MASTERPLAN Guitarist Discusses New Lineup, Upcoming CD

Holland's Lords of Metal e-zine recently conducted an interview with MASTERPLAN/ex-HELLOWEEN guitarist Roland Grapow. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Lords of Metal: A while back I was quite surprised by the announcement that [singer] Jorn Lande had left MASTERPLAN. Of course musical differences was given as the reason, but can you be a bit more specific about the actual cause for the decision?

Roland Grapow: Well, first of all, Jorn was always complaining after the shows we did that things were not working out for him. Secondly, he wasn't always in agreement with the stuff we wrote as a band. For instance, when we finished an album, months later he would say that the melodies were too high for him, that he couldn't sing them well live, that the direction of the band wasn't hundred percent his taste, that our song material was too cheesy, and so on. The musical style that we're in is however were important for MASTERPLAN. We tried to work this out already for the "Aeronautics" album, where Jorn was pushing us also a little too much in the direction of traditional, straightforward heavy metal. He found us too progressive, too dark. Uli [Kusch, ex-drummer] and myself decided that we wanted to keep our style, maybe getting back a little bit more to the style on the first album. Then Jorn decided that he didn't want to stay in the band. He wanted to go more into the direction of his solo albums. Don't get me wrong, I still love him as a singer and he's still a good friend of mine. I think he made the right decision however, since it's not good to have somebody in the band who's unhappy all the time.

Lords of Metal: Of course you knew that it wouldn't be easy to find a suitable replacement, but how did you get to Mike DiMeo [RIOT]?

Roland Grapow: It was very difficult and we checked out a lot of singers. We wanted to do the planned gigs already with the new singer, but that was impossible so we either had to cancel the shows or ask Jorn to come back and do the gigs with us. So Jorn did the gigs with us and it was a lot of fun. We were relaxed and we really enjoyed what we were doing. After these gigs, Mike contacted me and I checked him out since I didn't know him at all. After checking him out I found his style to be quite similar to Jorn — he's also a blues-type singer and that is good for MASTERPLAN. I complimented him first about his performance and then asked him if we was interested to sing for MASTERPLAN. Luckily for us he was.

Lords of Metal: Is it no difficult to work with American singer, since he's living at the other side of the world?

Roland Grapow: No, not really. It's not more difficult then working with a Norwegian singer. Nowadays it really makes no difference anymore whether you're from Norway or from the States. The flight is just a few hours more.

Lords of Metal: As a result of joining MASTERPLAN, Mike (had to) quit his former band RIOT. Was this a mandatory move because you want him to focus on MASTERPLAN or was it just impossible to combine the two?

Roland Grapow: It was certainly not requested from my side. In fact, RIOT announced another singer instead. Mike was surprised himself that they went on tour with a different singer. Maybe for RIOT, Mike joining MASTERPLAN was the reason to go and look for a replacement. For us it made no difference whether he would have stayed in RIOT as well. RIOT is just doing some shows in the New York area and things would have been relatively easy to combine. I said him beforehand to not quit anything, since making money in this business is also important and at that time the future of MASTERPLAN was very insecure. The same goes for Mike Terrana. When he joined I told him as well not to leave RAGE but he said that he wanted to leave RAGE because he couldn't work with those guys anymore.

Lords of Metal: You already mentioned the other change in the line-up being Mike Terrana as your new drummer. Why did Uli leave and how did you get Mike in?

Roland Grapow: Mike Terrana is an old friend of mine, so his name sprang to mind easily when thinking about a new drummer. First I just asked him to help out while he was on tour with AXEL RUDI PELL. He asked me what had happened and when I said that Uli left the band he said that he would be the new drummer for MASTERPLAN. He had always loved the band. I know him well and he plays great, so I'm really happy to have him in the band.

Lords of Metal: Let's talk about the new album for a while. When did you start with the preparations for the new album and how long did the overall process take? Was Mike DiMeo already part of the band during the song-writing process?

Roland Grapow: I started writing the songs in January last year, still with Jorn in mind as a singer. I finished about six or seven songs during January and February. Then I took a long break and in June I had a meeting with Uli to talk about the stuff that he wrote. When he left, I had a meeting with Jan and Axel in September and I stated that I really didn't want to have Uli's songs on the album when he was no longer part of the band. We decided to make one exception and that was the song "Masterplan" which I felt was too good to leave it off. We still didn't have enough songs for the album at that time, so I wrote "Keeps Me Burning", "Watching The World" and "Warrior's Cry". About Mike DiMeo's participation in the songwriting process: when we write songs, we don't write lyrics of vocal melodies. So I sent everything to Mike and he wrote the lyrics and vocal melodies. The first attempt of him didn't really fit the MASTERPLAN material, it sounded too much like RIOT. So we started to work as a team for each song and during that process he really got in to it and understood the style of the band. At that time I felt really secure about the future of the band.

Read the entire interview at www.lordsofmetal.nl.