BLIND GUARDIAN Frontman Discusses Songwriting Process For New Album

MrRock.net recently conducted an interview with BLIND GUARDIAN vocalist Hansi Kürsch. An excerpt from the chat follows:

MrRock.net: How was the songwriting process for the new album, compared to say (the band's previous album) "A Night At The Opera"?

Hansi: "A Night At The Opera" was an attempt to get away from the "Nightfall In Middle Earth" writing style and what we had done before. We established a partly new songwriting method. Ever since the early Nineties, we would do a multi-track type of recording and consider that to be songwriting, so Andre (BG guitarist Andre Olbrich) would put down his ideas and deliver them to me, I would do my vocals, and we would have the song. At a certain time, we would get together with the band, try to improve the song even further. But basically it's Andre and I that do the songwriting and that hasn't changed ever since the days of "Tales From The Twilight World". But with "A Night At The Opera", we started working with more precise subjects. There was just a small way of defining things before we'd get to the studio. When we finished the songwriting for "A Twist In The Myth", everything was defined 100%, which was really good because it saved time in the studio. For the songwriting itself, we start at point zero and have nothing but the whole world in front of us. Then, all of a sudden, we have pieces that we consider to be attractive enough to work on. Then we build it up like a jigsaw puzzle — we define one piece, and then go on to the next piece, and then we have accomplished the whole song. Sometimes, we go further down the road without having a chorus, so we design the whole song and have all of the elements in there, and we continue to check out different choruses. If we can not find one right away, we continue writing the song until it's done, except for the chorus, so then we fish for the right chorus.

MrRock.net: One thing I noticed about the new disc is that each song really has it's own feel and personality, and yet they still have that classic BLIND GUARDIAN sound.

Hansi: It was very important that we try and mingle in all of the important BLIND GUARDIAN elements, so this would be another trademark BLIND GUARDIAN album. But at the same time, we tried to come up with something new, which I think is a little more significant than on any of the other album that we've done before because we feel it is the right time. It is important not to stick to the past, but to go further and deliver a new power metal design. Of course we consider ourselves to be a real metal band, but it's important to be aware of the fact that we live in the year 2006 and that music has developed itself. The same thing is supposed to happen with power metal, so we can establish new things that, hopefully, new bands will build up on. I think that you are absolutely right in terms of the diversity of the songs — that was coincidence to a certain point. We discussed the fact that the lead vocals should be more important on the album than they were on "A Night At The Opera" so that the listener has the chance to understand the album quicker. But apart from that, we did whatever came to our minds. Right at the beginning, we were of course connected to "A Night At The Opera", but at a very early point in the process, we tried to get rid of that attitude and just started coming up with the more diverse stuff on the album, like "Another Stranger Me", and "Fly", which came in very early. Having the more "A Night At The Opera"-inspired stuff, and the more diverse stuff, we brought the attention back to the old BLIND GUARDIAN elements and we started fishing for what we could come up with in that direction. And all of that made it a very colorful album.

Read the entire interview at www.mrrock.net.