Working to continue to build an audience of fans who appreciate superior playing and compositional excellence to their brand of metal, Swedish progressive metal veterans Evergrey are in the midst of another North American tour, bringing along Canadian/Texan symphonic metallers Tulip, along for the raucous ride.
The tour began in Los Angeles on Aug. 23 and wound its way along the west coast for a few dates, before moving to the mountainous central region. Sept. 3 the excursion stops in Austin, Texas, moving on to Atlanta, Louisville and Joliet, Illinois, before popping across the border for a show at The Velvet Underground in Toronto on Sept. 8 and at Café Campus in Montreal the following evening – the only two Canadian stops.
“We love playing in Canada. We are only doing the two shows on this run, but we have done shows in the past in places like Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Regina and other places that I forget. We have toured there in the winter too, which feels like home for us,” said bassist Johan Niemann, who said he remembers their last tour in 2017 and sharing a very common Canadian experience with their Canadian tour mates at the time – watching hockey.
“The last time the World Championships were on right as we were pulling into Vancouver and we had a Canadian band on tour with us, so we watched the finals together, because it was Canada and Sweden and Sweden won of course. That was a great experience.”
Evergrey’s music is definitely progressive, in that the musical virtuosity is evident as is the complexity and intricacy of many of the band’s compositions. But evolving over 20 years of writing, recording and releasing albums, this dexterity has never been done to curry acclaim for exceptionality, nor at the sacrifice of melody and accessibility.
“We always loved melody; we all grew up on it. We all liked bands like Kiss, Iron Maiden and The Scorpions. That’s what we grew up on and it’s all very melodic music. You have a chorus, you have melodies, you have hooks and that’s still very important to us. And of course, having a cool metal riff is also very important and cool too. But you have to have a catchy chorus and some melodies for listeners to hook on to,” said Niemann, from the band’s recent tour stop in Seattle.
As with most bands around for any length of time, Evergrey has endured its share of lineup changes over the past couple of decades, with co-founder Tom S. Englund being the sole remaining original member and longest-tenured by many years. Niemann joined in 2010 making him the ‘new guy.’ Keyboard whiz Rikard Zander has the next longest continuous tenure at 17 years as of 2019. Guitarist Henrik Danhage was in the band from 2000 to 2010 and rejoined Evergrey in 2014 alongside drummer Jonas Ekdahl, who was also previously in the group, from 2003 to 2010.
Stability has meant harmony within the group and excellence in terms of the performance and songwriting connections between all five musicians.
“I hope we won’t have any more changes in the lineup, but you can never say never. This lineup does feel very, very stable. This feels really good at this time. I don’t want to take away from other previous lineups, but this feels like this is what the band is really supposed to be right now. We all feel like that, and it seems the fans are picking up on that too. And, again, I definitely do not mean to disrespect any previous lineup but we’re having a great time right now, both personally and musically. And I think that shows in our recordings and on stage,” said Niemann.
“You have to be good people as well as good musicians, absolutely, because nobody wants to hang out with assholes. If you’re on a big tour, like we are right now, you make music for maybe one and a half hours per day and the rest of the time in your day is spent all together on the bus. And if you can’t get along then it’s not worth it. Everybody is just the most amazing person ever in this band, so we’re all having a great time.
“And It’s definitely working well creatively. It’s never been better, and that’s what we all say. Obviously, Tom is the founding member and he is saying it’s as good as it’s even been. He is an interesting guy. He doesn’t really like being the band leader, so he really tries not to. He doesn’t want to have to bring the hammer down. So, for every big decision, everyone has equal say. And if four people really want to do something and the fifth one doesn’t, we then talk about why that fifth person doesn’t want to do it. If that fifth person has a good enough reason, then we will not do that thing. It’s very democratic and very open.”
This carries over to the songwriting where, even though Englund has been the band through all 11 albums since their 1998 debut The Dark Discovery, right up to 2019’s The Atlantic, he doesn’t impose his creative will.
“Jonas and Tom, they write a lot of music and sometimes they bring in whole songs that we either listen to and go, ‘that’s perfect,’ or we listen to it and go, ‘well, that might need a little tweaking.’ We may just suggest fixing something in the chorus or something like that. For The Atlantic, the song Departure was brought in by Rikard initially. He just had a keyboard part for one of the sections and we all thought it was such a great part. He only had a few chords and a piano sequence, but we all built around it and wrote the whole song in just a couple of hours – just from that one great idea he had. It was all of us just working together so well in the studio,” Niemann explained, adding that one of the hallmarks of Evergrey since its inception has been the perceptive, compelling and well-crafted lyrical messaged composed by Englund.
“He writes only from his own perspective on things. He writes about himself basically and his views on certain things. He is a smart man; you can look at his lyrics and kind of apply them to your own life, because he is writing about personal stuff all the time. The Atlantic has kind of a theme that goes through most of the record. Tom went through a divorce from his wife and the album is about that, basically.
“The Atlantic is about trying to find himself and who he is, and reinvent himself as a single person, not having a wife anymore and being alone and seeing what the journey brings. That’s why there is a sailing theme to the record. It’s like being adrift on the ocean, having things being very, very uncertain. And at times the sea is calm and other times it’s stormy. In the old sailing days, if you didn’t know where you were going, you were pretty much f***ed.”
Although The Atlantic just came out at the beginning of 2019, Niemann said some ideas for new music are already beginning to rise to the surface.
“We are slowly putting together ideas. It’s hard to say what kind of direction we’re going in, but we have been talking about it for a bit, just trying to see which way we may go. We will have to see how it progresses. We are slowly getting music together, although we usually wait until we get home from a tour to really get serious about writing, because there are so many other things to do while you are on tour. Obviously if you get an idea in sound check or something, or on the bus, we will record it and remember it,” he said.
“That actually happened with the song This Ocean from the last album. We wrote that in Bratislava, Slovakia in a sound check. Tom had this cool part and it was like, wow where did that come from. We got him to play it again and recorded it right then. And then when we got home, we made a song out of it.”
After their run through North America, Evergrey is heading for shows in South America in November, including dates in Brazil, Peru, Chile and Columbia, and then it’s back home to Sweden to begin work on a follow-up to The Atlantic.
For more information, visit http://evergrey.net, or https://www.facebook.com/Evergrey.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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‘EVERGREY’ are truly an exception modern yet very melodic metal band with a prog edge.I fist came upon them in 2003 and sadly over time forgot about the first video I saw ‘ A Touch Of Blessing’. I just found them again a few months ago and the last few weeks can’t stop playing that song and their ‘Atlantic’ album.
They are excellent musicians and their songs flow from one section to the next you must check this band out of course like so many other great bands they are from Sweden! I wish them much success!