“Even though ‘Prequelle’ is a record about death, essentially, it’s a record about survival, and I think that that is something that’s gone through all the records. Even back to ‘Opus Eponymous,’ there was a double meaning to things that doesn’t necessarily have to do with evil sermons out of some old grimoire somewhere how to summon the devil.”
“When you have a fruitful relationship with someone, and you’ve both chosen to work together, then it can spawn really good things.”
“As a young teen, Satan and the idea of some sort of world that you could be in touch with that could empower you was very much the symbol for freedom.”
“Technically, a Ghost song could just be piano and vocals, but it could also be full, pounding, heavy-thrashing hard rock.”
“There are people who just love to destroy other people. It saddens me to admit that, I think, at whatever state of human civilisation we arrive at, the will to destroy other people is something that is innate in some people.”
“My ability maps my own writing. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time biting licks from the really quick masters. That’s why I’m not very good at that sort of super-fast, shreddy sweeping. So I’ve never considered myself a traditionally good, fast-playing guitarist.”
“I’m an okay drummer, I’m an okay bass player, I’m an okay keyboardist, and I’m a quite good guitar player.”
“I prefer catchy, passionate, temperamental music. And as an upside of that, Ghost’s repertoire has, over the years, been piqued by a few, sort of, hits.”
“I’m a band dictator.”
“I sort of found King Diamond in second grade, but I didn’t become a devoted Satanist until a few years later, but that was very much part of my adolescence as well.”
“If you’d asked me when I was six, 16, and 26, I wanted nothing more than to be a big, recognized rock star. Especially when I was six and 16, because I thought that if I was a known guitar player in a known band, only cute girls would talk to me.”
“If you’ve followed us from when we started playing live in October 2010, you will notice that there has been numerous changes over the years.”
“It is difficult to be that band that doesn’t do things the way other bands do it. It’s a blessing and a curse.”
“I was 29 when we sort of broke through with Ghost.”
“Let’s just say that I’ve spent a lot of time being not very successful.”
“When you’re not successful as a musician, you are oftentimes unemployed.”
“I’ve had a very, very forgiving and a very, very supportive mother who never really gave me a hard time for going in and out of slackerdom.”
“By sheer luck, we did our first tour of America as a headlining act.”
“I grew up in Sweden. It’s a profoundly Americanized country. We have a strong tradition of Americana and always had non-dubbed American television, and embracing American culture a lot, so I always knew that I wanted to go to America.”
“I come from a home that had a lot of music played in general.”
“I’m a big fan of a lot of prog music. As a record collector as well, I won’t throw anybody or any band under the bus, but a lot of the records are fun to collect, are not necessarily very good. There are a lot of prog bands out there that it’s a really cool record, but it’s, like, not really there.”
“I’ve always been very – for lack of a better phrase – hit-seeking, hit-driven.”
“Even when I wrote death metal songs for a death metal record, I was always trying to do my best to make it as catchy as possible because that’s how I like music.”
“You want to be as successful as possible. You wanna have the strongest legs to stand on as possible for every album that you’re doing.”
“I’ve been in lots of situations in my life where I’ve managed to turn pain into growing pains.”
“Have I ever had dance lessons? I’m mobile, but not nearly as much as our promotional videos lead people to believe.”
“So many people have opinions based not on fact but spite.”
“If you’re going to a show that we’re providing support for, or a large festival, you’re obviously going to see a condensed version. We have to shave off some fat from the show, so we have to stick to the so-called ‘bangers.’”
“We’ve gone from venues that hold 500 up to 3,000 on our own, so I guess we’re not entirely unknown. But there is a difference between a few thousand people and 20,000.”
“My brother gave me my first records when I was about 3 or 4 years old, because he bought a lot of records. And he was very nice because he gave me the records he thought I’d like more.”
“My first records were KISS’s ‘Love Gun,’ Twisted Sister’s ‘Stay Hungry,’ and Motley Crue’s ‘Shout at the Devil.’ That had immense influence on me.”
“My first teacher… was extremely strict, mean, and deeply religious.”
“The reason for a lot of bands not making it is because they don’t really understand that your job is sort of divided into two different things. It’s one thing creating it… It’s like being an architect but also a construction worker.”
“’Dance Macabre’ feels like one of those songs that you want to play forever.”
“Sometimes I just wish I played in a band like Foo Fighters.”
