The Shadows, guitar rock, but I had never heard heavy metal. I found the music I was looking for, but I didn’t know how to find it. Bruce Dickinson era was like yeah- then as you get older you go back into history and that’s when I listened to the first two Iron Maiden records with Di’Anno. The Killers record is one of my all-time favorites, there may not be so many well-known songs on it but it is so cool, the production on it, the aggression. Heavy metal with a punk rock attitude, I like it.
Dead Rhetoric: How about “Make Friends with Your Nightmares” off The Black Flame?
Ståvlind: When we were working on The Black Flame that was one of the first records where I was in charge of the songwriting. We were a three piece band all along, even when we had an extra guitarist, but the bass player (Mikael Goding) and myself was a match made in heaven. I started focusing on getting really strong songs from the start with vocals in mind. Sitting at home, working and writing, and I think the songwriting on that album is very solid. This song is one example… I got the melody in my head first, I was watching another band with a symphony orchestra, I heard a few notes in my head and it filled in the rest. I would change the verse and the lyrical thing was very personal. I had a period in my life where I had really horrible nightmares, I woke up and had to turn on the lights, soaked in sweat.
I didn’t really know why I had these really bad nightmares, even to this day, they were so real. I tried to wake up but I couldn’t, it was like somebody was holding me down to the bed. It was like I was awake and everything was real, that song was made from that. We all have darker sides to our personality and we shouldn’t just try to hide from this, it’s better to face the demons and if you do you will become a better man. You can’t pretend that these things are not there, that’s what this song is all about.
Dead Rhetoric: Last would be “Hail Caesar” from Ravenous?
Ståvlind: That’s a really cool song, that was myself and the guitar player we had at the time (Johannes Axeman), we tried to write songs together. He was showing me all these ideas, and then he just started playing this riff, he played two bars of it and my intuition came and I said there is a song in there. We would mix the chords and a couple of days later we had the whole song planned out. The theme of the song, I heard another band say ‘Hail Caesar’ in a song, like it was in a break- I think it was Testament actually. I thought it was such a cool phrase. Someone has an idea or a couple of notes I hear and the rest writes itself. I think it’s easier to develop a song from another guy’s idea. It’s easier to hear something from somebody else, so “Hail Caesar” is a really typical Wolf song.
Part II of Matt’s interview with Niklas with run tomorrow, August 18.