OPETH Mainman Discusses Songwriting Process

Kate Heath of myYearbook recently conducted an interview with OPETH guitarist/vocalist Mikael Åkerfeldt. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

myYearbook: "Watershed" is your ninth studio album. You guys have come a long way between different band members and different music explorations. What experiences over the band's career do you feel like have shaped you the most?

Mikael: I think I learned a little bit of everything. I learned a little bit about songwriting after having written music for nine albums. Like the actual recording process, I learned loads about that. Also touring life, it's a little bit kind of shallow looking. You go on stage and have a couple of beers. That's basically what you do. There's a lot of things that I'm not particularly interested in, you know, on the business side. You're pushed; you're kind of forced into becoming interested in it. It's a day's work. You know, I'm doing this to support my family as well.

myYearbook: Like your other albums before, Travis Smith designed the cover art for "Watershed". What is it about his work that speaks to you personally and helps communicate the feeling of your music?

Mikael: It's one of those collaborations that has just worked for 10 years now. He really understands what I'm saying. We're on the same wavelength. I give him some ideas of what I want and he kind of nails it. I get lots of offers from other art people. From what I've seen, he's the best for us.

myYearbook: The song "Hessian Peel" contains a backwards recorded verse — "My sweet Satan..." Were you paying homage to LED ZEPPELIN their verse in "Stairway To Heaven"?

Mikael: It's the LED ZEPPELIN reference. It's leftover from the demo recordings I did. I was working with the song in my home studio; I wanted something for that part. I sang that line "My sweet Satan" off the top of my head. I didn't really think about it, then reversed it and voila! It's like, that's what I wanted. I figured that once we went into the studio to write everything for real, I'd just write a good lyric and we would use that instead. We tried a different one, but it didn't sound good in reverse. It didn't have the musical kind of ring that I wanted, so we used that one on the demo, which is an obvious reference to LED ZEPPELIN. It really was not like a nod to them or anything. It was just like that's what came out. It might as well been like, "I'm driving my Volvo." So it didn't really matter what I said. When I hear it, when it comes out in reverse, that's what matters.

myYearbook: When you're writing a song, are there certain elements that you go in with that you know you want to shape the song around, or are these messages and references that are so key to your style something that you weave in later?

Mikael: It depends, really. I've worked in all sorts of different ways in the past. In many ways, it comes down to the demo stages, like the early stages of writing a song and what type of equipment I'm using. Some of the recording stuff I've had in the past has been so f*cking shitty that it's impossible for me to finish a song. So I end up with bits and pieces that I have to piece together in the end. For the last album I bought like a Pro Tools, which made it so much easier for me to start working on a song and finish for the day and continue the next day. While in the past, if I was going to continue what I worked on the day before, I had to work from scratch. Now it's just easier for me, it was quicker too. Once I start writing, I'm very disciplined. The song kind of tends to write itself in a way, so I work fast. In the end it comes down to the help I have, what type of equipment I have. So, for this last album, I just started from the beginning of the song and built from there.

Read the entire interview from myYearbook.