HIM

Late last month, Ville Valo, frontman for Finland's biggest rock band HIM, found himself "slowly trying to get back to life, bit by bit," in the land down under. Following a thirty-hour flight and a couple restless nights in a hotel next to a construction site, Valo spoke via phone from Brisbane, Australia, not long before HIM took the stage at the internationally-known Soundwave Festival. Discussing HIM's widespread worldwide success – the band has the distinction of being the only Finnish band to have a gold record in the United States with their fifth release 2005's Dark Light – Recoil had an unexpectedly existential conversation with the more mellow than melancholic Valo. HIM's latest album, Screamworks: Love In Theory and Practice Chapters 1-13, comes after the more metal-ish gloom of their previous album, 2007's Venus Doom, and Valo's publicly known stint in rehab. Recording and performing completely sober, the disc can't exactly be called HIM's "happy" album since it still stays true to the band's sorrowful, self-described "love metal" sound, but in tone it comes the closest out of any of the band's seven releases. Intending on discussing the differences between Screamworks and HIM's previous efforts, the twenty-minute conversation instead ventured into how Valo doesn't want his songwriting to turn him into a hooker, how he dislikes the term rock star, and how Valentine's Day makes him sick.

Since you're getting ready to perform at the Soundwave Festival in Australia, and I'm here in the U.S., I wanted to start by how does it feel to have fans from so many different countries and cultures around the world connecting with your songs? Ville Valo: I don't know. That's a good question actually. I never really spent much time thinking about it in those terms. Music or literature or whatever it is, it's universal. I mean I bought Animalize by KISS the same day as everybody else in the world. [Laughs] I listened to everything at the same time everybody else [growing up] back in the '80s, so it is crazy how well it's travelled in our case. Like for example the first time we headed over to North America to tour [in 2004] we didn't even have a proper record deal over there and all the clubs were sold out. So the word of mouth, and the word of [pro skateboarder]Bam Margera [who championed the band in the U.S. for the last decade], and the word of our symbol the Heartagram, and the Internet gave us a really successful tour without us really doing anything about it.

When you're writing, how much do you try to blend your personal feelings or experience with universal themes? I think that with emotions, you can't customize your emotions, because at the end of the day when we're at the pearly gates with the band, collectively, carrying our cross which is the band HIM, in essence, and we're the ones to blame for all the stuff we've done in good and bad, I say that we need to be really proud and honest about putting the music first. If you start custom-making or trying to figure out what will translate very well, then all of a sudden you've crossed the line and become a hooker. That's how I think. I think emotions are universal. There are a gazillion people, or just a lot of people in the world, so there must be somebody out there who can relate to something. But that's not the point of me writing a song about a particular topic; I'm writing it to get it out of myself. Not necessarily for people to listen to, but for my own cathartic healing, kind of like sucking it out of me, so I can inspect it from the outside.

Why do you think music is a particularly good medium for you to do that, to be able to examine something like love which is so intangible? Music seemed like a good way for me because I didn't really have to go to school. [Laughs] Not to get super educated about it. I didn't grow up in a family that would have been particularly musical; no one played any instruments or anything like that, so I don't know where it came from originally, the excitement I had about music. I started playing music when I was around seven or eight years old and I've never really looked back. I think it's one of those things, one of those magical things where I didn't even have a choice. It just happened.

I wanted to turn to talking about your new album, Screamworks: Love In Theory and Practice Chapters 1-13. Was it your intention to release the album worldwide as close to Valentine's Day as possible for a particular effect? The funny thing was that we started working on the music about a year ago, and the first song we started working on the album was "Like St. Valentine," and that was a song I wrote because that was the time of Valentine's. We didn't have a clue with who we were going to be working on the album with as a producer or where we were going to record it or when it was going to be done; and then all of a sudden it seemed like we were going to get it done by Halloween 2009, so we thought let's get it out on Valentine's because that's an easy date to remember. And it does fit the vibe of the music, the love-metal vibe or whatever you want to call it. Then we realized that Valentine's Day was a Sunday and it would be impossible for us to release the album globally on Sunday, so we were discussing releasing it on Valentine's week and then it just happened. So it's one of those things where it might seem like it's very premeditated where we sat around a big table with a bunch of people taking notes of each and every little move that we make, but everything just fell into the right place. A lot of that's how everything works with this popular band. I'm not saying we'd be stupid and just go with the flow, but we try to go with the flow as much as possible without messing everything up.

