Fused by the bitter winter cold of remote northern Finland, Sonata Arctica has developed its own sound over the years, a mix of metal, hard rock and melody that has allowed the band to straddle the border between the underground metal scene and mainstream acceptance. No strangers to chart success and gold records at this point, the band appears poised to take the next step in their career, and could very well move on to the level of their countrymen and fellow melodic rockers Nightwish if the chart success and sales of their latest album, The Days of Grays, are an indication of what’s to come. Band spokesmen Tony Kakko (vocals) and Henrik Klingenberg (keyboards) spoke to Fight prior to their show on an appropriately chilly night in Taipei in early January.

Fight: Your bio describes Sonata Arctica as being from Kemi, Finland, a place that is on the edge of the world.    

Tony Kakko: It’s far away from everything else, including in Finland. We’re pretty remote, although we’re not the smallest town.

F: How does being from such a remote place affect the way you approach your music?

TK: I don’t think we get much influence from other Finish bands. If we actually lived in Helsinki that might have more of an affect on our music than living in Kemi does. Nobody’s telling us what to do. We get to be alone there and just do whatever we want. Even the labels are not that interested in coming over there.

F: You once described winter as being one of the biggest influences on your writing. So how does that season actually inspire the music?

TK: It’s my favorite season. Not for the rest of the guys, but mine, personally.

Henrik Klingenberg: It’s too cold.

TK: This arctic thing is contributing in our name and living in that arctic area kind of gave us context and a backdrop for our thing. If I don’t come up with anything else to write about I can always go back to nature and how cold it is.

F: When you first started out, you weren’t actually a metal band.

TK: I don’t really actually consider us being a metal band even today.

HK: You should ask him again tomorrow, it might be a completely different answer.

TK: No, no, I really don’t think we’re a metal band. A metal band I consider way more extreme than we are.

F: Most people would refer to you as power metal.

TK: I don’t call us metal, it’s rock. Dragonforce, they are power metal. We are a rock band compared to them. It’s a different thing, melodic rock; this is what I call it these days. In the early days it was a mixture of pop, Finnish rock, and we slowly started getting some influences from bands like Stratovarius, which we were covering. It just kind of crawled into our music, that kind of thing.

F: What bands are your biggest influences?

TK: I just start writing songs and let them come out as they come. It’s hard to say what band would be the main influence. Back in the early days definitely Stratovarius. We wouldn’t be here without that band. It gave us this direction and style that actually got us the recording contract in the first place. But then we started looking for our own style and way of doing things and we are really hard to put in any category. We don’t seem to please any one strict rule of each category. I reckon we are pretty close to getting our own genre, which I hate in a way. I don’t know if you know a band called HIM? They have this ‘love metal’ and I don’t know, it would be weird to have something like that…Kemi metal.

F: You’ve been described as the creative force behind Sonata Arctica. Is that still the case?

TK: Well, Henrik wrote one song. My style of writing is changing constantly from one album to another and when the guys try to adapt they’re always one or two albums late. Stylistically, the songs that I write are so different; I can’t really blame them for that.

HK: I think it’s more logical to have one songwriter doing the entire album in terms of getting an album that works as a whole. If you just think of it as a collection of songs that anyone can write it’s going to be too uneven.

F: From a vocal standpoint, Tony has begun to scream more on the past couple of records. What led to this?

TK: It’s more fun. I don’t want to be a one trick pony. I do whatever feels natural and good and sounds good. I don’t know if it always sounds good, but I’m still doing it. I don’t care. It has become my own style. And I was stressing for many albums trying to be Timo Kotipelto from Stratovarius, doing this clean singing, and it just wasn’t my thing. I noticed this the hard way.

F: Your albums chart consistently in Finland and with The Days of Grays you wound up on the Billboard Heatseekers chart. Is charting something you have come to expect with each album?

TK: Of course we expect to get on the charts in many, many countries and in Finland we kind of expect to hit the number one spot after being there many times and selling gold in Finland. This time was the fastest ever, in fact on the release date. I don’t really count on that, but it’s always a pleasure.

HK: It’s more like we wish for it to happen with a certain knowledge that probably it will happen, but it’s not a given.

F: In making your decision to bring Henrik into the band, you had a couple of different keyboard players to choose from, both of whom you knew could play, and to make your choice, you took them out to the bar. What happened that night?

TK: Well the same thing that happened with Elias as well, actually we didn’t go to the bar.

HK: We were drinking at the studio.

T: Yeah we were drinking there and we noticed that we might get along with that dude.


HK: And you were so wrong.

TK: It was just a matter of finding a person that’s compatible with the rest of the band because we are spending so much time confined in a bus or whatever. If one dude is not your type of guy at all, just bouncing around and being a bitch…(to Henrik) you are, you’re our bitch. We’ve learned to deal with it.

F: You started off your career on Spinefarm and then moved to Nuclear Blast. How has that move changed things for the band?

TK: I think things got just a little bit bigger on Nuclear Blast. On Spinefarm, being on Universal, their organization is a hell of a lot bigger, but we are bit hard to advertise and sell because we are so far from the mainstream, so Universal didn’t have much interest in us. Nuclear Blast had a better means of…

HK: …pushing the band forward. For us it’s easier to work with a company that actually has enough time to work with us. Universal, maybe, would not care.

TK: That would have been a case of being too small a fish in a huge pond. Now, we are bigger there and we mean more to Nuclear Blast than we ever meant for Universal.

F: Henrik described The Days of Grays as being darker than the previous albums. What do you think led to that?

HK: A big part is in the lyrics.

F: What led to the lyrics being darker this time around?

TK: There’s a lot of weird shit happening in the world. Losing people, finding people dead, and all that. Reality check, I’m not a child anymore. My parents are getting older and noticing all the strong people are getting weak and old. It’s about time to start paying attention and take what they want to give you, but you’re just too ignorant to understand. It’s kind of a sad album, really.

F: One thing fans are talking about is the lesser amount of guitar solos on The Days of Grays.

TK: This has been a trend ever since the first album. I somehow found myself writing songs that had no space for solos. And if I write a place for solo, then I suddenly realize it would actually be nice to sing on it as well. It’s kind of cold that I have to actually think solo as a break. Because we have to do these songs live and if there’s this really hard part to sing it would be nice to have a little break and I can go and have water or whatever. Let’s put the solo there.

F: What is your vision of the future of Sonata Arctica?

TK: I just hope we get to do this forever until we’re older than the Rolling Stones are. I’d love to retire from this thing one day. Of course touring is kind of hard and it would be nice to grow a little bit and take the next step. It’s been more than ten years on this level as a recording artist. We still have a lot of places we haven’t played in, like Taiwan and China and Australia.

HK: And big stadiums.

TK: Yeah, big stadiums. That would be cool.

HK: They are waiting for us.

TK: This is a nice, fun business, and it’s good to make a living. In that sense we are living a dream. What more can you ask, really?

by Joe Henley