“In an alternative life, I would have loved to work in film – I love film.”
“I grew up watching a lot of film.”
“I think very cinematically.”
“My name is Tobias Forge and I’m the man behind the mask in Ghost.”
“A band which plays songs such as ‘Death Knell’ or ‘Prime Mover’ can’t just stand on the stage with a shirt and jeans-jacket. It must be more awesome than that.”
“I constantly work with material that could be two years old, five years old, ten years old, as well as new things.”
“I usually write a lot. I don’t make an album and don’t write for two years and then end up with a blank paper starting over.”
“Public trials are very unsupervised and extremely swift and speak to the most primordial parts of us.”
“The original idea of being anonymous – it was a great, naive idea on paper in 2008, not knowing to what degree we’d be touring or to what extent this was going to be a professional operation. That regimen is very hard to live by. What I hadn’t foreseen was the fans and their willingness to embrace that and play along.”
“As long as I don’t go onstage completely normal and then jump into character onstage, I assume that most fans would be able to accept me as the creator. I can comment on the work the same way a director would on his movie.”
“There are many artists that I know exactly where they are born and what their names are and where they live, which are still very, sort of, hidden. Even Nick Cave, who has a film about himself nowadays, is still someone who I would claim to be utterly enigmatic.”
“Even if people would know who we are, or you could click on a Wikipedia page saying my date of birth, it does not necessarily mean that I have to go out on social media and tell you where I’m eating.”
“I’ve liked Kiss from when I was three years old. I’ve seen them, the real deal, with all the original members when they came back in ’96 and all that, and that’s fine.”
“Ghost has always been about make-believe.”
“Once you get people’s attention, you have a greater responsibility to tell them something of value.”
“If you ever want to play bigger places, you need to have records that sound like you’re playing in big places.”
“My mom is very liberal. She has never been religious… spiritual but not religious.”
“When I was 8 years old, I was already very interested in music.”
“Even in my hometown of Linkoping where I grew up… the church we had was very lavish – very boasty. So it ticked most of the boxes of big, imposing Christianity. And I love being there if I’m in town… because it’s just this haunting place.”
“Not only did we read a lot at home, we also watched a lot of films. So I had already seen a lot of films that were about the crucifixion and the temptation of Christ, like Bible history and the Ten Commandments – stuff like that.”
“As long as I’ve been doing Ghost, at least, I’ve been very keen on maintaining not necessarily an anonymity but a low profile. But on the other hand, I spent 25 years not doing Ghost, where, 20 of those years, I wanted to be nothing but a famous rock musician.”
“Even though I like speaking freely, I don’t really have a desire anymore to profile myself as the individual wanting to be recognized.”
“I enjoy the idea of being able to sort of flip-flop between being recognized and not being recognized.”
“At the end of the day, one of the biggest misconceptions of Ghost is that it’s just about the devil. It’s always been about mankind and living.”
“More than often, what you see, or what we’ve been able to recreate, has usually been a tampered-with version of what I have in my head, because the original idea has always been bigger. Every time I am in the mode of creating a show, there’s always some level of gravity that comes in play, either of a monetary sort, or there’s a space issue.”
“For us, if you’re a rock band, there’s no way around it. You have to tour. You have to tour a whole lot.”
“I think that it’s crucial. I think that playing live, if you want to be an artist – that’s what artists do.”
“With Ghost, I never really foresaw that it was going to take off the way it did.”
“I like the fact that my work in Ghost is famous, and people know it, and we have our crowd. But I am not as antsy about getting recognized on the street as I might have once been.”
“I like horror movies that have a degree of coziness to them.”
“I never, ever, wanna see ‘The Conjuring’ again – ever. I don’t wanna see ‘Annabelle’ again.”
“I’m a big fan of the first one, but one of the first horror films I ever saw on my own was ‘Halloween II.’ That was my first real experience of Halloween as a concept because in Sweden in the Eighties, we didn’t celebrate Halloween.”
“I think you need to see parts one, two, and three of ‘The Omen.’ And then just skip the ending of number three – it’s so bad it makes me want to put my foot through the TV.”
“I wasn’t letting people in with the music writing process, and for a long time, I thought I was hard to work with.”
“It’s always ideal if the production that you’re taking out on tour is the one that you spent two weeks rehearsing with, and you just do the same show thirty nights in a row.”
