INTERVIEW: Johan Hegg – Amon Amarth
Over a quarter of a century into their career, AMON AMARTH have become a force of nature. From humble beginnings harnessing a brand of ferocious melodic death metal, the Swedes have progressed to one of the biggest, most successful bands in death metal, headlining festivals and selling out shows the world over with their anthemic, hook-heavy modern sound, retelling stories of Old Gods and Viking warriors. Following on from the immense success of 2016’s Jomsviking, AMON AMARTH return with their 11th full length, Berserker. Just before the announcement of the album in March, we caught up with front man Johan Hegg to discuss the new record, AMON AMARTH‘s tradition of Viking-themed lyrics and their recent documentary, The Pursuit of Vikings: 25 Years In The Eye Of The Storm (read our review here).
Hey Johan, thank you for taking the time to talk today. You will be announcing Berserker to the world tomorrow, so how is everyone in the AMON AMARTH camp at the moment?
Johan: We’re all great. We’re really happy with the new album, so obviously we’re very excited.
With Berserker, we see AMON AMARTH return to a more standard format, with every song self-contained in its story as opposed to the full-album story of Jomsviking. How was it for you to return to writing in this self-contained way? Was it a challenge after Jomsviking, or was it easier?
Johan: That’s kind of what I’ve always done, in a way, even though I’ve had themes and smaller concepts for previous albums. Jomsviking obviously was a big difference because it was a full story narrative, that pushed us in a good way. But it didn’t feel like a challenge, it felt natural to go back to that. I think after doing something like Jomsviking, we could either try to redo it, which would be very difficult, or do something else. I don’t think we wanted to end up as one of those bands that keep doing concept albums just for the sake of making a concept album. With Jomsviking I had a really good idea that’s why it came out that way, story wise. With this album, all the inspiration I had lyrically was so scattered that it didn’t make sense to even try to pursue making a concept album again. It would have been a far stretch.
One of the great things about Jomsviking was it allowed your fantastic storytelling abilities to really shine through – it was your plot, your characters, your story. Do you have any desire to write another album-spanning epic in AMON AMARTH’s future?
Johan: I think that’s definitely a question for the future! [laughs] But maybe not far in the future. It depends if you have the right story. If I have the right story and the right angle, then yeah I think we could do something with another concept album, lyrically, but it also has to be something the other band members are willing to do as well. Even though I write most of the lyrics, Johan [Söderberg] and Olavi [Mikkonen] write all the music. It’s still very much a team effort. It has to be a band decision to go down that road.
Can you give us a run down of the stories and historical events that inspired the lyrics of Berserker?
Johan: It’s more mythological than historical, but the title track itself The Berserker At Stamford Bridge is about the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. The English King Harold Godwinson faced off with the Norwegian King, Harald Hardrada and Godwinson’s own brother, Tostig. The story that I focus on is something that is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, where the Vikings were outnumbered so they had to retreat over the river, over the bridge, but to the stop the army they sent one man out on to the bridge. Nobody knows his name, it’s not mentioned anywhere, but according to sources he killed somewhere between 40 and 70 people before the English finally got him down by sending people out on rafts onto the river with spears and killing him from underneath. It’s a pretty gruesome story, and I think it’s a fascinating, fascinating story that one man with a Dane-axe was able to accomplish that. It was a brutal battle, of course, over 10,000 people died, but it was effectively the end of the Viking invasions on the British Isles.
Norse Mythology and Viking history has always been the lyrical theme behind AMON AMARTH. How deep do you research the history and mythology when writing lyrics? Do you have any key sources you’d recommend for others interested in researching these subjects?
Johan: It all depends. For this particular story, I’m not gonna say I did a lot of research but I read up on the story behind it and who the characters were and stuff, so I could get a picture of how this would have played out. But it depends on where I want to take the story. Sometimes, a lot of of myths I know by heart I write about it quite easily. But for Fafner’s Gold, for instance, I read and reread that story, the mythological story about how Sigurd rose to kill the dragon Fafnir. I had this idea because I really liked this mythological story about greed, and what it does to people. I wanted to really get that across in a good way and it’s a long story as well, to shorten in to lyrics was difficult, but I’m happy with the lyrics. There is some research that goes into certain lyrics and others, maybe not so much! [laughs]
Do you have any key sources you’d recommend for others interested in researching the mythology and the history?
