HAMMERFALL Book On The Way

Niclas Müller-Hansen of Sweden's Metalshrine last month conducted an interview with guitarist Oscar Dronjak of Swedish melodic metallers HAMMERFALL. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Metalshrine: How long are you gonna keep touring for the latest album?

Oscar: Including Metaltown [festival, where the interview was conducted], there are seven or eight more gigs. The last one is at the end of August in south of Sweden at Helgeå festival. We're actually taking a break for two years or at least a year and a half. The plan is that this year nothing happens after August and then we're taking all of next year off. No gigs and the plan is for a new record to come out in 2014. I'm gonna write a book about HAMMERFALL and that just got finalized a couple of days ago. We've been talking about it for a while. We're celebrating 15 years as a recording artist this year and next year we're celebrating 20 years as an existing band, so there's a lot to write about. We've done a lot of fucking stuff that people might be interested in reading about. I thought I was gonna write it from my perspective, they way I look at the time spent with HAMMERFALL.

Metalshrine: Are you gonna get help from someone else?

Oscar: Of course… well, not in that way. I'm writing it myself. I would never consider getting help for that… well, maybe I would, but I don't want to. I like writing and I'm pretty good at it when it comes to putting it into words. Then we'll see what it's like to write a whole book. I think that if you enjoy doing something and you're not totally off… I'm getting help from the publisher, of course, but then I think it'll work. That's how we started HAMMERFALL. It was just "We believe in this 100% and screw everything else!" and it became something.

Metalshrine: Is it just for the Swedish market?

Oscar: It'll be written in Swedish and that's the basis for it, but we've talked to the publisher and they're also aware of that we have a broad fan base in a lot of countries, so they wanna translate it to English as well, but that's not happening now. First off I guess they wanna see how it does, but I think it should be translated to German, too, because we have a pretty big market in Germany too and we've talked about it, but that's all.

You can read the entire interview (in Swedish) at Metalshrine.