Separating identity can be an incredibly difficult task, in the modern day with production software being readily available band’s are able to not only create music but produce it themselves. Somewhat on the other foot is the other dilemma of a producer creating music. Legendary producer Dan Swano once again stakes his claim to the Prog throne with the unveiling of second album The Northern Sanctuary in Witherscape.
But what is it like being a producer that is now given the task of creating original material? Do the proverbial hats switch easily, perhaps are there elements lost on the common ear Swano would notice. We were lucky enough to speak to the man regarding Witherscape, the concept of The Northern Sanctuary and of course just what it’s like being in a situation of a producer in a band dynamic.
Today I have with me Dan Swano of Witherscape, how are you Dan?
I’m doing very well thank you!
Witherscape. If you could kind of bring the brand new album in a nutshell conceptually, what would it be? It takes off after the previous album is that correct?
Yeah, we actually ended the storyline conceptually on the first record kind of open and then we said “Well maybe we could kind of make a fifty year time jump”. Then write one new song that will only be released on this EP where we introduce a new character a new storyline. Where he ends up buying this mansion which is on the cover of the first album at auction because he had this weird vibe when he saw the ad in the paper that this old mansion in the North of Sweden is on sale and thinks I don’t know why but I have to have this, I have to buy that place!
Technically the storyline from the first one ends with a kind of pregnancy of a future baby to be born and since there is a fifty year time jump kind of like a fifty year old person, you could say that maybe its that child born there, we don’t know its never really in the story but it could be! Then we leave it where he buys the place and he will then start the renovation and then eventually open some kind of sanctuary for the broken soul persons. Its kind of an open vibe, spiritual in the Northern wilderness of Sweden and thats where we pick up on the second album where we open this place and the patients or guests if you want to call them start showing up and then thats when eventually all hell breaks loose.
From a lyrical standpoint, musically its also of course connected to the previous stuff that we have had done. Rather than completely redesign the whole thing, I felt that there were a couple of songs that really worked really well both as composition but also with people. You get a really good response and sometimes you just stumble on some comments somewhere and you’re not really supposed to read it. “This song is so great bla bla bla” and you think you reached out to someone who you don’t really know and thats a little bit more special than the others so I kind of based more of the backbone is based on the tracks “Death of a Day”, “Map of The Myth” and that epicness from “Asteroid Falls” and all these three combined created the DNA that I kind of explored .
I put them into an expander to make the soft softer and the hard harder and the Prog Proggier and wrote from there. Rather than say I’m inspired by this and that, no I’m inspired by Witherscape’s previous works with an expansion. You see how far that we can stretch our style and still be this kind of slightly progressive Heavy Metal with a twist of Death Metal mainly from the growling part also some moments of Thrash and some might say even Power Metal in there!
So its kind of a virtual melting pot of genres…
Yeah and I think that what we already had on the first one was kind of a unique mixture of a little bit of everything. We kind of stumbled upon something that I am still to hear, I mean I haven’t been searching for it but I cannot think of another band which has a musical part. Like a verse which is rotating riff and the first two times you sing clean and number three and four you are growling on that same part.
It works equally well with clean singing with vocal harmony and without any harmony in the growling. Usually bands write a part “here is growling on it” and then the next part “here is clean vocal on it” and I don’t know what people reflect on that but even choruses where there is growling one time and clean singing another time and they seem to work equally well with or without that clean thing. Thats one of the things that makes Witherscape fairly unique and of course our 1100 people would say “No this song, with this band” but its not what I’m after.
Thats what I have never done before in my life, I never wrote a song for Edge of Sanity and all of a sudden I started singing with this more raspy clean voice for the first two lines and then on the same riff started growling! I never did that! The riffs have to be in a certain way to allow both types of vocals and that is one of the trickiest things to write. Interesting enough from a harmonic point of view, to have growling on it but also to allow another melody on top that is also an interesting melody that isnt just one or two notes. Its really a demanding piece of the song writing, I brought that with me.
When you mentioned about growling and clean singing, is that aiming to reflect what is actually going on within the concept?
