EPICA Singer Talks About New Album, Band's Drummer Situation

Mark Carras of RockMyMonkey.com conducted an interview with EPICA singer Simone Simons on Sunday, September 23. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Rock My Monkey: You guys played Seattle last night, but I wasn't able to make it. How did the show go?

Simone Simons: It was great. There were a lot of people, I think about three hundred and fifty people. The mosh pit started already during the first song. That's something we're not used to, so we were very happy with that.

Rock My Monkey: Cool. Now, I heard that the band had to spend some time in the hospital yesterday. Is everyone okay?

Simone Simons: No, that was me. I had an infection on my leg, and I had to have a checkup to see if it was healing okay.

Rock My Monkey: Okay. So you're okay, though?

Simone Simons: Yeah, yeah. It's getting better. It was really nasty. I had to do one show sitting on a chair, and one with crutches. But now I'm doing much better.

Rock My Monkey: Cool. Now, the individual songs seem to have rather diverse subject matters lyrically. How do all these separate topics come together as one cohesive concept album?

Simone Simons: Well, the whole album is actually about humanity, and the many sides to humanity. The first part of the album is about the negative side of the human psyche. It's about greed, addiction. Then you have the second part of the album that deals about religion. Then the third part of the album which deals about nature. So it's kind of a wide topic covering a lot of aspects about the world.

Rock My Monkey: Do you at all worry about any backlash from the Muslim community because of the song "Death of a Dream"?

Simone Simons: Well, I don't think so. Everybody is entitled to have their own opinion as long as you don't talk bad about others. For me the song is just about the true story about a woman who is Muslim who fell in love with a guy who was a Christian. Or he was at least not a Muslim. She got pregnant, and her brother killed her for that. That is just a true story that I got inspired by. So it's not that I'm making things up.

Rock My Monkey: What inspired the band to do a FEAR FACTORY cover, and why was that chosen as the bonus track for Europe?

Simone Simons: Well, some of the band members really like the band FEAR FACTORY, especially the song "Replica". And second, a funny story to it is when we started off as EPICA before when Mark was in AFTER FOREVER some of the AFTER FOREVER fans were calling us REPLICA. So it's first of all we like the song, and second of all it's a bit of a joke.

Rock My Monkey: Will American fans have the chance to buy that expanded edition with the DVD and everything?

Simone Simons: I think so. You should be able to order it online if it's not in stores.

Rock My Monkey: Okay. But I mean, do you think Nuclear Blast America will release it as a domestic release, or is this something that's always going to be an import?

Simone Simons: I'm not sure. I can ask Mark who's with me. One second. (speaks native language) Yes, I want to say that it's available by the Internet, so it's probably not in stores here. You got to do an effort to get it.

Rock My Monkey: Are there any plans to find a permanent replacement to your past drummer?

Simone Simons: Well, at the moment we are very happy with Koen Herfst and Ariën Weesenbeek. Ariën is at the moment with us on tour, and he's also the guy who recorded the album. We are working with both of them. They are working in shifts. We had already had some auditions for drummers, but none were as good as Koen or Ariën. So we decided to do it like this until we find a drummer. We are not in a hurry. It's going okay like this.

Check out the entire interview in text and MP3 format at this location.