On the song "Like St. Valentine" you have a lot of imagery that touches on embracing the fragility of love, which is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic. Do you feel like that emerged as a theme for the album in some ways? I don't think there were any or was any big theme [on the album] at least to me. "Like St. Valentine" and the opening track "In Venere Veritas" – that pompously titled thing – those were the first ones we worked on, and "Like St. Valentine" for me was just like... Valentine's Day was coming and it's never a big deal in Scandinavia and I was just pissed off. I was pissed off at the concept of [selling] love in that sweet kind of way, you know? I need drama. [Laughs] I'm that kind of a person. So it was all the yucky, giddy, cutesy-playing teenagers; they just made me feel really nauseous and I just wanted to take all the classically Valentine's influences out of that particular song and just have it be really over the top and have a bit of violence. We tried to make the violent Valentine's Day song possible, and I guess that we succeeded fairly OK.

That's one thing I don't think everyone gets about your lyrics, how you often have a very sly sense of humor. How important do you think it is to have a sense of humor if you're going to look deeply into a concept like love, particularly if you're going to examine your own experiences with it in song? Yeah, but I think that whatever you do in life in general, I think that humor is extremely important because I don't think that there's any topic in life that can not be laughed about, especially when it comes to the messes of the heart. People are so very complex, and they make things so complicated by themselves because they want to, and they create these dream castles they want to build and they have hopes and senses of affection that are so wild, it's highly entertaining, funny, and humorous. I think life in itself is a big joke. [Laughs] I'm trying to figure out the punch line here. But, in essence, there're always two sides to the same coin. Always. And you can always laugh about things, and I think that's very essential in music as well. It's very similar to say like, how I love Neil Young, and he wrote a song called "Long May You Run." And "Long May You Run" is a beautiful, beautiful song, and it's about his car. The car that they drove from Canada to California when he moved to the States and tried to make a living off of being a musician. It's very, very sentimental. Very, very melancholy beautiful, beautiful love song. But it's about a fucking car. [Laughs] So I think that there's always two sides to anything, and that's fairly important to realize in whatever you do, and I think good artists have both of those sides.

As an artist then, do you feel like you identify more with the romantic poets than you do with say rock stars? I never really thought... I think that Americans use the term rock star in a different way. Because to me what it means is that you're allowed to behave like a moron and go out and behave outside of society's rules and you're expected to behave really badly. I don't think I ever wanted to aspire, when I was younger, I don't think I wanted to become a person like that. I obviously love rock 'n' roll mythology, the Jim Morrison side, the Iggy Pop, all those characters, and they have a lot of that French poetic debauched kind of [19th Century French poet Charles] Baudelaire bites in them. But when you say rock star, I think of Tommy Lee or I think of Crazy Town, and that's something I just want to make sure I'm not anything like. What I wanted to do when I was younger was to make myself happy, and I did it by playing music, and we still do with the rest of the guys, we still love playing music, so that's pretty random and that's pretty incredible and I don't think that there's a term for it. I have musician in my tax papers, so I guess that's my job. Or entertainer, I can't remember which one it is, I keep on changing it.

I've got to ask about the new album title since it is titled as "Chapters 1-13." Do you already have additional volumes of Screamworks in mind? Did you intentionally want to leave it open ended? It's called that because we had a digi-pack version of the album [available] with the [additional bonus disc] Baudelaire In Braille, the acoustic interpretation of the album, so I guess you could say that that's 'Chapters 1-26,' in essence, if you'd want to, you don't have to. Maybe we'll keep on expanding it. I don't know. It would be great to do some remix stuff, because we've never really done that stuff a lot, so that might interesting to see, because there are so many '80s vibes on the album, that it might work really, really well, as some dance-able, really cheesy, John Carpenter type of mid-'80s horror movie-influenced dance music. Like White Zombie and all those bands did. It would be really interesting to try stuff like that out within the realm of Screamworks, so that might be a third part in Screamworks, with Love In Theory and Practice being number one, and Baudelaire in Braille being number two, and then we'll have to see. We'd have to figure out a title. There are so many different possibilities. I'm hoping that those continue to just multiply exponentially. I think that makes whatever we do fairly intriguing because we don't ever know what's around the next corner and when you're working a new song you never know how far three and a half minutes of silly rock music can take you. Or in this case, from Helsinki to Brisbane, which is pretty spectacular, I think.

HIM's headlining U.S. tour will come to the Orbit Room April 6. Screamworks: Love In Theory and Practice Chapters 1-13 is in stores and online now. For more, click over to heartagram.com.