Spin Earth
/june 2009/

M: Ville, you said you only slept two hours last night.
V: Maybe a few more, I wasn’t counting.

M: What have you been doing lately, how has your schedule been? Have you been rehearsing a lot?
V: We’ve been trying to rehearse like five days a week, maybe twelve hour rehearsals a day and mixing stuff, mixing demos. We record at the rehearsal place. It’s not hard work, but there is a lot of shit to be done and I’m lazy. Not as a lazy bug, but I tend to work constantly on the little things and then I forget about these big fucking pictures.

M:Are you excited to go to L.A.? To start the album?
V: Yeah, I’m excited about starting to record the album, not necessarily going to L.A. Long distances and I don’t drive, I don’t have a license so it’s shit for me.

M: So Matt Squire is a guy who’s worked with more pop stuff. He’s worked with Panic at The Disco, Katy Perry…
V: Have you heard any of the new Used album?
M: No, I haven’t.
V: Ok, because originally it was supposed to be coming out around this time and I think now they pushed it back and it’s coming out in August, but it’s a really heavy one. It’s the heaviest one he’s done. He has worked with Skindred for example. It’s like a ragga metal band. But the Used album is the one that convinced the guys in our band to wanna work with him. It’s catchy, it’s big and all that, but it’s more metal.
M: Do you like The Used?
V: No, I like the guys.
M: I like their first album…
V: I don’t dislike it, but let’s say I don’t have any Used albums. I haven’t had the time to dive in deep in the realm of The Used. So I don’t know shit about them. I’ve met them a few times and I love the people.

M: So if you don’t wanna some personal questions…
V: We’ll see… We’ll see what happens.

M: Are you feeling melancholic at this point in your life?
V: I’m always feeling a bit melancholic, but really, I guess the whole term “melancholic” some people consider to be a bad thing, some people consider to be like a wistful kind of longing, like poetic, you know, the blue moment, in a positive sadness sort of sense… So it can be both of those things and I guess I am somewhere in between.

M: Have you been dating?
V: Dating?
M: Yes.
V: Oh, you know…Let’s say the hooks are in the water, but no fish has really been caught yet. I don’t date, Finnish people rarely date, and I hate the idea of dating. So what I do is I usually fall in love and then I spend a lot of time with that person. I don’t go out, I don’t like meeting people.

M: Bukowski would say that it is easy to love a person when you don’t know them too well…
V: Well, in those terms, probably what Bukowski was meaning with that was the fact that it’s easier to mirror your own dreams in a person when you don’t know them too well. So you can make that dream happen in front of your eyes, and then when you know someone too well it kind of taints the picture, you know?

M: Do you wish to find love again?
V: It depends on love, because I don’t believe there should be only one word in the vocabulary for love, which is love. Because love is always different with different people, it’s based on different things… Yeah, I wanna be swiped off my feet and I want to be on my knees. Yeah sure, who doesn’t? But I’m fairly patient and I rather wait for it to happen then dive head in first in a place where I don’t want to find myself… Again.

M: Are you really releasing the album on Valentine’s Day?
V: Trying to. Sure, why not? Not necessarily on the 14th, I don’t know what the day of the week is, but yeah, for Valentine’s.

M: So you’ve been without alcohol in your life…
V: For two something years.
M: How did you have the strength to stop?
V: Well you know, I guess it came from the fact that I did have the strength to destroy myself fairly completely… See yourself losing a lot of things you like and love in life and the things that make you who you are. Let’s say music. That was one of the reasons that gave me the strength to stop.

M: Do you think it’s easier to write without the alcohol?
V: You got more energy, but then again there are lots of things you wouldn’t do. I don’t go out, I’m a hermit. But then again I have gone out and done a lot of weird fucked up stuff, for what? Like twelve years in a row. So I do have a lot of stories. Maybe now it’s a good time for me to be a hermit and live in my little place, just to figure out the things I’ve done. And then when I’ve run out of stories, run out of songs, then it’s a new time for me to start. Start hitting a crack pipe or something. Make life a bit more interesting.

M: Have you been reading lately?
V: No, I usually read on tour, cause you don’t have TV’s or anything like that. It’s hard for me to concentrate at the moment.

M: What are your favorite authors?
V: I don’t have any. I am one of those guys that has maybe three thousand books at home and I have read five hundred. I liked Palahniuk at one point a lot. Chuck Pallahniuk, the guy that wrote "Choke" and all that.
M: I like him too.
V: Yeah, but then again he keeps on repeating himself.
M: Yeah, I agree.
V: Which is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s his signature mark, but it does gets a bit weird at some point. There is this guy called William Christopher, whatever... “Kiss Me Judas”, “Penny Dreadful”, and “The Anchors of Hell”. It’s a pretty good one. You’ll like it if you like Palahniuk. It’s like film noir, not film noir, but detective… Kind of fucked up. Lots of drugs, lots of sex and lots of gross things. But I’ve been really liking children’s books…

M: Children’s books?
V: Yeah, books with lots of pictures. Nature books and stuff like that. So there is not a lot of stuff to read actually, but I have a lot of books that I wanna start reading. I’ll probably start.

M: Like what?
V: Is it Scarlett Thomas that released a book called “Mr. Y”. No, “The Story of Mr. Y”, and now released something I just got… Well, a fascinating writer. A British writer, you should check it out. “The Story of Mr. Y”, which is very meaningful, very different. It’s like a Victorian novel mixed up in time and space. So there are different stories in different places happening at the same time. It’s good, it’s interesting.

M: Hey, since our weathers are so different… I am from Rio… I wonder, do you feel more inspired in the winter or summer time?
V: I don’t think that matters. It’s about the season in your heart.

by Mayra Dias Gomes