interview with...

guitar player of The Flower Kings and now playing on Anderson / Stolt)

​“Working with Jon Anderson is both interesting and an honor”
When titans meet, you either get a clash or you get something special and the latter happened between Jon Anderson and Roine Stolt resulting in an awesome album ‘Invention of Knowledge’. I was lucky to talk to one of them.

Danny: “Hello Roine, you must be proud of this one!”

Roine: “Oh yeah, off course. Usually when you done something for which you worked really hard for a long time, like a Flower Kings album, I’m usually a bit confused but also happy and proud.  But this one is a little bit special because it’s a special connection. When I first started to listen to progressive rock back in the day, Procol Harum was my big band, that I really loved and King Crimson, but quite fast I started to like Yes a bit more and then Genesis.  Those were the two big bands for me for progressive rock. So now working with Jon Anderson is both interesting and an honor.”

Danny: “And having worked with Steve Hackett you played with someone from both the bands.”

​Roine: “They are also some of the nicest people within progressive rock.”

Danny: “So there was no barrier between you and Jon? I mean age or music or …”

Roine: “Age, well, he’s about ten years older than me, but he’s young at heart and he has a young mind and is always eager to learn something and to work a bit more. In the end when we were finishing the album and starting to get into mix mode, he said that we climbed a mountain, that’s a very typical Jon thing to say. And sometimes it felt like we were climbing and climbing and climbing the mountain. There was always something new that we needed to fix to get better and to rewrite. He was rewriting lyrics and I was rewriting music. Yeah, we kinda made a journey together. It’s a bizar situation having like 5, 7 or 10 emails a day from the guy who was the lead singer in Yes.” 
Danny: “So all the writing was done over the Internet?”

Roine: “Yes, it’s a new way of writing music. Off course in a perfect world, maybe, we would be in a room in the studio in Stockholm or in Los Angeles . But it would have cost us lots and lots of money and we would have spent so much time, so many hundreds and hundreds of hours. We could never redefine a record label that would finance such a project.  So sending files and working on them for a couple of hours and then sending them to Jon and he would wake up in Los Angeles and listen to them and send his ideas, saying what he liked and what he didn’t like. It was working fine. Every now and then we were on the phone, but mostly we worked through the internet.
Jon’s very, very to the point about the songs and what he heard and wanted. Some people think that Jon Anderson is somewhere out there in outer space, because you can get that impression. To me he’s one of the most down-to-earth and to the point people I’ve been working with in the music business. He knows exactly what he wants, he hears everything. He can send me an email saying: “Hey, at 11:32 into this song, there’s this percussion thing and I think we can try that with drums or we can try with some strings here. And at 15:23 I think the background choir needs some more voices or the bass line has to be changed a bit.” So he’s very, very to the point. So he’s not like, I don’t know, I don’t like that bit. Because if someone says something along those lines, you have to be coming up with the ideas yourself and be creative and ask yourself did he mean that or something else. It creates some sort of insecurity. And working with Jon is very correct and very to the point on the exact minute and second. And we also had conversations about it. So it worked very good over the internet. It’s a very cost-effective way of working.”

Danny: “And you came together in the end?”

Roine: “No. It would have been nice to be in the room when he was tracking his vocals. We could had a dialogue about it. Or if I was tracking some guitars and he could give his ideas about it.
We finished the backing tracks in a studio in Sweden, in which I’m today also, recording another album. I was here together with Felix Lehrman, Jonas Reingold and Tom Brislin. And we were recording the backing tracks here.  And then I was preparing the files for Jon and send them to him. Then he was doing the vocals in California and then he was sending them back to me to mix and to blend.”
Danny: “Talking about your choice of musicians, you have Jonas playing bass and also your brother Michael?”

Roine: “Well, we had a couple of songs and I found one song I thought, this is something that suits Michael. He’s been a bass player for a long time and now he sings and he plays guitar. We were just talking about it and I said: “I have this perfect song for you.” He’s playing on ‘Everybody Heals’. 
And Jonas plays on a lot of albums with me during the last ten years. He played some stuff here in the studio and then we were working on the vocals and the songs were changing. In the end I played some bass too.  Jonas said: “You can do that. You don’t need to send it to me. You know exactly what you want.” I’ve been playing bass since I was a kid. And I played bass with Steve Hackett. It’s not my main instrument any more, I switched to guitar, so there are actually three bass players on the album. 
There’s only one drummer and we have lots of singers.  There’s Daniel Gildenlöw (Pain Of Salvation), Nad Sylvan (Agents of Mercy, Steve Hackett, solo) and the girls, so it’s like a big choir, sometimes.”

