Dan Swanö is a legendary producer and multi-instrumentalist, known for his work with Nightingale, Edge Of Sanity, Bloodbath and his countless producing and mixing jobs. After a lengthy interlude he’s back with a project, entitled Witherscape. In this interview he talks candidly about his latest album, getting back in the music game and how he gave famed producer Jens Bogren (Paradise Lost, Opeth) his big break…
How did you and Ragnar Widerberg meet and start Witherscape together?
Ragnar used to work in a rival music shop and when they were forced to quit their business he came over and asked for a job at the music shop I worked for at the time. He got the job and I knew he was a guitarist for a local Judas Priest tribute band. I’m a big Judas Priest fan, so I thought he was the coolest guy on the planet. I worked very long days so I didn’t have time for any kind of social life. Occasionally he played guitar and I really liked what I was hearing, so I asked whether he was in a band. Ragnar was in a couple of different bands that weren’t going anywhere, but he said he had a lot of music ready but no plans to really use it. I was suffering from a huge writing block at the time and I really wanted to get back in the playing and writing music game again, so I asked him to send over some of his ideas. I really liked what I heard, so I told him that we should join forces. In May 2010 we rehearsed a couple of times where he played guitar and I played drums and vice versa. We really had a good chemistry going on. We decided to practise every weekend and after some time the material for the Witherscape album started to take form.
Can you describe the chemistry Ragnar and you have going on?
Ragnar is really positive person and he can see a silver lining on even the blackest cloud and I’m more of a pessimist. I really feed off his positive energy. He kept on writing new music and I was suffering from a massive writing block. It was very inspiring. At some point I looked for old guitar riffs I had laying around on a back-up hard drive and bring those to the table as well. Due to family obligations practising on a weekly basis was really hard and nothing really happened at first, but at some point he quit his day job and pick up a study and I did pretty much the same. I wanted to have my freedom as a musician back, so I became a producer/studio engineer once again. I could set my own schedule again, so at this point we could rehearse together and make Witherscape work. Century Media showed interested in the music, so things became really serious. We decided to record the album and go from there.
You and Ragnar are very inspired by seventies prog (King Crimson and Gentle Giant) and 80’s metal bands like Judas Priest and Merciful Fate. What do you find so enthralling about those musical eras?
There’s a certain mystique about the early Judas Priest and Voivod albums. I still think to this very day Sad Wings Of Destiny and Sin After Sin are still very scary records in still very much the same way that Melissa and Don’t Break The Oath by Merciful Fate are scary records. When listening to those records you enter another dimension. It’s all about you and the music and nothing else. You really get sucked into the music and you hear and see things beyond the music. With Witherscape I wanted to make a record that gave me that vibe again. I didn’t want to have only songs on there, but also wanted to have a compelling story line in there to really suck the listener in. It was a really big undertaking, believe me. In a way the record is modelled after Sad Wings Of Destiny. If that record would have been made today, it would sound like Witherscape. If you take the growling away, it’s almost a pure heavy metal record. Still, the growling is really important to me. It acts as the spice so to speak.
Besides suffering from a writer’s block you lost your voice as well, due to growling. How did you work around this?
That’s true and I haven’t overcome that at all. Because we didn’t had any deadlines I had all the time to record my growls to the point that my head exploded. This isn’t a joke. It was like a work out in the gym. I used every muscle in my body to get the best performance possible. I’m completely out of shape, so after a couple of lines my growls became less powerful. I really wanted to put my heart into there and give the performance of my life, after “officially” losing my ability to growl some twenty years ago. Back then I could do a whole gig and have a normal conversation. Nowadays, I lose my voice after a couple of minutes of extended growling. When I get back home again my girlfriend instantly notices when I growled again, because my head is all red and sweaty and I don’t have a voice left. It took me the better part of a few months to record all the growls for the Witherscape album. Recording those vocals was a labour of pain. There’s only one king of growling and that was Chuck Schuldiner on Leprosy. He’s my benchmark. If it doesn’t sound like him and it doesn’t physically hurt, I haven’t done my work properly.
Do you have any plans to take Witherscape on the road?
The funny thing is that Witherscape started as a project with two guys rehearsing together in a room. So at some point Ragnar and I discussed the idea of getting some more guys in to form an actual band for live performances. The likelihood of this coming into being as way bigger than we ever had when I did Bloodbath. Some of the drumming on the Bloodbath album isn’t how I normally play and I admit that I have cheated a little bit here with samples and looping. Witherscape on the other hand doesn’t use any studio trickery and requires real drumming. I did a good job in the drumming department and Ragnar recorded all the guitar parts. We didn’t secretly use a guitarist from Russia for the tricky parts, ha-ha. The one thing that separates Witherscape from becoming an on stage production is a sponsor, someone who would bankroll such a venture. To really capture the ambience of The Inheritance we should have stage props, proper lighting and whatnot. The show should be an extension of the record, but in a visual form. To do something like this it would cost a small fortune. If, for some reason the album will turn into a massive hit just like the Bloodbath record I’d be the first one to put the whole operation on the road, but there must be money involved to cover our expenses. Ragnar and I would be away from our regular jobs for an extensive period of time and have our families to feed. It’s because of that very mundane reason that we can’t take Witherscape to the road, unless there are substantial financial recourses involved.
Finally, you’re also the guy who gave Jens Bogren his big break. What’s the story on that?
I always get a special vibe when I mix or master an album that is produced by Jens. I was actually one of the first people that believed in him. I don’t take any credit in what he has become right now, because it would have happened sooner or later. I may have sped up a few things for him. Quality always finds its customers. What happened is that he got in touch with me at the place I worked at the time which, he then took over this studio where I’ve done some mixing jobs for 59 Times The Pain and Voice Of A Generation. It was a really big studio in Orobro and it was a huge undertaking. The electric bill from that place alone was a nightmare ha-ha. I really wanted to help Jens in every way possible, because that place is too good to be turned into some garage or a storage room for car parts or whatever. At first I helped him getting some good deals on equipment. I also had a deal with a previous owner to record vocals for a Nightingale album in the little studio in the loft for dirt cheap. Jens is just the greatest guy around. He’s really into Paradise Lost and Sisters Of Mercy and here he was feeling miserable because he recording some bebop shit, so I thought he could use a break. At the same time Katatonia was recording their album in Stockholm without a studio engineer thinking a studio would do the work for them. They didn’t know how to get a good guitar tone so they asked me to help them out. It turned out they made a mess out of the drum recordings, so I volunteered to shape up the drum sound. I could mix their record, but I didn’t have the time to do it, so I asked Jens to do it for me. I heard some of his work and he really knows how to get this fresh sound, without being genre-based. It was just a good sound. That was the end of it, so I asked Jens whether he wanted to mix Katatonia. He was really seeking for work and when I told him it was Katatonia he was completely over the moon. I set up a meeting for them and they end up working together. We also asked him to record the second Bloodbath album. That record was quite a success for Bloodbath and it opened a lot of doors for Jens, because the Katatonia guys wanted to work with again and also the Opeth guys caught wind of him and the same goes for Amon Amarth. It spread like wild fire. I have to say that in the beginning I was a bit jealous, but nowadays I’m just amazed how things that went on in my life helped to give his career an extra boost. At the time death metal and metal in general needed a fresh new sound. You had the Fredman and The Abyss studios. When I drove to the Witherscape rehearsal room the only record that sounded good on my car stereo was the last Symphony X album which was mixed by, you guessed it, Jens Bogren. I wanted the Witherscape album to sound that good when I mixed and mastered it. Funny how things come full circle.
Raymond Westland