EDGUY Guitarist: 'We've Never Tried To Be Something That We're Not'

Direct Metal Music recently conducted an interview with guitarist Jens Ludwig of the German melodic metal band EDGUY. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Direct Metal Music: You guys have been playing together for seventeen years now, and have put out fourteen records, which is basically an album a year are most of your career. How do you guys keep up with yourselves and stay motivated to keep on putting out new records?

Jens Ludwig: I don't know, we just enjoy it, you know? We don't do this because we have to do it, and you can't compare it with a regular job, you know, like something you would have to do,. It's just that we're really enjoy it, you know, and we're really look forward to all the aspects of what we do, like going to the rehearsal rooms and recording songs that will be on another album, or be it going on tour again. These are all the things that we really enjoy and we want to do. So, really, none of us consider it work, it's just entertainment to us and something that we really like to do. We never have to force ourselves to do anything, cutting another record, doing another tour, it's just what we want to do. The good thing about it is that we're all fairly young, I mean we're not that old (laughs),and we still have a lot of creative potential. You know all these years have proved us as songwriters, as musicians, and hopefully as human beings as well! The whole band is living a dream come true, and this is true for all of us, so nobody has to force us to do anything. This is why we can keep up and continue to release good albums, and how we can keep up playing the shows, it is because we love what we are doing.

Direct Metal Music: It also says to me that you guys must be really close friends. Is that correct?

Jens Ludwig: Yes, and actually we've known each other for so many years that we probably know some things about each other that we honestly don't want to know! We have really grown together in the last few years. I can still remember our first European tour that we did. We didn't have any crew, we were just traveling by a caravan, driving ourselves from show to show, and being stuck together that little space [presumably the van] for six weeks really kept us together after surviving that. Everything after that has been luxury! So we really came up the hard way, and nowadays things are much easier for us! But all of these experiences and things we have gone through together have made us stronger and closer together.

Direct Metal Music: Shifting gears back to the last album, "Tinnitus Sanctus", it just seems like this album was put together in a different way, is that true and if so what was different about the way you put this album together?

Jens Ludwig: It was actually written in the same way we always write all of our albums, Tobi [singer Tobias Sammet] comes up with the main ideas, and then we work on the songs in the rehearsal space. But at some point I agree with you, because the "Rocket Ride" album, for example, was the first album that we worked with an external producer ever. On the previous ones, we also had songs that way into different directions but since we didn't have any producer and since the mix has been done in the same studios, at the end everything sounded all very similar. It all had the same sound, you know? Since Sascha (Paeth) is doing the production, we've tried to get every song what it needs. If it's a song that need some more hard rock direction, then we'll give it a whole or more hard rock sound. If it's a heavier track like "Sacrifice", for example, it's gonna get a different sound than some other song, and that's how it seems we have more diversity concerning the songs on "Rocket Ride" than we had on the previous albums. It's just a matter of giving the songs the right sounds. But I personally feel that "Rocket Ride" was maybe a bit too ambitious, and that maybe we were moving it in too many different directions, even though it revealed a lot of fun experiments like adding reggae in there. But in the end, I can understand why people might think that it's going into too many directions. I think with "Tinnitus", we have the same diversity, and we still have different types of songs going in many different directions, but the whole album sounds like more of a unit than "Rocket Ride", and that's what I'm really proud of.

Direct Metal Music: How do you guys maintain your sense of humor, especially how dark and mystical metal is becoming recent years.

Jens Ludwig: It's a combination, I think, of a lot of things, but one thing that we talked about earlier that we're really enjoying what we're doing, and actually we've never tried to be something that we're not. If you see us acting a certain way onstage, making jokes and what-not, it's the same way we'd act backstage afterwards and when having a beer with you, you know? We don't try to be somebody else, we're just ourselves, and that has a lot to do with the personality of the band. There's definitely no reason why we should have any negativity onstage or in our music. Right now there's a lot of negativity going on in the world, and I think when people go to a concert, you shouldn't tell them how shitty that life in general is. You know what I mean? When they go the show, they should be able to just forget everything and have fun for two and a half hours. And the same is with us, as many problems as all of us might have, of course everyone has problems, you know when we're on stage and we are performing, we forget about everything else and we just try to have a good time. There are plenty of people out there who will tell everyone about how shitty life is, but we don't see it that way, we just want to show people that there are still a lot of things that you can enjoy in your life.

Read the entire interview from Direct Metal Music.

Quality fan-filmed video footage of EDGUY performing the song "Tears Of A Mandrake" at the Rockweekend festival, which was held on July 9-11, 2009 in Kilafors, Sweden, can be viewed below (courtesy of "framednoise").