[Interview conducted April 2004]

Expressing the sorrows, the joys and the all too human contradictions of love is the heart of what HIM is all about.  Fast rising stars in their native Finland, they are quickly finding sympathetic ears the world over for their unique blend of emotive goth, hook-laden metal and singer/songwriter attention to melodic detail.  Vocalist Ville Valo exudes a sensuality through his sweet singing that is truly captivating, matching the intensity of the music it permeates.  Meeting him in person is a revelation as well, as he has a very composed and almost aristocratic manner, yet is incredibly friendly and utterly devoid of pretension.  Just hours before the band's Seattle debut, I had a chance to sit down at the Holiday Inn lounge with him and find out just what makes HIM tick.

Was the reason it took so long for you to tour America because you were just focusing more on Europe?
No, nobody asked us, nobody wanted us here.  Nobody still wanted us in Japan, Australia, or Canada, so it has taken a long time.  But I'm really happy because in Europe we're well-known in Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Finland of course and Southern Europe, like Spain.  We started touring with Razorblade in England and nobody cared for us.  It took us two or three years to get a following there and now it's going really well.  So it is cool that we were able to come over here now because the world is such a fucking big place and we've had the time to release new albums and tour around.  It's like taking baby steps, that's how I look at it.

It gives you the chance to build up your live experience, too.
Yeah.  We've been touring in Europe since '98 so we know the downfalls and what's too much and what's too little, when it comes to touring.

Getting to your recordings, you did a couple demos before your first album, right?
We did two, a day per demo, just to gain attention from record labels.  The second demo had "Wicked Game" on it and Finnish BMG got really into it.  They're a pretty mainstream company over here, but really alternative-oriented in Finland, so they were interested.  Then we did pretty well with our own material as well, so we re-recorded it for the first album.  We did an EP first that was only released in Finland, with four tracks, and it gained some radio airplay, so that's the reason they wanted us to make the first album as well.

The vocals on Love Metal sound a lot more confident to me than the earlier records - do you spend much time working on your vocals, any training?
That's because of the touring.  I've never taken any lessons or anything, I just felt like screaming a bit more.  Especially vocals are so sensitive.  There are loads of great singers who are great live, but they can never deliver in the studio because of the fear of the record button.  When the red light's on and they say you have to do it, that's always the hardest.  You can always hear that in the voice.  With stringed instruments, you can do overdubs and so many different things.  Your hands get so nervous you can hear it through the playing, but in the voice you can really hear it, the shaking and stuff.  But, I'm just hopefully getting better.  It's all the cigarettes and the booze, that makes it a bit more manly and less choir-boy like.

You guys have an interesting image, kind of hard to pin down.  Do you spend much time worrying about that aspect of the band or not?
When we started out back in the day, we were probably more image conscious, but everyone in the band is totally different from each other and there's no reason to put the same suit on everybody.  It just doesn't work because everybody looks better and plays better when they are wearing something they are comfortable with.  It's funny because a lot of people have had a problem of pinning us down to a certain genre and I consider that to be a blessing so far.

Do you foresee the other guys contributing to the writing in the future or is everyone pretty happy with you handling that?
When we started out, I wrote a couple of songs with the guitar player but he's way too lazy and now he's a dad, he had his first child last year, so it just happened naturally.  Gas is a really good songwriter, but I've always been sort of afraid of having different songwriters in the band because you really easily lose the plot and I could never sing anyone else's lyrics because I consider stuff I write, for me at least, really personal, so it makes a huge, huge difference emotionally to sing your own melodies and your own lyrics.  That's also why the band members have different side projects and do different stuff as well.  But it's never been a big problem because most of us are really old school mates, so I've been playing in different bands with different instruments with those guys since I was about twelve years old.  Which means we know each other completely musically, so when I'm writing songs for HIM, I know exactly how it's going to sound with the guitar riff or whatever in my head already before he's played it.  I'm not writing Joe Satriani type stuff, which he can do but he doesn’t want to do and I don't want to write, so that makes it pretty easy, we've never had fights about it.  So the idea is I have the basic arrangements, the basic chord changes, melodies, harmonies, lyrics, then we go to the rehearsal space and start jamming.  All the songs change a lot.  I mean, songs can start off being ballads and end up being the hardest rocking numbers.  It always takes us a long time, months and months, to figure out songs.  We try different versions and record them and listen to them back at home and usually pick the wrong version for the album.