Danny: “Where would you put the album in the career of Yes?” 

Roine: “Some people say ‘Magnification’ because of the orchestration.“

Danny: “And who’s Lalle Larson?”

Roine: “Well he’s the keyboard player of Karmakanic and he played with Agents of Mercy.  I feel it’s a good thing to not work with the same musicians on every song. Lalle brough In his ideas and Tom brought his, concerning keyboards. And even Jon and I play some keyboards. There’s no prestige. We’re just guys playing whatever we can add. We just throw ideas into the pool and see what comes up in the end. And we inspired each other. We were tossing ideas back and forth. When we started with the album, we didn’t know where we were going. I just kept working and whatever I came up with and Jon said YEAH? I used it. You could come up with any idea, you know, it was fun! I think that’s the spirit of progressive rock. If you like to put in some classical music or some folk music or some electronics or a drop of heavy metal, everything works.”

​Danny: “Your guitar solos sounds different, probably inspired by Jon?”
​Roine: ”Well, the thing is, I don’t think much when I start playing because I think most of these guitar solos were just something that I put down very spontaneous, thinking that, okay, once we have more instruments and vocals on, I will do my proper solo. But it never came to that point because I started liking the solos and Jon did too. So what’s the point of playing them all over?”

Danny: “Can you tell me something about the concept?”

Roine: “The lyrics are written by Jon and all the vocal melodies are Jon’s, so he’s been driving that part of the album. When Jon says ‘Invention of Knowledge’, it’s about basically we were living in a cave, you know. Then we started realizing what the planet we’re living on, can bring and what the sky can bring, what the spirit can bring. And by learning language and by learning to coöperate with other human beings, with the animals and later with technology. Also by travelling the world and going to different continents, like Columbus. It’s always in human nature to take one step further. We’re constantly evolving. That’s what I’m thinking, but Jon and I haven’t talked about it in depth. I’m guessing that’s what he wanted to say on this album. I just went along with it. He had an idea and I said okay. It’s your call.”

Danny: “The artwork is done by Silas Toball?”

Roine: “We’ve been working with Silas for 2 Flower Kings albums and Agents of Mercy albums. So it’s just something that came up. We were talking with the record label and Jon about the artwork and I was instantly thinking, okay, I know the guy. So I contacted him and he’s a big Yes fan. So I told him I had something for him, but he couldn’t tell anyone. So he kept silence for almost a year.” 

Danny: “Will there be more albums with Jon?”
Roine: “We do have a recording contract, that says we can do, but don’t have to do, another album. Obviously, everything worked out great. So I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t. It’s just a question of time. Jon will go on tour with Rick Wakeman and Trevor Rabin in the beginning of next year. We also have been talking of playing this live and see where we go with that. Jon has been saying a couple of times, that we need to do this live. People would love to have this on stage. But there’s nothing set in stone, of course. If we are still healthy and there is time, I’m sure we gonna do it.”

Danny: “You said you were in the studio, earlier in the interview. What are you recording now?”

Roine: “I’m in the studio now with my old friends from Kaipa. We were playing in the seventies. We got together just recently, about one and a half year ago, and we have written some new music. And now, we’re recording an album. It’s going really well. It’s the band from the seventies, with the drummer, the bass player, the keyboard player and myself. And the singer of course. So we are working on music that takes off where we left. It’s very organic. We’re using lots of Hammond organ and electric pianos and mellotrons and moogs and stuff like that.”

Danny: “Okay, good luck with the album and with Kaipa. Thanks for your time.”

‘Invention of Knowledge’ is released on 24/06/2016. - read our review here...

Danny Focke   - with special thanks to Cathy Miller © / Meg Loyal © / Lillian Forsberg © / Johnny Taxen © for their beautiful pictures.