There must be something in the air in Sweden, that makes power metal bands who werent active for 10 years, come back with new albums: Freternia, Insania and now Dragonland. Last year these guys released their 6th album "Power of the Nightstar" and I contacted Elias Holmild (keyboards) and Jonas Heidgert (vocals) to discuss it in details.
Let's go back to 2011 when the band released "Under the Grey Banner". Didn't you feel a bit abandoned when Olof Mörck started to concentrate more and more on other bands?
Elias: Well, not really. After "Under the Grey Banner", Amaranthe took off and at the same time I started to devote the majority of time to my main career path in computer games development. So both me and Olof simply did not have much time for Dragonland as a consequence. We tried to kick off the songwriting a few times, but it was hard to get a good momentum going due to our minds being mostly elsewhere. So in a sense we both abandoned Dragonland for quite some time, even though the idea of creating a new album was always there. We were never on any hiatus or something. A few years later I also got a house and kids, so what little time was left shrunk even further.
Elias: Yeah, absolutely. We were also working with other bands and projects during this period, so we were keeping it up so to speak.
Elias: The first full song, "A Light in the Dark" was written in 2016. Before that, we had some fragments of "A Threat from Beyond the Shadows". I think Jesse maybe had "Resurrecting an Ancient Technology" finished in like 2012 but we didn't have it properly arranged yet, and it did not have any lyrics. The vast majority of the album was written from 2018—2020. We never felt tired of the material. Our initial pre-productions when we compose the songs are usually quite crude with just the bare minimum of arrangements and much happens when we start to arrange and add all the details to the songs. The tracks evolve so much during this process so that you don't really get bored with them.
Jonas: If I recall correctly, me and Elias talked quite a bit if it was to be a concept album or not. I felt that if I was to write the lyrics it would feel more natural with a concept since it fits my way of writing. I have terrible difficulties keeping things short, hahaha! But I think Elias spawned the idea about the sci-fi concept itself. And by listening to the early drafts of some of the songs it was plain clear that it was sci-fi it was going to be.
Jonas: Hmm, that's a pretty tough question... Well, my personal opinion and short answer to that is: No. Unfortunately mankind is too rooted in greed, stupidity, radical religious beliefs and fear of "different" people and cultures and I find it hard to see that changing in the foreseeable future. But one can always hope!
Elias: Me and Jesse are the only songwriters on this album. While we composed some of the songs on our own, most of them were a collaboration between us. His contributions are a huge part of the album — many of the soaring choruses are written by him — he made a fantastic work with those! I think he maybe added a bit of a more heavy sound than what we've had before, as can be heard in for example "Journey's End".
Elias: The lushness and production quality of movie soundtracks like Interstellar, Tron and The Martian. I loved the atmosphere in The Martian, and the score is fantastic. For example the track "Sprouting Potatoes" was an influence for some of the background keyboard arrangements. In general, basically all scores by composers like Steve Jabolonsky, Harry Gregson-Williams and Hans Zimmer are inspiring.
Elias: I think maybe J.J. Abrams would be a good fit both for writing and directing!
Jonas: The answer would be "No" if we would have made it in original tuning. But since Elias is well familiar with my vocal range he made sure to record a version adapted to my register which then makes the answer "Yes"! Haha!
Jonas: Not at all actually. I wrote the "frame" for the story long before we decided to include the cover of "Oblivion". It was more that the song is fantastic and the atmosphere of it fits great with our own songs on the album.
Elias: One track that we had to work with quite a lot is "Celestial Squadron". It sounds like a simple little track, but there are many details and variations which are not always obvious for the guitars and bass. So there were quite some iterations that had to be done there before we got everything 100% correct. This process was a bit tiresome due to the fact that everyone was working in their own home studios. So basically I got the guitar and bass tracks sent to me and had to verify everything and then jot down whatever feedback I had and request revisions. This would have been simple had we been sitting down together in the studio - communicating music in this fashion via text can be quite hard. I think we learned a lesson here and will probably use a slightly different process for the next album.
Elias: Richard is an old friend of ours, as well as all the other guys in his band Ascension. We've known them for quite some time now. It was Olof who came up with the idea to ask Tommy - they knew each other since before.
Elias: Not at all, it was more like we had this long solo section where it would be cool to have another guitarist with a different style to mix it up a bit. It's always fun to have some guest soloing and Tommy is a superb guitarist. What he came up with is really cool I think.
Elias: We were actually still contractually tied to AFM, so the contract was not really renewed as such.
Elias: No tour is planned right now, but we're looking into some different opportunities.
Elias: We have one song that we wrote in like 2012 where we toyed with the idea of making a follow up to "Under the Grey Banner". This track might make it onto some release someday if we can make it fit.
Elias: You are correct! Wow, 25 years is definitely a long time and we should do something around that. Not really sure what though, but your idea with re-recorded songs is interesting.
Jonas: It's going pretty good right now! I just finished recording the final vocals for the album this past weekend and Elias kindly let me use the Dragon's Lair Studio for this! Then if all goes as planned, the album “Global Warming” will see the light of day sometime this year!
Elias: Not at this point. I do some keyboard work/orchestrations for other bands every now and then and Jonas has his Iron Maiden cover bands. I've also done some retrowave music under the name Solar Surfer together with my sister on vocals and I might pick up this again at some point. But no solo careers as such are being planned.
Elias: Haha yeah, the question of whether we should consider changing our name has come up every now and then. But only within the band — no external partner has ever asked us to change the name. I think we discussed it most seriously during the writing of “Starfall” since that album is so far from what we did before. To this date it is still the album that would be the least fitting for the name I guess. But no, as far as I'm concerned we'll never change our name - it just feels like a bad idea after 25 years to do it at this point.
Thanks a bunch for this interview. We had a blast answering your questions. We're super grateful for your continued support for Dragonland. It is our intent to not have you wait 11 years again for us to release new music. Take care everyone! Cheers!
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