Last month Ghost Cult’s Omar Cordy had the chance to chat with singer Floor Jansen of ReVamp, while moonlighting on her regular gig as the voice of Nightwish. Their interview took place right before the bands’ debut New York City show, of their first American tour in support of Iced Earth. Their latest album Wild Card (Nuclear Blast) came out last fall to critical acclaim, but most importantly beloved by fans of the band. Truly a group in tune with their fan base, ReVamp makes music for themselves, but clearly knows what makes them popular too.
In order to showcase their music to the world, the band turned to Kickstarter to help make this dream a reality. Crowdfunding can go either way these days, with some campaigns doing great and getting funded seemingly overnight, while others fail spectacularly. We started off by asking Floor about her experience using Kickstarter:
“There were a lot of people who don’t understand why we would need that and think as a musician you’re making tons of money. Or this is only to make sure I can buy 3 bikinis instead of 2, and have a cocktail at the beach. Those people can be negative about it because they don’t know the income of the average musician, but most people were very positive.”
One of the things that ReVamp has been known for is their collaborations with other artists such as Bjorn Strid from Soilwork, Russell Allen of Symphony X fame, Johan van Stratum, Mark Jansen of Epica, Marcela Bovio of Stream of Passion, and Daniël de Jongh of Textures. On working with Devin Townsend twice, the mention of Devy had Floor exclaiming “I love his voice! It was great to hear how it came together.”
Not only have they written with other artists in mind, they allowed true creative involvement by Townsend. “You can only really go for it the person can sing along. With Devin, he really put in a few extra things that made it more Dev-like. But he followed my basic melodies and added his musicality.”
When asked if anyone outside the band has written with them in mind or Floor personally outside of her bands, she explained: “So far that really hasn’t happened before, only in the early days of After Forever. That didn’t go to well because of the timing. And the short notice of Nightwish and Tuomas Halopainen is writing the new stuff, so I don’t have many concerns.”
You may have noticed, it seems ReVamp has a thing for writing these multi-part songs. Floor insists that’s not the case. “We actually don’t write long songs. Most of them are not even five minutes. The structures very basic verse, chorus, verse, chorus, mid part its not that complex not always but what happens within the part is a little complex perhaps. Most of it is written by Jord Otto, the guitar player, Ruben Wigga, the keyboardist and me. Together with producer Joost van den Broek who also played in After Forever. Co-wrote the first ReVamp album. Most of this is done through the internet. Everyone adds their ideas and and later on we sit together and work on physically next to each other.”
With a lot of people not familiar with the band in the states, they’re determined to not lean on her previous bands material to win over crowds on tour:
“It’s only ReVamp stuff. We played some After Forever stuff when we only had one record and headlining shows that were longer than the first album. It was also a good step from the old days into the new with a second album it’s not necessary anymore. In the states we only have 30 minute so were going to do a mix of both and it’s out first tour there.”
As one of the hardest working artists in music, Floor has no shortage of outlets for creativity. One side project is Star One to which she commented on the state of that band: “I’m as involved as anyone else. It’s a project that sometimes happens, and nothing has happened in many years so..” her voice trailing off in uncertainty.
With the amount of touring she does, she stresses the importance of keeping your voice in tact. “Your voice is a part of your body so your body needs to be in generally good shape. Eat well, sports, get healthy foods. I’m quite strict about those things. They only thing my voice doesn’t like is cigarette smoke and speaking loud, so if I don’t do that, everything is fine. I also strongly believe if you stress too much about it, it backfires on you. So I don’t pay attention to my voice that much, I know it’s doing fine as long as I’, doing fine. Keep my body in shape and don’t do crazy things, it never lets me down.” (laughs)
The touring for ReVamp doesn’t stop with just North American as added. “I am singing in Nightwish now an that’s the bigger band so that determines the schedule, so there’s limited for ReVamp to tour. We’re doing this extended North American tour for six weeks covering as much as we can from that huge continent and then we’ll make it over to South America after that.”
“It isn’t sorted out yet but, I’m working on getting some master classes set up. I did my first master class for singers here in the Netherlands in March and I sold it out in one day and one in Finland too. There’s many people over the world interested so we’re truing to get some done in the states as well. As soon as I have some more news it’ll be posted on my website http://floorjansen.com I gave lessons on Skype as part of the Kickstarter incentives. I was teaching via Skype before that and unfortunately I don’t have the time anymore, so this is nice to do.”
When the subject of the Netherlands music scene was brought up, she was very blunt about it.
“Metal isn’t very big here unfortunately, we have a lot of American and English music we glorify and bunch of singer-songwriters that do the same thing. It sounds very negative, but I’m completely done with the Dutch music scene because it’s not very good. And anything that isn’t 13 in a dozen. That’s a Dutch thing, I don’t know if you say that in America. It means everything in the dozen is the same, one more doesn’t really matter; and if you something different like metal, you don’t really stand a chance. Which I find sad because there’s a big market for it and it has to stay underground and its been pushed for back everything is more interesting than playing metal in your own country and it’s sad”
“But you can smoke pot here without getting arrested so yay!”
ReVamp on Facebook
OMAR CORDY
It may have taken time and gone through obstacles to come to realisation, but Wild Card (Nuclear Blast) the second album from Dutch symphonic metallers ReVamp seems to have turned the wait into an aggression and snarl which elevates the beauty and passion of the release to another level. The album is a towering piece of skilled imagination and breath-taking symphonic grandeur, one which explores familiarity as well as originality in creating a new potent wind of invention and glory.
Floor Jansen already has a distinguished career as a singer for After Forever and ReVamp, but things went to another level after a text message from a certain Mr. Holopainen called for her services as replacement for Annette Olzon, who left Nightwish mid-tour. This may all seem like a fairytale, but not too long ago Floor suffered from a burn out. This had profound consequences for Wild Card, the latest ReVamp album. Her adventures with Nightwish proved to be another major, albeit more satisfying, distraction from finishing the record. It’s all about finding the right balance as Floor candidly points out to Ghost Cult.