I wish it could be so easy that you could have the friendly lines are with the cleans and the angry are with growling haha. I think that would be one step too much to ask of Paul Kerr our wonderful lyricist. I do feel that whenever there is growling I feel that the lyrics have to be somewhat stronger.
More sticking out, growling is kind of a limited thing, you have the rhythmn and you have your rasp. When you are articulating pretty well like I do, I actually like people to hear what I am singing when I am growling. It helps when its powerful words! Thats why my scratch lyrics are all about death and dying and then Paul has to find “Oh fuck you can’t always sing death and die all the time you know?” What can you sing that is also powerful words, you enhance it with the rasp but with the clean singing you can have an expression in your voice. You can mellow shit out when you sing something nice but for me growling is pretty much full on and I like it that the lyrics are evil haha
What about the artwork, does that represent a particularly point in the story or is it an overarching picture?
No thats the end. Thats the grand finale of all finale’s. Whats taking part in the history is that at the very end there is a ritual performed that would bring on the end of the world as a kind of side effect to this portal being opened in the sky. So this entity that possessed the Man in White can finally go home. Trapped in our dimension for way too long and all the time he has been searching for the perfect vessel that is pure enough that you can completely take over the body and then you can kind of break open like a reptile out of an egg. Truly be this physical form that it is and then just fly home, the side effect is that all hell breaks loose and apocalypse haha
This entity doesn’t give a flying fuck! He’s just like “Ah I can go home, thats cool!”. I always had that image in my head Hieronomous Bosch meets modern computer graphics, that must be awesome. I took a shit load of time to find someone and he was there all along this Gula guy. He’s done graphics for my band since 2001 I think but he is always so busy! I have this thing where I get to see these guys early on in their career and all of a sudden you think “Oh he’s making cover artwork for Annihilator and Destruction.
“Ok maybe he has no time for me!” and he didn’t haha! In the end the album got delayed to a point where he actually was nice enough to find the time for this project and of course I was like now make it a gatefold. You don’t only have to make the cover but you have to make the flip side being as one so when I fold out the LP thats the cover man. A poster of course must come with the LP, its all in there you know? I love Century Media for that vinyl, is like I’m fifteen again! Excellet artwork and finally to actually without any compromise whatsoever, have that snapshot from my brain onto the screen was a really strange moment. Just like I can have a sound in my head, I can do that. I can give you Ice cold or Red hot as a sound but when you see me drawing its like “Please stop”.
Hahahaha
The way that Gula could take my strange scribing of how it should be there and he just nailed it with extremely few changes. It was scary, it was like he saw what I saw. Thats why I knew that he was like into this Sci-Fi gaming role play kind of book cover stuff also. Those are often up there, I’m not really a Role player in this way but I have seen the games also from the eighties Dungeons and Dragons, they always had the coolest looking covers!
Like Diablo…
The rights cost about a thousand Euros a week so oh no please. That kind of quality, you know its painted but the detail is extreme. Thats really what I like, you can find that little demon sitting on a rock there somewhere! He saw one and was like oh man I never saw that one before.
Its kind of like having little Easter eggs in the main artwork?
Yeah! Like me and my friends used to look at the Iron Maiden covers.
I knew you were going to say that!
Hahaha and then you would come to school and say “I saw something new!” Its a Mickey Mouse on Powerslave, Yeah!
Was the cover designed with vinyl in mind specifically? Are you a big vinyl collector?
Its weird, somehow vinyl saved me in so many ways that its made its resurgence because there is again a focus that an album should be around forty minutes. You have a side A and a side B and my brother was always talking. “This is cool, its the first song on side B.” and I said “I love you but theres no” haha! I like to think of it this way and that was way before vinyl made its re-entry.
Now I have to keep thinking like this, shit we have twenty two minutes then we need a side break or the volume of side A will be lower than side B because the more time you put on a vinyl the lower the volume. Because it is a format, the labels are making actual money from the sales of LP’s and they will be there they are here to stay. Even though ninety percent of them see them as a merch item they still have to be there for the 10% audiophiles that listen to vinyl and complain about the engravings bla bla.
