Intervista Grand Magus (Janne “JB” Christoffersson)

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Hi JB, how are you doing?

Pretty good, pretty good.

2019 marks the 20th anniversary of Grand Magus…

Yeah, someone mentioned that to me earlier, yeah, it’s true.

…how does it feel to reach this goal?

[Laughs] I don’t think it’s been a goal for us but…it’s a long time for a band to exist and I haven’t really thought much about it, but it’s a cool thing to say, it’s cool to say you’ve been around for 20 years.

Are you planning to do something to celebrate the anniversary?

We haven’t talked about that at all, actually, I don’t think anyone of us has thought about it, but now that people starts to mention maybe we should figure something out…we’ll see.

Let’s talk your new album: “Wolf God” is coming out 3 years after “Sword Songs”. For almost your whole career you released an album every 2 years, why did it take longer this time?

Mainly because we wanted to change the way we write and record albums.
This time we wanted to go back to the way we did our first album, which is that we record live the basic tracks, and also I wanted to go somewhere where we could stay while we were recording, so be basically lived there at the studio.
I knew that it would take a lot of time to plan that whole thing, and it also meant that we needed more time before we thought about entering the studio, because all the music had to be written, you know, finished before we went into the studio.
That was the main reason, but we also felt that it was the right time to take a short break and kind of get the creativity going again before we even thought about writing new material.
We said, it’s better to take some more and come up with something really cool than trying to keep this 2 years interval intact.
The same thing happened with “Iron Will”, that came out 3 years after “Wolf Return”.

What does the Wolf God represents? Is it just mythological figure, or is there more to it?

All the music that we’ve done and all the lyrics have a lot to do with emotions, instincts and intuitive stuff that has not necessarily a very logical meaning, it’s more like a personal thing.
Something that I realised more and more the longer we’ve been doing this is that doing music in this way, being in a band and everything, is a bit like art, and I don’t mean art in the sense that it’s good necessarily, but just like art is very hard to explain.
I mean, how do you explain a painting, for instance, do you as a painter say, “Yes, this is about the Roman Empire falling, and this guy in the corner is thinking about this and this”, no, it’s a painting, it can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, to me music is a lot like that.
Having said that, a lot of the stuff that I’ve always been interested in, and that triggers my imagination is nature and mankind relations to nature, and the Wolf God is a kind of representation of the power of nature to me.
That’s about as specific as I can be.

You mentioned the lyrics and, talking with other bands, I often hear things like, “Yeah, lyrics come after, we write them after the music, they are not really as important”. How is it like for you?

The lyrics definitely come after the music, but I don’t think the lyrics are less important.
We are a band with vocals so…it comes as a package, you can’t take the lyrics out of the vocals, because then it would be just instrumental music, and vice versa.
It’s definitely not less important, but it comes after.

I find the artwork really beautiful, who drew it? Did you give him any input?

The guy who drew it is called Anthony Robertson, he’s done our last three albums starting with “Triumph and Power”.
His style really suits our music, I think, and for this album I kind of gave him a few things that I was after, but the design and everything is his interpretation of what I told him.
You know, we don’t go into details with him because I want something with artistic freedom to represent our music as well.

The first track of the album, ‘Gold and Glory’, is an instrumental intro, something that I think you’ve never had before: why this choice?

Yeah, you’re right.
The background is that the guys who did our previous four albums, who produced them, Nico Elgstrand, he wrote that piece for us to use as a live intro for our “Sword Songs” tour, for the gigs we did after that album.
We liked it so much that we thought it would be a cool idea to record it properly and put it on the album.

Have you ever considered the idea of hiring a second guitarist to have a more full sound when playing live?

Well, I think I first got that question when we did our first tour and that was almost 20 years ago [laughs].
We seem to get around being a three-piece, there’s a reason for being a three-piece and I don’t have any plans to change that.

Talking about lives, so far you only have a handful of festival dates announced for the summer, are you planning to announce a proper tour in support of “Wolf God” soon?

Yes!
It’s not gonna be announced until a month from now, or even more [the interview was done on the beginning of march].
It’s gonna happen in the Fall, I think it’s gonna be announced around the time of the album release.

How many new songs are you planning to play live?

I don’t know, it depends on…for the festivals we usually don’t have that long a set, so we’re gonna pick maybe two songs max for the festivals.
Then for our own gigs it depends if it’s a headlining gig or not, and we haven’t talked about which songs yet, so we’ll see.
But these songs were written during rehearsals, more or less, so that means that we rehearsed them before going into the studio, so we know we can play them as a band and they would sound good, so I think we can pick a lot of the songs, actually, it just depends on the circumstances around the actual performance.

The first time I saw you was during the 2013 tour when you were playing after Angel Witch; nowadays it often happens that for commercial reasons, so to say, historical and influential bands play as support acts for younger bands. What do you think of that?

[Laughs] Well, I’ve never really been involved in…what usually happens is that your booking agent puts together tour packages.
We don’t usually have anything to do with which bands end up in which tour, and I wouldn’t get involved, unless it was people I knew I couldn’t work with, you know.
So it was definitely not the case that we said, “Yeah, Angel Witch can be the support band”, that’s not our decision, that’s someone else’s decision.
To me it doesn’t really matter, as long as we can do our music, that’s good enough for me.
We had a lot of fun in that tour, and obviously it was really cool for us to be in the same tour as Angel Witch, that’s about as much as I can say about that [laughs].

Thank you for your time, I’ll leave you the final word if you have a message for our readers.

I think the new album, “Wolf God”, is really good, we had a lot of fun making it and I think it shows on the final result, so if you’re in for some real Heavy Metal you should check out the album.

Davide Sciaky