OPETH Frontman: 'I Never Had To Grow Up As Much As Some Of My Friends'

May 17, 2012

Joy Shannon of JOY SHANNON AND THE BEAUTY MARKS and the OC Art Blog conducted an interview with guitarist/vocalist Mikael Åkerfeldt of Swedish progressive metallers OPETH on April 26 at the Gibson Ampitheater in Universal City, California. You can now watch the chat below.

OPETH has just completed a North America co-headlining tour with MASTODON. The trek kicked off on April 4 in Portland, Maine, and visited more than 30 cities in the U.S. and Canada before wrapping up at Atlanta's Masquerade on May 12.

OPETH's new album, "Heritage", sold 19,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to debut at position No. 19 on The Billboard 200 chart. The band's previous studio CD, 2008's "Watershed", opened with more than 19,000 units to land at No. 23.

"Watershed" was the follow-up to the band's acclaimed "Ghost Reveries" CD, which debuted at No. 64 on the Billboard chart back in September 2005 with first-week sales of just under 15,000.

OPETH's 2003 album, "Damnation", premiered with a little over 5,000 copies.

When asked how OPETH planned to deliver the more technical songs from "Heritage" in the live show, Mikael Åkerfeldt said in a 2011 interview, "I thought that might be a problem. But it's not been difficult at all. The live versions of the new songs sound closer to the originals than many of the other songs. We have a new keyboard player who's really into the different sounds we create and he's got lots of kit. When he plays, it's like he has four arms. He's doing a lot to make sure the current live show is something very special. But we'd never record anything that we didn't think we could pull off live."

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