Bjørkø: Don’t Think, Just Do

As a founding member of AMORPHIS, Tomi Koivusaari can “share the bullets” between himself and his five bandmates if something flops. But with his solo project BJØRKØ, he says, “I made the decisions by myself, so I have to carry the consequences.”

Heartrot – released at the tail end of 2023 – is a fun journey through guitarist Koivusaari’s musical interests and influences, who is as confident piecing together an extreme metal rager with Jeff Walker from CARCASS as a melodic epic with Marco Hietala of NIGHTWISH and TAROT fame.

“It was supposed to be fun,” he says, in his deep Finnish baritone. “And it was fun. When I started to ask the vocalists and to assemble the band, it was just fun. I’m glad I got the chance to do it and had the time.” It’s a half-truth that Heartrot took 15 years to make. The seed was planted long ago, before his 40th birthday, and some riffs that appear on the record are from way back then, but it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that the now 50-year-old Koivusaari properly revisited the idea. With AMORPHIS cancelling around 150 shows thanks to COVID-19, all he had was time.

“I felt quite inspired because we didn’t have gigs, and so my ears weren’t ringing as much. It gave me something to do, musically. There are some rough ideas from 15 years back which didn’t fit into AMORPHIS’s music, but a lot of it was created a couple of years ago.”

The oldest song on the record – the beautiful acoustic ballad Magenta, featuring Finnish singer Mariska – was originally a 12-minute instrumental piece, but even at the time, Koivusaari thought, “okay, nobody’s gonna listen to this.” One of the biggest challenges in taking the reins of his own project was working out what it would even sound like. “I couldn’t agree with myself,” he says. “I listen to a lot of different kinds of stuff, so I couldn’t decide what kind of record it should be. Should it be a typical band record that follows certain paths? But then I realised that it’s best if I don’t think anything.”

‘Don’t think’ appears and reappears like a mantra in our conversation. Not thinking led him to create an album’s worth of songs that inspire him, free from any self-imposed limitations. Act as if there is no direction, and see what happens. He later took great care in sequencing the tracklist so as to create the sense of a journey, and says he always has the sides of a vinyl in mind when arranging songs on a record. This was the most difficult part of the process, he says, finding the connections between outros and intros, while building a musically fulfilling adventure.

He finished the album with that same ‘don’t think’ attitude. With no pre-existing fanbase or expectation, a debut solo record can take all the time it needs. He would call producer Nino Laurenne late in the recording process like, “hey, maybe we should do this?” and would be told no. He tried this a few times, but really, what he wanted was to have Laurenne’s opinion and to be certain. Laurenne would ask him why he was proposing a change so late in the day, and Koivusaari says, “he was right. Why? When you get too much into some things, the small things, you start to think too much.”

So he let what comes naturally to him unfold, including the thematic atmosphere of melancholy across the album. A self-professed hater of happy music – “I cannot stand it” – most of Heartrot was conceived in the middle of the night, in a cabin, in darkest winter. “There, you are so much inside your head, because there is nothing else,” he says. “I like melancholic music myself. I like ABBA, to me ABBA is melancholic music, even their happier songs. I had them in my mother’s milk when I as a kid.” When Magenta first took shape all those years ago, he originally thought his solo project could be the soundtrack to an imaginary film, the basic idea of which he believes still exists in the finished product. With a bigger budget, he’d make a music video for every song, which he says would be the perfect way to take the album further.

He wrote without worrying about who would sing on each track, whether it would be one voice across the whole record, or if there would be multiple guests. “With AMORPHIS, we always create the music first and we don’t think about the vocal lines when we’re composing. This time, I had the same kind of tactic, but I was working with the songs for longer than I normally do. When I was trying to find the purpose of each song, I started to hear the different kinds of singers. At some points, it was quite obvious, like Addi Tryggvason from SÓLSTAFIR. I didn’t know him, but I sent a message to see if he was interested, and he was.”

Now that BJØRKØ and Heartrot are out in the world, it feels like a pulp has been removed from Koivusaari’s brain. “I had to get it out, and then I could start to breathe. I can start to make new music, whereas before, I just wanted Heartrot released. It was exciting and it’s been nice to see positive comments, and the negatives ones as well, if they’re well explained. But of course I like more positive comments!”

With the pulp dislodged, he’s already looking ahead to the next AMORPHIS record, who are due to enter the studio at the end of 2024. Having taken charge of his first solo project, its consequences are pride and satisfaction, no bullet dodging necessary. He loves the teamwork of AMORPHIS, and he had Laurenne on hand to help, but after 30 years of playing in a band, getting to lead the way on his own record was entirely new and, he says, something he needed.

Heartrot is out now via Svart Records. 

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