Interview with Johan Hegg of Amon Amarth, Part Seven

Johan Hegg in Chicago (April 19, 2010)

KS - My favorite Amon Amarth song is “Hermod’s Ride to Hel - Lokes Treachery, Part1.” Is there a “Part 2” coming? Because I’m waiting - the song came out two albums ago.

JH - Ha! Yeah, well...we’ll see about that.

Olavi Mikkonen in Chicago (April 19, 2010)

KS - I was talking to Uli Fisseler, your tour manager, and he said that you’ll be working on a new album after the tour.

JH - We’re going to start working on a new album. Let’s put it this way. We want to do “Part 2,” and we were actually trying to make it happen for this album. But we’re not going to do a “Part 2” just to make it. It has to be a great song.

Johan Söderberg in Chicago (April 19, 2010)

KS - Do you have a concept for the new album already? Have you started working on it?

JH - I think that there are some ideas, like basic ideas, really. A riff here, a riff there.

For me, I have some ideas of what I want to use as topics for new lyrics. I just started writing. Even though it’s an idea that I have, I might not end up using it.

That’s actually what happened with “Hermod’s, Part 2.” I had an idea that I wasn’t happy with, and it didn’t really work out with any of the other songs on the album, so it didn’t end up happening.

Ted Lundström in Chicago (April 19, 2010)

KS - You said that the lyrics are secondary to the music. Do you wait until the songs are finished before writing lyrics? How do you relate your lyrics to the music?

JH - I’ll write some stuff, and I’ll have some ideas and then go, “Alright, this idea works perfectly with this.” Sometimes, you maybe have to rearrange the idea or work around it a bit to make it work. Usually, I try to fit the ideas together.

Johan Söderberg, Ted Lundström, Olavi Mikkonen, and Johan Hegg (April 19, 2010)

A lot of the times, I will sit in the rehearsal room when the guys are working on something, and I will just doodle something on the paper and write something. Then, all of a sudden, there’s a line, and you’re like, “Hmm.” Then, you start writing something, and then you come up with a cool idea.

Sometimes, I’ll record the songs, and I’ll sit home and listen to it, and try to figure and to get into a mood, what it could be about. There’s a lot of different ways to work it out.