Metal Injection / August 2009

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Noa Avior interviews Ville Sorvali for Metal Injection during Paganfest US 2009.

Moonsorrow happens to be one of my favourite bands of all time. They have opened up my ears and my mind to a new area of music that otherwise probably would have never known, so I wanted to personally thank you for creating your music.

I'm flattered. And good evening.

A large part of the Moonsorrow sound are all the atmospheric elements that you incorporate into your music, like the wolf howls and the sword clangs, water, birds... You're so good at putting this atmospheric elements together. Can you describe the atmosphere of the Paganfest tour, and what sounds would you use to describe it?

What sounds would I use to describe the Paganfest tour?

Yeah, what atmospheric sounds of the Paganfest tour?

The clinging of beer bottles.

Beer bottles? Nice. What about other stuff, like battly sounds, I think?

There are a lot of sounds in the bus, but you don't want to hear about them.

You guys are sharing a bus with the guys from Primordial, right? So, how's that?

They are the nicest guys on the planet. We toured with them 3 years ago in Europe and it was good to have them again in the bus with us. We get along very well. We have the same weird sense of humour and there is always someone partying if we need it.

That's awesome! So, have the US been treating you well? I know there's been some good parts of the tour and then some really really bad parts of the tour.

Good part: all of the venues we played were really cool, with lots of people, we played great shows and so far the response has been really good. We're really excited to be here. I didn't expect it to be this good, actually. So I'm happy.

Now let's go back to Moonsorrow. The band. Can you talk about what your music is, what symbolism do you portray, what mythological stories do you tell. Because I know you don't like to be associated as a Viking metal band, so how do you interpret your music?

I'd just say it's concentrated around Finnish paganism and the pagan mindset. We're not actually singing that much about mythology any more. It's more the pagan mindset and respect for nature and our discontent with today's world or the modern world. We're not happy with how things are going. I'm not saying we would like to go back to the Stone Age or anything like that, I'm happy with having electricity and running water in my house, but all this consuming and consuming is not good for the planet and it's not good for the people either.

Is that why you incorporate a lot of your nature sounds in your albums? I can think of the song Kaiku, there's five minutes of sounds of the forest, the birds and everything. Is that why you use those sounds in your music? To try to preserve it?

Partly it's because we want to emphasize the emaning behind our music, and partly it is because we don't really think that music should be only music. We all like a lot of movie soundtracks that are not just about the music, there are other sounds as well.

Is that why you thank Mel Gibson on Suden Uni?

Yes, we thank Mel Gibson because Braveheart gave us a lot of inspiration. We watched it 9 times during the making of our first album. 9 times in 9 days.

You think nobody reads the credits, huh?

Yeah, I thought no one reads the credits!

Is there a back story to the name Moonsorrow? Why is your band called like that?

It's a stupid name to begin with. But I think all the good heavy metal bands should have a stupid name. The story in all its glory is that Henri took it from the Celtic Frost song Sorrows of the Moon. That's the whole story.

Skrymer of Finntroll made the album cover of "Strength and Honour" [Voimasta ja kunniasta]. Did he also do the cover of Firestorm [Tulimyrsky]?

No, he didn't. It was a Belgian guy called Kris Verwimp who did the cover for this one. We have a tradition of using a different cover artist every time. I don't know why we have that tradition, but we decided to go that way and check if we could still find some people who could draw covers accordng to our ideas. Honestly this one became even better than we thought.

Right. And you also help expand the work among artists that are struggling, probably, and they need to have some [...], right?

We're all the same people, so we have to keep together!

On "Firestorm" there are two covers, you guys covered Metallica and Merciless. Why did you choose those two bands, and are there other bands you guys like to jam on when rehearsing?

I don't know why we chose Metallica in the first place. It was more than five years ago when Henri made the arrangement in Moonsorrow style, probably because he had too much time in his hands.

In my opinion it sounds better than Metallica.

Well, it's different than the original, I'm not comparing which one is better because "For Whom th Bell Tolls" is actually one of my favourite songs ever, but I think we pulled it through pretty well. In my opinion it's a really good cover.

In my opinion too.

When Henri made the arrangement, I heard it and I said, "we have to record this". Then we recorded it in 2005 and the record label asked us to do a bonus song for some sort of release which never happened, so now, when we had the idea of the EP, we decided to use it. And we decided to do another cover as well, of Merciless, because we were playing it live back in the days when we started.

Okay, so you guys are not going to be like Children of Bodom, you're not going to cover Britney Spears or something and put that on an album, right?

Most probably not.

We won't see that in the future of Moonsorrow.

The thing is that you don't only have to cover metal bands. You can cover anything. The thing is that you have to make the cover sound like your own band. That's why we're not covering Bathory, for example.

On the last track of "Suden uni", which is "The Wolf's Dream", there's a song called "Come Along, Fellows!" [Tulkaapa äijät]. Is that your funeral? That's how I interpret it, all the guys celebrating your funeral, and then it ends with a quote that you would like on your tombstone? That's what I thought. How wrong am I?

You're sort of right. It's just not for my funeral, even though I wrote it under my own name, because as you realized I left my own name out from the listing of the names.

Right.

But it's a cover song, actually, froma Swedish folk tune that had similar lyrics. Actually it just had different names on the listing of the names, listing the friends who should attend the funeral.

It seems like a very upbeat song. Is that what a traditional Finnish funeral is? More of a celebrtion as opposed to a somber setting?

Not nowadays. The funerals in today's world are boring! I hate them. But back in the day, in the Iron Age or whatever, I'm pretty sure that people actually celebrated at funerals, because the spirit of the guy who was dead was free, so they celebrated it.



Transcribed on January 10th 2020. Believe it or not.