You said you can't sing other people's lyrics, so is it difficult to do covers then?
Well, take for example "Wicked Game" - that could be a HIM song, talking about the substance within the song, the chord changes and stuff like that.  I'm really sad that I didn't write that song, it's one of the most beautiful song.  We always want to give a song a new angle, just take a weird song, like we've done "Live to Tell" by Madonna, "Enjoy the Silence" by Depeche Mode, "Take My Breath Away" by Berlin, all those 80s pop hits, but they all had that melancholy in them, they're pretty sad tunes, and we always made our own versions of them.  We're not doing that stuff so much but of course, when a band starts off, there's not that much stuff to play so we started off playing loads of cover tunes and it's a good way for young musicians and older musicians to find out about song structures and how simple the good songs really are.

In an interview you said you only write songs about 'love and beautiful women.'
I was probably just hungover if I gave such a bland answer.  I don't think the songs are just about pretty ladies or heterosexual relationship, they are more about...  I'm a pretty sentimental fellow and I grew up with really sentimental music.  Like for example Neil Young - he's written loads of different sorts of stuff, but he's always got the emotional side in there.  I've been writing about my friends' relationships, relationships in general, how it feels to look myself in the mirror on different mornings, and I consider most religious debates and political debates all start out of love and out of relationships.  I consider the world, at least my world, revolves around relationships - friends, parents, girls - but, I see that being not so simple, not just like, 'I kissed a girl and I'm feeling good' or 'I'm feeling bad.'  I'm not a political person and I'm not religious at all, so what is there to write about?  I don't have a driver's license so I don't know anything about cars.

You mention not being political, but I am curious what your personal reaction has been to world events the last couple of years, the war and threats of terrorism?  Do you even keep up on the news while you're touring?
Not that much because it makes me really sad.  I usually hear the worst news from my friends.  Of course, it affects [me] but it's a bit weird being Finnish because Finland is so far away.  It doesn't really matter much to the other countries because it is so tiny, we're like between Sweden and Russia and we don't basically matter.  So we're like observers from the outside of many things.  For example, with September 11^th, we were just here a week before it happened and one of our roadies took a picture of me in the van from Philly to New York and I saw the picture about a half year ago and the twin towers are on top of my head like horns and it's like, 'What the fuck's wrong with this picture?' you know.  We flew back to Europe to start doing promotion for one of our albums and we watched it live in Spain and we didn't believe what was happening because it was all in Spanish - we were like, 'Is this a movie?  What's going on?  Why are people running about, why are they all crying?'  That was heartbreaking.  It's also weird because the media is so concentrated in America.  There has been loads of shit going on in Spain with the Basque country, all those bombings, loads of innocent people suffering.  There is so much shit going on and music is the only thing that gets me through all of that and hopefully it gives a bit of peace in somebody's heart somewhere.  I've never voted because I don't believe in politics; whatever they say, they're going to be bastards anyway.  What do you think?

I think a lot of what is going on now was avoidable, if we had a different administration the past few years, but 9/11 was kind of inevitable just due to American foreign policy going back as far as you can name.
Yeah and to a certain extent it's understandable as particular people have suffered a lot and there is loads and loads of unreleased anger, but it's just unfortunate that shit like that happens.  I was really praying, and I'm not religious, that America should have never made the attack back because America would have had the compassion of the whole fucking world.  It would have turned the whole vibe around in the world when it comes to America.

Yeah and we just kind of blew that.
Well, but that's understandable too, because there are so many different views on it.  There's probably so much shit that we don't even know about, too, when it comes to the oil, all those conspiracy theories of what's going on behind our backs, so it is very hard to say.  I don't think that all that fighting helps, it doesn’t help anybody.  There's just going to be loads of body bags carried from there to here and loads of corpses without body bags there in the desert somewhere and we don't know anything about it happening.  It's hard to see, it's hard to base all your beliefs on fucking television because there's so many things we never get to see.

[for the rest of this interview, check out issue #26 of Outburn Magazine]

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