SONATA ARCTICA Frontman Discusses Guitarist's Departure

MetalTeamUK.net recently conducted an interview with SONATA ARCTICA vocalist Tony Kakko. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

On split with guitarist Jani Liimatainen:

Tony: Well, Jani was just unable to take care of anything anymore. He was in jail for one month, for example, for avoiding the military service. There's no way he's out of it yet — that was spring this year, in April, that he was one month in jail. He got out of there to do the civil service thing, and the last I know he was in training for that, some kind of training. The service thing is a year, or a little bit more — 395 days? Well, one day in jail counts quite a few days in civil service, so I don't know actually. I haven't been in touch with the guy, it's been impossible, you know. That was also one of the main problems, no matter what you do, send him a pre-stamped answering letter with an envelope and everything, and you don't get that back. You SMS him, and get no return. Hhhhhh It's just impossible, and he obviously just didn't want to be in the band anymore. For me, it feels like… when you're dating a girl, and you want to split with her, and you're not man enough to say it right there. So, you start fucking things up, and eventually the girl says, "I don't want to be with you anymore." Rather have the girl leave you than leaving the girl and be a man. That's only my point of view.

MetalTeamUK.net: Concerning the SONATA ARCTICA videogame "Winterheart's Guild", how involved is the band in its development?

Tony: Well, we've been ready to be involved more than we actually have been, thus far. The idea was we would do our voice-over things, but we haven't heard from them in a while. It's a lot of work, and they're not exactly the biggest company, they're not exactly Blizzard! (Laughs)

MetalTeamUK.net: The scheduled release date for the game was the end of 2007, is it on track?

Tony: I don't know. If I had to say, I suppose it would be sometime next year. Because we haven't had anything to do with the game in the longest time, but they are developing it constantly. It's starting to look like a game, I've seen some demo clips.

MetalTeamUK.net: The videogame is intended to have an instrumental soundtrack composed by you guys, are you going to release the music separately?

Tony: At the moment, we haven't had time to do anything like that. And the idea was that Jani was into this more extreme kind of music that they wanted to have — I tried asking Jani to do that, back when everything was still okay-ish, but he didn't react in any way. So, I don't know what's going to happen with the music department. I could do it myself, but doing something like CHILDREN OF BODOM on an album, it's not SONATA ARCTICA anymore.

Read the entire interview at www.metalteamuk.net.