Recently I was privileged to have seen for the very first time Finland’s melodic metal masters Sonata Arctica in action. Having heard about them for many years I was very eager to see them perform live. The music of Sonata Arctica is inspired by the metal of the 1980’s but brought to life by the members passion to keep metal alive in the here and now. Unpredictable at times the band pride themselves at being overtly creative and choose not to follow the general rule of thumb when it comes to their particular writing style. In their early days they were known as Tricky Beans a decisively different outfit from their current archetype. Needles to say the guys have come a long way and show no signs of slowing down any time soon. Just prior to hitting the stage for their show at the Galaxy Theater in Santa Ana CA I sat down on the bus for a chat with guitarist and founding member Jani Liimatainen to discuss the bands first full headlining tour of the states, their unique way of composing music and various other thoughts and concerns that relate to the band, the genre of music in which they play, vegetarian metal and more. This interview was very spontaneous and at times humorous. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with Jani and I hope you will enjoy it as well.  

OT: It’s good to see you, I’m glad you’re here.

Jani: Believe me we’re really glad to be here.

OT: Yeah I’ve kind of been anticipating seeing you guys play for like a whole f*cking year now! (Laughter) Ever since you were supposed to be here with the Nightwish tour that got scrapped, which I was really disappointed in.

Jani: We too, actually.

OT: Do you think that basically the fact that that happened and you’re headlining this tour now, do you think it was a better move for you to come now?

Jani: When I think about that now I think all of it worked for the best. When the Nightwish tour got cancelled we did this small mini-tour of ten shows and headlined ------ and it shows that we actually can headline here, we don’t have to come as a support band ----. So when we got the opportunity to do the longer tour of thirty shows, of course we were gonna do it.

OT: Right. I think it would have been a great package but obviously the fans are gonna appreciate the fact that they can see you guys play longer.

Jani: The people who see us appreciate the fact that we play a full set, of course also we played with Nightwish before and they’re sure a bunch of nice guys. It would have been great to tour with them but it didn’t happen.

OT: Now their singer’s gone and whatever. They got out here one time and I sent another writer to cover them and so I missed ‘em so now I’m regretting that, but whatever, sh*t happens. So you just played Hollywood?

Jani: Yeah Los Angeles at the Key Club

OT: How’d that go last night?

Jani: It went f*cking well! We didn’t expect that kind of response.

OT: Well hopefully tonight’s show will be equally as good.

Jani: Hopefully it’s gonna be better.

OT: That would be good too because I wasn’t at last night’s I’m at this one so I don’t have anything to compare by.

Jani: No the guy said sales-wise this is the same or a bit better and people here are maybe a bit more enthusiastic, not so many of-how would I say it nicely-Hollywood posers. (Laughing)

OT: The ‘cool band’ crowd, yeah.

Jani: Just standing there looking cool.

OT: We know all about that one, hear it all the time. So your latest CD Reckoning Night has been out for a year now in the U.S. Being on the road and playin’ the same songs over and over must tend to get a little worse for wear. Has there been like a rekindled spark here in the states, does it feel good to be playing those songs to a new audience that hasn’t heard them before?

Jani: Of course that’s the beauty of it, now we’re touring for the first time here on the west coast and you get to play new places that you’ve never played before. So even though you’re playing the same f*cking songs you play every night it’s still a new audience, it’s still exciting. Still when you go on stage you get that adrenaline rush and it’s all good for the next one and a half hours.

OT: Right. So far, how does the American audience differ from what you guys have been used to?

Jani: Not much, of course this is a big country so it differs here from place to place. It’s not that different, actually, from European audiences it’s pretty much the same. Of course in Europe, then again, there are many places like in Finland where the audiences are more… laid back. I’d say USA is somewhere like the German audience they’re not going as crazy as the Italians. The Italians are like the people in South America: f*cking insane.

OT: Yeah I hear that’s like the place to play.

Jani: Or here as well, when we play San Francisco they’ve got the mosh pit going on and have to lift people away it’s too hot and they’ll get crushed.

OT: It’s good to know, I mean because as many splinter groups as there are and the way that the corporate entity runs the States it’s good that you guys can come here and play your style of music and be so well-received and get that vibe from the crowd. I’m always, personally, a little wary of different audiences because their interest level here is very sporadic, and you never know what their going to like from one month to another especially within the corporate structure. But it seems like there’s more of a faithful following in the underground.

Jani: Yeah, that’s the great thing about playing this kind of music. In five years you’re still gonna have your fans that were there five years ago. If you’re on that commercial stream you’re like a flash-in-the-pan; you’re done. Being able to play music this way may not as big a thing as being a Pop Star but it lasts longer, at least I hope so.

OT: So you guys have come a very long way from the Tricky Beans days. (Laughter)

Jani: I’m talking yesterday we walked onto Sunset Boulevard, we’ve come a f*cking long way from our first rehearsal space to this. It’s a cool feeling.

OT: I’ve heard a lot of different stories about the name in that you guys weren’t always a metal band. What was the band like compared to what you are now? What led to the transition to become Sonata Arctica?

Jani: We started out playing cover songs; we played everything we basically could, everything that we wanted. We played Megadeth, and we played Spin Doctors and U2; the whole area of music. And then Tony started writing his own songs and so we started writing with him and we got really heavily into Stratovarius at some point when they came out with their Visions album. I think that was the breaking point, we were all leaning towards the metal direction but at that point we started covering their songs and then thought, “This is cool, maybe we can start doing our own stuff like this.” It started from there and now it’s come to this where we’re quite far from Stratovarius already. But I say that was the turning point. It was always some way hard rock metal in the beginning, like two guitars and distortion and all that, but not heavy metal.