Johan: Well it depends on where you’re at. If you are just starting out and you want to learn something about mythology, I would definitely recommend Neil Gaimen’s book, Norse Mythology. I read it, I think its brilliant. It’s a great book, I think he did a really good job with that one. He wrote the mythological stories almost into a novel. I would definitely recommend that one. Even if you are well-read in Norse mythology, I would recommend it because it’s fun to read that. Historically, I would say almost any of the Icelandic sagas are fantastic. The Njáls saga is outstanding, the Jomsviking saga is also fantastic. And if you want to really go down that path and ponder what you read, I would definitely say that the Prose Edda and Poetic Eddas are where you want to go.
Although Jocke Wallgren joined the band for the Jomsviking cycle, Berserker is the first AMON AMARTH album he has performed on. How was it working with him during the writing & recording process?
Johan: Oh, he’s a great guy, a great drummer and he’s really easy to work with. It was great. He is just such a positive guy, with a really can-do attitude. I am going to repeat what Olavi said, because I wasn’t really involved all the time with the musical things. But Olavi said that no matter what he asked him to do, he would do it, he wouldn’t even question it, he would just do it and try it out and you could see if it worked or not. There was no debate, he just did it and see what worked and what didn’t. It is such a pleasure to work with someone with such a positive attitude and a great personality, he’s a great dude. It was a lot of fun to work with him.
With Jomsviking, you really perfected the AMON AMARTH live show, with the burning runes, the huge drum riser, Jörmungandr etc. Obviously, you don’t want to give too much away, but what do you have in store for the live show for the Berserker cycle?
Johan: We are going to have an 18-inch model of Stonehenge! [laughs] We’ve got some big plans. It’s hard to talk about them without actually revealing what the plans are, but it is going to involve fire for the really big shows, obviously when it comes to the smaller shows it will be tricky, but we are working on a set up where we can scale it up or scale it down depending on where we play, so hopefully we can give our fans the same experience no matter what show they come to.
Many of the songs from Berserker are going to be immediate live-favourites. Which songs are you especially excited to debut live?
Johan: It’s such an interesting situation we have for songs on this album. When we were talking about songs we should focus on for the album release and singles and all that stuff, everybody had different favourites. It was so difficult to agree on anything! For me personally, one of my favourite songs on this album is Shield Wall, I think that’s gonna be a real live hammer really, and I think that people will love that song. I think its such a powerful song, it’s short and to the point, and it has a great chorus, I think. For me, that’s one of my favourites for sure.
You released the documentary/live DVD The Pursuit Of Vikings: 25 Years In The Eye Of The Storm in November. How was it for you to look at your career retrospectively?
Johan: It was kind of strange, actually. We went back to places like our first rehearsal room, the room we played our first show and all that stuff. I haven’t been back there in 20 years. It was amazing, it was an amazing feeling, and it really was emotional to look back on the career that spanned a quarter of a century really. It’s hard to explain it, I get filled with pride and gratitude and humility and it just felt a little bit overwhelming to see how far we’ve actually managed to come as a band. We’re from this small suburb of Stockholm. So, yeah, it was a great feeling really altogether. We had a lot of fun making it. I actually enjoyed watching it myself, which is odd to say but I did, I thought it was amazing. Alexander Milas and the guys from the production company, they did a great job with telling the story.
In the Wednesday set of Summer Breeze that was featured on The Pursuit Of Vikings… the whole set was built on deep cuts and rarely played songs. Are you likely to include any older, rarer songs in the live set during the Berserker touring cycle?
Johan: It gets harder and harder to build at set-list after every album. Berserker will be our 11th album, that’s about 110 songs to chose from! It gets more and more difficult to put the set-list together, but we always want to try to include songs we haven’t played for a long time, or that is gonna be a bit of a surprise to people. But it is difficult because fans have their favourite songs and want to hear their favourite song, so if you go off the deep end and play something really obscure people are gonna be really puzzled about whats going on, but we always try to do something down that line. I’m not going to lie, I’m not really good at putting set-lists together, I usually leave that to the other guys! [laughs]
Once again, thank you so much for your time today Johan. Finally, do you have any parting messages for Distorted Sound Magazine’s readers?
Johan: I hope you guys pick up the new album when it comes out! We’ll see you guys on the road and have some fun alright!
Berserker is set for release on May 3rd via Music For Nations/Metal Blade Records.
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