EICCA TOPPINEN On APOCALYPTICA's Hit Song 'I Don't Care': 'It's A Very Unique Piece'

In a new interview with Czech Republic's Project Backstage, Eicca Toppinen of Finnish cello rockers APOCALYPTICA spoke about "I Don't Care", which was released in 2008 as the third and final single from the band's sixth album "Worlds Collide" and features Adam Gontier, lead singer of THREE DAYS GRACE, on lead vocals. The song reached No. 1 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Tracks chart for one week and No. 2 on the Alternative Songs chart where it spent a year in the Top 20. Eicca said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "Yeah. It is one of my first real co-writes. And I'm so lucky that I got an opportunity to write a song with Max Martin. I don't know if you know Max Martin, but he's a Swedish songwriter. He's one of the most successful songwriters in the pop world of all time. So he's behind all BACKSTREET BOYS [hits], last The Weeknd albums, Britney Spears, ACE OF BASE, starting from ACE OF BASE. So, he's done songs for Pink, whoever. If you Google Max Martin, he's the probably most successful songwriter of all time after Paul McCartney and John Lennon. So I got an opportunity to write with him, and as a result of that [we have] 'I Don't Care'. And we have two versions of 'I Don't Care' because Adam Gontier, who was a singer of THREE DAYS GRACE, a Canadian band. He was the singer for that. And we did the first version for the album, but then in America, the record company was, like, 'For the radio, we have to rethink this and we have to kind of remix it so it fits today kind of radio song.' So we have also an American edition of that. It's basically everything the same, but the vocal performance and a little bit structure of the song is changed and the mix."

Reflecting on "I Don't Care"'s enduring popularity, Toppinen said: "It's an evergreen hit. It's still streaming over three million streams a month on Spotify after almost 20 years. So it's a hard-proven song. If some song is going so strong 20 years after the release, it tells something about the song. But I love the song. It's condensing APOCALYPTICA mood with this kind of powerful vocal structure of songs. So it's a very unique piece."

APOCALYPTICA's latest album, "Apocalyptica Plays Metallica Vol. 2", continues the journey that began in 1996 when cellists from Helsinki's world-renowned Sibelius Academy played symphonic tribute to METALLICA. The "One" single saw METALLICA frontman James Hetfield joining proceedings for a soul-stirring, spoken word of those inimitable, now-immortal lyrics.

The album's lead single was "The Four Horsemen", a song that originally appeared on METALLICA's 1983 debut "Kill 'Em All". It features a guest appearance by METALLICA bassist Robert Trujillo.

APOCALYPTICA's ninth studio album, "Cell-0", was released in January 2020 via Silver Lining Music.

The recording of "Cell-0" followed a four-year break between albums that gave the band — Eicca Toppinen, Perttu Kivilaakso and Paavo Lötjönen, all of whom are classically-trained musicians — a fresh perspective and affected the way they approached the new music. The album saw them return to their roots and was the quartet's first instrumental album in 17 years, finding APOCALYPTICA challenging themselves to discover new flavors and colors in their respective instruments.