I also made sure that you can make the mix without this fucking loudness horseshit, make it as good as you can and then put it on the vinyl and everyone is in for a sonic treat. Then of course a big ass gatefold where the actual picture is just not some stupid detail from the front made bigger on that back. No you fold it out and there it is, the big ass thing. Just like all these Roger Dean stuff that I grew up on. All this epic ass Prog records with the fold out, they were all this one long album like Fullscreen / Widescreen rather than this stupid little 12 cm square. How old are you?! Hahaha
With Witherscape, obviously you have produced so many bands, do you find it hard to kind of leave that producers ear behind and just be in the band?
Sometimes its very complicated to try and see it from just the song writing point ofview because its always some kind of sound thought with everythind and there have been times where you think more about “Oh this is cool keyboard sound, now I just have to find something to play on it…”
Hahaha
Sometimes there are happy accidents, you begin to play something that becomes the actual hook! There are always conflicts between the sound dude and the writing dude, all the time. Up until the point to where I am mixing there is always the point of what works from a sonic perspective or what is more of a musical perspective and also having my mind that the man on the street might want th vocal, its all just chaos! Which to sit on, who am I now? The consumer, the writer, the mixer?
Theres a lot of conflict and I think that you need to find the sound for every instrument where it makes what you play sound as cool as it can be. Not over the top you know. Sometimes you have a sound that is so cool that you could pretty much play one note and its just so cool but these days people also listen to music through mobile phone speakers. So you need to think about this, its not that the sound is so fat in the bottom end or so sparkly in the treble. You need this little piece of music that comes out of the mobile phone speaker to be epic.
Epic is sometimes what you play rather than what you played through this fantastic preset with all these magical things so I composed a lot on an acoustic steel string guitar which sounds extremely un-epic for sure. I recorded the ideas on my phone lying far away on the table. Sometimes there are dogs barking in the background, my foot tapping on the floor is louder than what I play but if the idea still sounds cool when I listen to it then its a good idea? You really give it hell and it still works and sounds epic. Most circumstances that I know of, give it the production and then it will just jump out of the speaker and hit you in the face.
Its all about hearing the dog barking and feet tapping you know? Hahaha
There are excellent demos!
Was Witherscape always going to be kind of concept band?
Well I don’t know really! Sometimes it comes really from sheer laziness this thing. Its such a drag to find ten cool topics within this small vibe that you are after. Nightingale also had this problem, we came off a whole bunch of records being all about this concept about reincarnation and shadows and gypsies and all of this you now? Then you could just invent stuff and then we said no, lets write about real things and thought ok. What do we write about? Then surely you stumble on something like write something about the point of view of a soldier dying in the battle of Stalingrad and stuff like that, that lyric took fucking forever!
I could have written eighteen concept records in the time that I wrote the lyrics for Stalingrad because its so real. Thats really really tough and I wrote some lyrics for the latest Nightingale also about anything from this conjoined twins that they had to separate because one was killing the other and they had the choice that both die or that one live and one die. All these strange decisions that people had to make and I wrote that from the point of view of the weak twin feeding on the strong one that was about to die. You think about all that weird stuff and think that all the research that went into this, its so hard to find those good topics that its so easy to just say hey lets make a concept record.
We just have to find that its about this dude who does this and that, the end of the world, cool. In this way I am not looking forward to skipping the concept but at the end of the day Paul Kerr is our beloved lyricist and I think that maybe he would like to have a bigger role in this and come up with whatever twisted concept he can think about. He knows what I like and he knows what works in our little world.
When he would come up with a concept or ten little concepts or divided into three concepts with a few songs to each, whatever I’m open for suggestions but there is definitely something epic about concept records. Only when you say it yeah we’re making a concept record its already epic! Haven’t heard a note! It was a kind of little extra thing for us at the beginning.
Where did this kind of love for the concept album come from, is it from literature or actual concept albums you’ve listened to before?
