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Hi Erik, welcome to VENTS! How have you been?
Thanks for the warm greeting! I’m currently typing this after getting back from a 9 day tour. Overall is a good tour but I got really sick during the trip and almost had to cancel the rest of it!
Your upcoming LP, The Eternal Conflict, follows the Seasons of the Wind I, II, and III EPs. What did making that series teach you, and how does this new album represent the next stage of your creative development?
When I wrote the Seasons of the Wind EPs, I didn’t have a full group of guys. I hired my friend Chris Gohde to do the studio drums and then knew I’d need to find the rest of the people from there. I had some initial ideas of how I wanted the songs to sound so I figured if I played the parts it would give someone coming in after an idea of what I was going for. Getting Carl and Kip in on bass and drums helped make the writing sessions for The Eternal Conflict more of a band dynamic so the songwriting got to take different twists and turns. I’ve also been constantly evaluating my singing and style to try and figure out how to integrate them better into the songwriting. Overall we took the idea that we wanted to keep it melodic but heavy sounding as well, that’s probably kind of a theme for a us that’s developing as we play together.
The title The Eternal Conflict immediately suggests themes of struggle, contradiction, or inner tension. What does that phrase mean to you, and how does it connect to the album’s music or lyrics?
The Eternal Conflict is the idea that all things ebb and flow, up and down, good and bad. It’s kind of a word play on the ying and yang symbol. Too often we try to get to and stay in a more comfortable state but those don’t last forever so life is always shifting like the sands on the beach. It’s much easier to learn to ride the waves of the chaoticness of it all.
Your sound brings together influences as varied as Thin Lizzy, Black Sabbath, Soundgarden, Tom Petty, and The Beatles. How do you bring those different musical worlds together while maintaining a sound that feels distinctly your own?
You know this might be one of the cases where you just keep adding ingredients together to make a stew that works for you, haha! I love a lot of different guitar orientated music so I try to incorporate all the parts that resonate with me. All the mentioned bands were such great songwriters so I’ll hear little things here and there that probably get just jammed into my brain somewhere and will get refiltered out down the road. At the end of the day I’m looking to make songs that are heavy, melodic and have catchy hooks.
You grew up surrounded by music, with a father who played guitar and pedal steel. What are some of the earliest musical memories that shaped your desire not just to listen to music, but to create and perform it yourself?
I remember being a kid and asking my dad to play the Batman theme on guitar and thinking that was the coolest thing! My mom would crank up the stereo and blast rock while we had the windows and doors open while she gardened so that huge rock sound just got engrained in me. I really took guitar playing more serious though when 6th grade hit and I discovered bands like Nirvana, Green Day and Soundgarden. I thought it was so cool to play along to some of the songs with Christmas lights on in my room like I was playing a show!
Your journey has included work with Fallen Angels and Skelator, as well as various other projects. How have those experiences in different corners of rock and metal influenced the artist you are today?
Playing metal music like those two bands puts you in a different mindset, I really wanted to just play fast aggressive guitar and songs. But there was always a part of me that wanted to play more jangly guitar or lower tunings so some of that got incorporated into Fallen Angels in the later albums. The best experience out of doing a band like for a while was all the live stage time we did, so you developed a better sense of what to do on stage and how to different live rigs depending on the sound you were chasing so in some sense all that experience was more from the practical side.
Carl Larsson has been your longtime bandmate since 2002, while Robbie Houston has contributed to engineering and production across your work. How does that history and familiarity affect the creative process, and what do those collaborators bring out in your songwriting?
It’s always interesting to watch people grow as you get to work with them, when Carl and I first played together we were just in our late teens/early 20s so we were learning the craft of writing a metal song, playing live etc.. So you build a bond and sense of trust of what the other person can bring to the table for things in the creative realms. Carl has really blossomed as a bass guitar and has been developing lots of cool bass counter melodies against my guitar progressions that make it really pop versus just following my lead. With Robbie I’ve watched him continue to improve on the production side as he got more and more experience in studios. I knew with The Eternal Conflict I wanted a certain era of sound so we discussed what that would look like and how to best go about getting there while at the same time just doing our own thing.
Robbie Houston is involved both as a guitarist and someone who has helped engineer and produce your music. How does having musicians involved behind the console influence the way you approach arrangements, tones, and recording decisions?
Having a musician in that role can help greatly with offering ideas to how a part should go or ideas to try. All of the clean guitar for the album was done on the spot in the studio and we kind of collaborated on how things should go or what sounded best. Same with the vocals, I only had the initial melodies for the lines but I knew I wanted to do harmonies and background vocals so we just created everything on the spot in the studio, trying each other’s ideas.
Kip Rondorf’s drumming draws inspiration from John Bonham and a strong sense of groove. How important was it for you to find a drummer who could provide not only power, but also the rhythmic feel needed to support the album’s dynamic songs?
You know a lot of people don’t really give any credit to drummers for how the song’s sound and feel. Sure they’re hearing a beat being played when listening to a song but it’s quite possible that the groove the drummer provided changed the initial feeling of the song. Kip did that with quite a few of the tunes and rather than fight it, I just kind of let the idea be explored and to see if it would go in a cooler direction than what I initially thought. It’s hard to describe but you know if like a drummer’s playing if you can lock into their groove and it isn’t hard to play to and just feels right, that’s what Kips playing does for me.
You’ve been described as someone who understands rock’s past while pushing it into the present. When you’re writing, how do you decide which classic-rock traditions to embrace and which ones to challenge or reshape?
A lot of it just comes down to the moment, at least 95% of the songs I come up with just from jamming on my own. I’ll just pick up the guitar when I’m in the mood to play and see if anything worthwhile comes out, anything that does I’ll record to my phone and work on developing later. When I have a batch of songs worthy of further development I’ll start to try and flush them out. Once I have a basic structure I’ll present them to the band and we’ll see where they go as we play them together. It’s during this process that a song might get new ideas and things added to it from the view points of the other guys. Creating a group of songs for an album I think requires a little bit of a view point where you step back and look at them as a whole and see what sounds were created and how each individual songs mixes with the collective.
With The Eternal Conflict bringing together this lineup of seasoned musicians, what do you hope listeners discover about Erik Hansen through the album, and where would you like this new chapter to take you next?
I hope listeners discover that the three of us can carve out songs that are catchy but interesting at the same time, hopefully they will listen with intent and hear the various layering and subtleties we added to the tunes. I’d like the next chapter to provide us the opportunity for bigger and better shows. I’d also like to continue to leap frog from the sound we created on The Eternal Conflict and craft songs more catchy and polished while still retaining that hard rock edge.