OT: Right. It’s interesting because obviously metal is probably one of the most underappreciated forms of music that’s out there and it gets so little attention except for maybe a stint in the 80’s but that was only for a season. It’s still been looked down upon even though I think that it has some of the most brilliant musicians in its ranks, it still never has been able to completely compete with the pop world that is out there.

Jani: That’s true.

OT: It’s just interesting that this band would go from something that might be more mainstream to something as underground as this.

Jani: What we did at the beginning was so f*cked up mixture of all kinds of stuff that I don’t think it would have ever worked. (Laughter)

OT: You were just kinda all over the board and you didn’t really find who you were yet.

Jani: Yeah, everything we could incorporate there… it was fun stuff.

OT: Right on. You know one of the things I’ve noticed is that your music is very unpredictable in the way that it’s written; it doesn’t tend to follow the same chorus-verse pattern as most artists out there in this particular genre. To what do you credit your unique writing style, how does it come about? An example would be the first song on the new album “Misplaced”, there is no real chorus per se and it sounds almost more like movements.

Jani: Yeah that’s where it really doesn’t have a distinct chorus, it’s hard to decide which part would actually be the chorus of the song. Tony does the writing, I do some of it, but of course the thing is you do something that’s interesting for yourself. I’ve heard that verse-bridge-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus-solo-chorus-chorus, I’ve heard that a million times, so why bother? I don’t mean we have to fix it, it’s not broken, but every once in awhile it’s good to do something else, like mix the thing up. Really what holds your own interest usually works for the other people as well, you still have to trust on that since you’re writing the music.

OT: Right. It’s interesting because a lot of artists will be afraid to step outside of the box and do something like that because, obviously, the more artistic and diverse you get in that manner the harder time you’re going to have trying to convince the fans. In one respect, because people are so used to having music played out a certain way.

Jani: Yeah people have this weird way of looking at things, if you don’t change they say that you’re doing the same old thing and if you change they complain about that.

OT: Right, right yeah. That’s what I’m saying.

Jani: It’s kind of walking in the gray section there but it’s never really been an issue with us. It’s been always a natural transition from one album to another and we try to push the envelope to many directions and see what we’re actually able to pull off. On this new album we did a lot of really weird stuff-but we made it work!

OT: Yeah you did, it’s great. Obviously metal has become so diverse; there are so many different splinter groups out there.

Jani: Yeah, Vegetarian Metal then.

OT: (Laughing) There’s another new one.

Jani: There’s newer than that, I don’t keep count any more.

OT: Have you found it’s difficult to try and get fans to cross over and get into your stuff when they’re like into Black Metal or Prog Metal or whatever, ther’s a real fascination with the metal core sound these days, especially here in America. I have friends that are all into the same style of music but we can’t agree on any bands that we actually like.

Jani: Yes, one thing I totally hate is people calling us a power metal band nowadays. That’s so not true. It’s pretty f*cking far from power metal, we have still some elements we’ve taken from there, but really not that much. Just to be called that really sucks.

OT: How do you define your sound these days?

Jani: I just like to think of it as melodic metal. I don’t like to put on any more stamps on it than is necessary.

OT: I think the biggest problem is a lot of people have a tough time actually deciding what a particular style is. I mean not everybody really understands what the progressive sound is.

Jani: People don’t necessarily understand what Power Metal is. Power Metal has a really weird reputation. To me Power Metal is these bands that play f*cking fast and sing about dragons and swords and mighty warriors and this sh*t and I don’t want to have anything to do with that scene, nothing whatsoever.

OT: Although your album cover on the latest album has kinda got that Power Metal vibe with the wolves and the ocean.

Jani: Well the wolf has kind of become a mascot for us and basically the cover is Reckoning Night of reckoning day, we took it from there but it’s like end of the world. And of course the cover there’s like bits and pieces from every song, there’s wolves and there’s the ship from “Black Pearl White Oceans” and all this kind of stuff get in there and you can see the lighthouse and you can see the puppet.

OT: Yeah there was a lot of thought put into it. Some people would just take some weird picture and put it on there.

Jani: I don’t really like that. I like to have a cover that you can look at and even months from when you bought it you can still see and discover something new about it. I loved, like back in the days when I was listening to a lot of Iron Maiden when they still had LP’s, like vinyl with a huge cover, like Somewhere In Time or something like that then you can watch that and find new stuff from it all the time; it’s so unbelievably detailed.

OT: Yeah I was talkin’ to Ronnie James Dio and he’s very much in that vein too. He’s like, “We lost the LP and it’s just not the same anymore.”

Jani: No, he’s right about that. If you take this big picture and then put it into this: it’s not going to be the same thing anymore.

OT: Yeah, when do you guys plan on releasing your DVD?

Jani: The DVD’s coming. It’s done, it’s ready, hopefully it’s now ready, it’s been post-poned and post-poned, a lot of little sh*t happened and had to push it back and put it back. Now it should be ready and that’s gonna be out hopefully in April.

OT: Cool. When can we expect a new studio CD?

Jani: When we come home from this tour we have five weeks off then we tour Europe, then we do the summer festivals and after that we stop touring and take a month or two off then start working on the new album. It should be out 2007 in the spring.

OT: Cool. I’m really looking forward to tonight. I thank you so much for your time.

Jani: That’s alright, my pleasure totally.