“Artistically, or just performance-wise, I love playing arenas. I think that is my favorite form, because it’s big enough to feel like a big, grand show.”
“I do believe in the idea of a historic person named Jesus that was a kind of chill dude who was just telling people to chill and be nice to each other. And he got penalized for that.”
“I definitely believe that tormenting other people because of the Bible and for that to be – for lack of a better word, Gospel… I think that is not very nice.”
“In grade one and two, I was definitely into heavy metal and Satanic rock music, bands that had attributes that were quote-unquote ‘Satanic,’ even things like the Rolling Stones with ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’ and ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ but also like Motley Crue and Kiss and Alice Cooper.”
“The problem with religious doctrine, as with politics, because of its ability to give people authority, it has a tendency to attract people that want authority for all the wrong reasons, and that is what it has done across all time.”
“The belief in something bigger and supernatural is not the same thing as linear religion.”
“I’m a big fan of ’80s music, for lack of a better word.”
“I always layer my vocals a lot. I sing a minimum of three layers of the same line every time, and then it’s always one or two or sometimes even more harmonies.”
“I was told before that one of the hardest jumps to do, painlessly, is the one from playing clubs into playing arenas. I am completely aware of that now.”
“I love playing arenas; it’s the best thing.”
“From my point of view, a lot of the things that we’ve done over our entire career have always been a big failure because it was never the way that I planned it. But then there’s always upsides with it that turn out to be better or greater than the original plan.”
“I am an old-school guitar player. I’m not an ’80s-’90s sort of shredder who plays a million notes a minute. I am way more ’60s-’70s kind of style, and I write very ’60s-’70s.”
“If you come in like a typical modern drummer who is used to playing only with tricks and double kick and, like, big, big, big, fast rolls, but you can’t play a swinging shuffle, then you can’t play in Ghost whatsoever.”
“You need to have spent your time from playing Top 40 pop rock in order to know how to play a song like ‘Ritual,’ a song like ‘Absolution’ or ‘Idolatrine.’ You need to know your classic drumming and your classic guitar.”
“I always hate starting tours, especially when it coincides with an album coming out.”
“If we see someone, an artist who just does magnificent art, and especially if they’re already doing Ghost-related art, we just reach out and start collaborating. But when it comes to the record sleeves and the tour posters, I’m usually quite particular.”
“Since I remember still very clearly what it was like not being popular or in a successful band, I know that things go up and down, and you cannot expect this to be on the same trajectory forever. It won’t be. Because even if you get to be the biggest band in the world, it’s gonna change.”
“Even the biggest bands – and I hate to break the magic – but even the band that sold out 90,000 tickets in your football stadium, they might come back two years later and do an arena. It still feels huge, but there’s a difference – there’s a big difference. And there’s a big difference playing a 30,000-seat stadium and a 90,000.”
“I would like to say, and I think I am truthful, and I think I am honest when I say that I love doing Ghost. And if I didn’t feel as passionate as I am and have been, about it, wanting to focus, basically, all my time on it, I don’t wanna do it.”
“I am not a big artist myself. I am, I guess, a somewhat successful songwriter now, but I think that my value is Ghost and my writing via Ghost.”
“I love pinball.”
“You don’t accidentally turn into a big band. Not even Nirvana accidentally turned into a big band. They toured – they wanted to become a big band. They didn’t necessarily want to become that big of a band, but they still wanted to make a really good record and wanted to come out and tour.”
“Most bands that don’t want to become big at all, they don’t play. If you don’t want to be known, if you don’t want to make it, don’t play. That’s the easiest way not to do it.”
“I have a fascination for well-produced ’70s and ’80s rock with a lot of harmonies. AOR bands like Journey, Jefferson Starship, Toto, Kansas, Boston.”
“It would have been easy to try to make ‘Opus Eponymous II’ and just stick with a routine. But it just felt like, if this is going to go anywhere, we need to take big steps every time.”
“I don’t want to do Ghost as a normal, unmasked band standing around in, like, denim jackets. That was never the plan, regardless of whether people knew who I was or what size shoe I wear.”
“The music comes first. Final lyrics are usually written very close to recording the vocals.”
“Even when I was a kid, I always sort of identified myself with Keith Richards and Slash more than the singers of the bands.”
“I grew up in a very music-loving home with a lot of records, a lot of TV, a lot of radio, a lot of video – VHS cinema, basically.”
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