SOILWORK Drummer Talks About Making Of 'The Living Infinite'

Jay Nanda of the San Antonio Metal Music Examiner recently conducted an interview with SOILWORK drummer Dirk Verbeuren. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

San Antonio Metal Music Examiner: Congratulations on "The Living Infinite". I've been enjoying it a lot. I guess I'll get the obvious question out of the way — why the double album?

Dirk Verbeuren: Well, it was originally an idea . . . eventually we decided to write and see if we could come up with enough solid music and stuff that would fit together to make a double record. It ended up happening, and everyone got to work, and yeah, we ended up with so much great demo material that we all felt like, "You know what? This could actually work." It was a goal that we came in touch with ourselves, but of course we still have to deliver. When we felt that we had what we needed to do that, then it kind of became reality. I'm glad you like it.

San Antonio Metal Music Examiner: Besides the number of songs, what makes the double-LP different than some of the previous records you played on?

Dirk Verbeuren: To me, the biggest difference was how much of a band effort it was during the songwriting. Not to say that that wasn't the case at all in the past, because it was to an extent. Everybody was always jamming, creating their parts. But a lot of this material was written in the very raw stage. For example, in my case, a lot of the drums that were on demos were very simple, to create my parts from scratch. Then also, for example, David (Andersson),our new guitarist, gave me a lot of freedom . . . they said, "Yeah, go ahead and restructure and rearrange, change speeds if you want." And I really did. I kind of took their ideas and put them in my own way. So for my part, I felt a lot more involved, and I think the same went for the other band members. That to me is the biggest difference and one of the reasons why the album is diverse.

San Antonio Metal Music Examiner: What was the objective behind the new video for "Rise Above The Sentiment"?

Dirk Verbeuren: [laughs] Originally, we wanted to do a band video, but there was just no way for us to get together. The next best thing was to use some previous footage we had from the recording. We kind of wanted to share that with our fans anyway. We'd been in the studio for two months, so there was quite a lot of footage. As a result, one of the assistants in the studio at completion was also video creator and editor and came up with this idea to make it unique and different. Hence, the old man going nuts and finding our VHS tape or whatever. And when we saw the results, we were like, "This is awesome! This is different." After all, there are so many videos of bands playing empty warehouses and stuff, so this was something else, and it showcases another side of the band. I was going to say that you don't hear of a lot of death metal or melodic death metal bands showing humor in videos. There's so many videos out there. When we first saw it, I didn't even know what he was doing. Then I laughed my ass off the whole time. Maybe some people will hate it, but at the same time, probably some people will laugh at it as well. It's a little more memorable than staring angrily into the camera. [laughs]

Read the entire interview from San Antonio Metal Music Examiner.