ELIZE RYD On AMARANTHE's Multiple Vocalists: 'It's Not Like We're Competing With Each Other'

Prior to AMARANTHE‘s June 15 performance at the Greenfield Festival in Interlaken, Switzerland, vocalist Elize Ryd and guitarist Olof Mörck spoke with Plekvetica. The full conversation can be streamed below. A few excerpts follow (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On touring:

Olof: “I think a lot of musicians say, ‘I’ve traveled the world, like, 20 times, but I’ve never seen absolutely anything.’ I think it’s easy to just get stuck with the idea that you can’t see anything. I know that Elize has to be a little bit careful because [of] her voice — she doesn’t want to get sick and things like that — [but] for me, I don’t really have the same kind of worry, so if we come to a city like Leipzig [in Germany], for example, then I will go to the Thomaskirche [a famous church where composer Johann Sebastian Bach was buried] and see the Bach museum, or if we come to here for example, I try to take a walk around. Today, I didn’t get the opportunity so far, but I think it’s important to see the places that you go in the sense that you get a little bit of a feeling that you’re actually coming to different places instead of just seeing the inside of backstages.”

Elize: “It’s just like some kind of a spell I had on me — every time I go out and have fun, I get sick. I joined Olof, I think, one time on the last tour — ‘Let’s go for dinner in the city and see [sights]’ — and then after that, I got sick. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s mental, and I need to work with that, because I agree with Olof — it’s very important to see the world if you have the opportunity to do that. Also, the older I get, the less nervous I get for the show. Maybe someday I [can] find peace of mind and I can change a little bit my routines and wake up early and go and see stuff.”

On how the group’s three singers stay “happy” when determining who sings what:

Elize: “[Moans]… We are not actually happy, usually. I don’t know what to say…”

Olof: “I think for us, it’s kind of [an] organic thing to find the right voices for the right person, especially [on] the ‘Helix’ album. Elize wrote almost all of the vocal lines and in some cases, it wasn’t really decided, ‘Is this going to be Nils [Molin] or Elize?,’ but then when you’re in the studio, you have a feeling of where it should go. I think it’s only a couple of times where it’s like, ‘Oh, who should sing this?'”

Elize: “Usually, after an album is released, like in this case, I could read a few comments that [say], ‘Nils didn’t get as much vocal melodies as Elize.’ I was like, ‘Oh, shit. Was I selfish?’ I can actually change that for the next album. It’s very easy — it’s just for me to be like, ‘It’s cool. I sing the pre-choruses and a little bit on the chorus, and that’s fine.’ It’s not like we’re competing with each other. It’s just, we write the songs and then we record them, and then of course usually afterwards, you think, ‘Oh, maybe we could have done it like this.’ I think for each album, we kind of grow into it. I would love to give Nils more vocal melodies to sing. I don’t have a problem with that. I think we will do so, and that’s how it goes — after one album is released, you start to think about the next and how you can even out the balances.”

On the band’s songwriting process:

Olof: “The foundation is always me and Elize sitting down with a keyboard, finding the right chord progression [and a] really catchy vocal line. From there, it’s almost easy to write a good song. When you sit down by yourself and you just sit and write guitar riffs, obviously you can create a great song like that, but I think it’s doing it a little bit in the wrong order of things. I think our process has remained pretty much the same since the first album — we sit down in my place, no fancy studio or anything like that, and we just work on it like friends instead of trying to take it super seriously.”

Elize: “That’s one thing we really try to keep — that feeling we had when we wrote the first album… We pick up emotions and things that affect us, and that’s what we base our songwriting on, always.”

On practicing:

Olof: “I actually still play a lot of guitar, especially recently, in the last year or something. I just feel a little bit more inspired these days. Building the band was a lot of work. A lot of things needed to fall into place that [were] not necessarily music-related, let’s say. But now that the organization is fantastically built, with our management and with the booking situation and with our crew and everything, it’s a lot more easy to now focus on the music, which made me fall in love with the guitar a little bit all over again.”

On the group’s future plans:

Olof: “We are going to start to work on a new album before very long. We feel super pumped for that.”

AMARANTHE‘s latest album, “Helix”, was released in October through Spinefarm Records. The disc was recorded at Hansen Studios in Ribe, Denmark with Jacob Hansen (VOLBEAT, EPICA, DELAIN). The follow-up to 2016’s “Maximalism” marks the band’s first release with Molin, who officially joined AMARANTHE in July 2017 as the replacement for Jake E.