LACUNA COIL Guitarist Hopes Their Success Will Help Other Italian Bands

ModernGuitars.com recently conducted an interview with LACUNA COIL guitarist Cristiano Migliore. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

ModernGuitars.com: Your producer, Waldemar Sorychta, has worked with you on the last several records. Is he a co-writer as well?

Cristiano Migliore: Not really. He gave us some ideas, of course, but I mean every producer probably does. But he never actually co-wrote anything, especially on the last album. He did on some of the previous albums. On "In a Reverie", for example, he wrote a complete song by himself, well, together with Cristina. But that was the only episode since we've worked with him. For "Karmacode", of course, he obviously gave us some input and some ideas that we decided to use or not, according to what song we were doing. But he didn't really tell us, "Oh, you should do this," or, "I wrote this part, you should use it." He's more like a supervisor. He comes in, and when you're already working on stuff and everything is ready at 80 to 85%, he's like, "Okay, this song is very good, but I would try to change things around. So maybe you can play this part twice as much as you do right now or maybe cut that part because it's too long." It's mostly stuff like that than actually writing parts for us. It's always been like that. It's great because he has, I would say, a fresh ear when it comes to giving advice. When you focus too much on a song, you lose a little bit of focus on what the goal should be. Sometimes you keep playing and playing and you're like, "Oh, I'm not sure." And you can't find the right direction. Then he would come in and say, "Oh, why don't you try doing this?" and it would work great because it's like somebody from the outside that never heard the songs. He's really good at that. He's more like, "Oh, yeah, maybe try do this." And you're trying things and he'll say, "Oh, it's great," or maybe, "No, I don't like that." He's more like an adviser than a co-writer.

ModernGuitars.com: What was it like doing the Donington Festival? You played with bands like GUNS N' ROSES and METALLICA.

Cristiano Migliore: I love GUNS N' ROSES! I used to be a big fan, and METALLICA too, of course. For a band like us, coming from Italy, a country that doesn't really have a rock background or rock history, to be able to play onstage like that, especially since at Donington we played on the main stage in front of 65,000 people, was amazing! You're there and you go onstage and all these people are there, and it's not like they're throwing rocks or rotten eggs. They're all there listening and most of them were jumping, too. It's very, very emotional. And then when you're done, you have a chance to see these other big bands playing. For example, when we were at Ozzfest, I think I saw SYSTEM OF A DOWN's show like 15 times. It's great because it's like you have a free ticket every night other than being onstage and playing. So it's very cool. It's something that I did and none of us actually thought possible if you go back ten years, or even five. So it's definitely a great experience.

ModernGuitars.com: Italy has never had a huge rock scene. Do you feel that LACUNA COIL is blazing the way for other Italian bands?

Cristiano Migliore: This is something that we all thought about many times. We hope that we were able to give other Italian bands the chance to be discovered. When we started, Italy was really like the third world of rock and metal music because nobody really knew any other bands coming from Italy that would play this kind of music. I mean, PFM and other bands like that were very popular, but very popular in Italy because they would sing in Italian. Even though we started with the intention, with the goal of making it internationally, of course we never thought that we could be in Ozzfest one day. As any band when you start, you always hope that something will happen. So when we started, we thought like, "Okay, if we want to do this right, we're just gonna start and sing in English. We are gonna try to get a deal not with an Italian label because it would limit us too much." So we just tried to go to Roadrunner, to Century Media, to Nuclear Blast, and all these other independent labels that at the time were pretty big, as they are today, of course. At that time, it was really like there was this huge explosion of bands like MOONSPELL or TIAMAT or THE GATHERING. We just basically sent out our tapes and waited to see what would happen. I guess it was the right thing to do, seeing what's happened today. I really hope what we've been able to do will help other Italian bands because there are a lot of Italian bands that really deserve to be where we are right now and deserve to at least be heard.

Read the entire interview at ModernGuitars.com.