Its from my growing up. I was a sucker for this music that kind of scared me and took me places. I loved every kind of music growing up but I had two older brothers one is ten years and one is sixteen years older than me so they were way into their musical growth. By the time that I was fully enjoying music they were giving me mixtapes with whatever he was into and I was like nine or ten and he was taping me Prog stuff that was extremely dark and complicated and I rememeber that I was so scared by some of the music that I couldn’t fall asleep!
I loved to just look at the album covers and it was all weird, like Sad Wings of Destiny from Judas Priest dude still to this very day I get the chills from it, thats like pure evil for me. Stay Class is evil, its just this special stuff you know? Then my brother started to really get into the Progressive Rock stuff I think around ’81, he was a full on Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, Emerson Lake Palmer all these big bands they each had a shit load of albums. They were all this big concept, fold out covers and of course I would sneak into his room and look at all that stuff when he wasn’t home. Thats where it came from, this growing up in awe of those one track albums. I was also a big fan and still am actually of Jean Michel Jarre, Oxygen and Equinox. Oxygen Part I, Part II, Part III they’re all this flowing never ending stuff. Then you have Dark Side of the Moon which is also like one flow you know? I was kind of raised on concept albums, then they kind went away from life for a while when I ditched my brothers music and thought that I am going to listen to some stuff that you don’t approve of.
Bought albums with WASP, Journey and SM and started completely getting into the Thrash Metal and they were just like “Ah thats shit” my brother was into Frank Zappa and free form Jazz at that time so he was on his own planet and there were just no concept albums in that world until the summer of ’88 Keeper of The Seven Keys Part I and Operation Mindcrime. It brought me back to my childhood plus my current new found love for Thrash Metal and also Queensryche just blew my mind and just thought fuck this is good and from that moment on I kind of reconnected with my past.
I didn’t know what really happened when you grow up listening to that, my brother used to tape me what I later on called Ghost Prog its like the most commercial moments from the most Progressive bands. They also had some of the more normal songs, “Carpet Crawlers” from Genesis, you had ” Think Of Me With Kindness” from Gentle Giant and he used to tape me what a ten year old would like from Prog. The older I got the more complex stuff he taped me and then he started taping UK and this, thats still some really complicated shit going on that I still worship to this very day and I was so young and it left such a big impression on me.
For me it wasn’t like “Oh I’m cool I’m listening to Prog” I was just listening to the mix tapes from my brother and yet somehow this kind of concept thing was always a big deal for me. With Operation Mindcrime and Keeper that became a part of my world. My brother did not approve of any of those records at all. It completely changed me and the first thing that I did was write a song called “Invasion of The World” that was fifteen minutes long and I brought this to my band at the time called Icarus and here we can have stage show we can have this and that and they thought uh thats pretty cool! Its quite a twist from these four minute Europe songs that we were having at the time.
Eventually out of this was the birth of my first Progressive Rock band Unicorn. I was obssessed by Operation Mindcrime and kind of turned that thing around and from that moment on it was all Progressive and concepts and Unicorn had its own concept. Everything was evolving around our own religion with different characters, The Unicorn, Mr K it was all weird. We had our own altar in the rehearsal room where we were worshipping and it was compltely out there! What we do now is super light compared to that.
It all kind of came full circle really…
Exactly, because I heard Queensryche on the radio. I even bought Rage for Order and I sold it to a guy down the street because I thought it was too weird. Somehow Operation Mindcrime was not so weird like Rage For Order but it was so theatrical with all this little talking. I have a love for Tintin? I think you call him in the UK? The journalist with the little dog, super fan! I had all of the records, I listened to them non stop in Swedish of course so I had the biggest thing for this spoken word theater vinyl thing there. That was kind of like there’s dialogue with Queensryche, The Priest as well and the shooting gun.
The phone’s ringing everything like that.
Yeah, yeah! It was so well made! It was super Hollywood pro. “Sweet dreams you bastard. AH!” I think its fantastic, excellent work from every point of view. I’m just a sucker for concept stuff what can I say.
Witherscape’s brand new album The Northern Sacntuary is out now on Century Media.
