Interview – Daniel Gildenlöw of Pain of Salvation

Editors Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  Full unedited audio available below.

Damnation Magazine: I kind of want to just jump into the overall theme of the upcoming album, Panther. It does seem like there’s kind of a recurring idea regarding social roles and not fitting into them. Would you say there is an overall theme? And if so, could you give us a little bit of insight to that?

Daniel: Yeah, it originates actually from the last album, there is a song called “Full Throttle Tribe”, which is basically a recollection of my own life with the pros and cons of having felt that I’m constantly adjusting and then trying to calibrate my interface towards this species that I am a representative of, and try to calculate the offset somehow from a social point of view. I guess a lot of people can relate to that, going to school and just feeling intuitively that you’re just not as the others. On different levels of course, but there is so many different concepts of normality that are around us as we grow up. Some are very obvious and some are more subconscious or a part of a culture.

Whatever it is, I think that we all recognize that feeling of trying to fit the bill of normality and also not wanting to… I’ve come to a point in life when it’s very obvious that if I had been growing up today, if I had been attending school today, starting school today, a lot of us that went to school back then would have been diagnosed with today’s standards and probably even medicated.

So I guess that this album is, in a way, in defense of everyone on the spectrum and also questioning the entire concept of normality, because I think that we live in a culture we can safely say that more and more we’re getting to what we could call a global culture, for good and bad of course.

What I feel is that, as a culture, especially a western culture, we’re flattering ourselves a lot with being tolerant and very accepting and understanding that everyone’s different and everyone needs different premises but at the same time, we’re still narrowing down the concept of normality, which is very counterproductive I think. Experiencing it myself growing up, for 47 years, also being a parent and also in periods being a teacher, I can see that today we have a lot of students that are, at a really young age, already being diagnosed and starting to view themselves as their diagnosis.

So they will come into the classroom already at the age of eight or nine and just say that they have ADHD and they can’t function. They see themselves as dysfunctional, which is something that I never had to. I was just sort of like a restless personality and I could find my ways and I could find my strengths in that, and all of the negative side to that would be called personality.

So that is basically what the album is about. It’s about my own experiences through life and also bringing in a bigger social perspective into it about how we should be viewing this concept of normality. Because it’s always just based on context really. It so much depends on the time you’ve grown up in, the culture that you’re a part of, and pretty much how society is built around you.

So these are functions that become dysfunctions when placed in the wrong context. So that’s basically what we’re talking about.

Damnation Magazine: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Actually, I’m 35, but I have a similar experience, my mom tells me a story about how when I went to school originally, they said, “Oh, this boy needs to be on some medication.” And my mom refused, and she facilitated a love for music and things that are different. I also eventually found that the idea of just questioning stuff and being curious was okay to do. So I think a lot of people probably share that, like you said, and that idea that our culture is trying to sway everyone in a certain direction that may not feel right.  But there’s that inner and fundamental thing that I think if you pay attention to, it resonates with you. That’s why I think this album and a lot of your music, but specifically this theme, will resonate with a lot of people. 

Daniel: Oh, that’s nice. Nice to know. The thing is, when I look back, I realize that this has been part of all of the different albums I’ve done. There is always this thread or idea of the individual trying to find its way with the interface towards mankind or culture or whatever there is, the bigger machinery that’s on the outside of who you are as a person. That conflict is pretty much in all of the different concepts in the albums that we’ve done but on different levels and different stories.  I guess all of that comes back to the fact that I’ve been always digging where I stand and invested a lot in myself in all of the lyrics. So that is part of the entire Pain of Salvation back catalog, I realize now.

Damnation Magazine: Yeah. It makes sense because even as you’re saying that, I immediately think of the album BE, it’s almost like the universal consciousness has the same questions that we as individuals have.

Daniel: Oh yeah.

Damnation Magazine: So it’s this cyclical thing.  That’s actually really cool to picture it in terms of the whole discography, where you’re telling the same story in a lot of different ways.  Since you mentioned, obviously we’re getting a lot of this from the lyrics, I’ll have to spend more time with the album to really unpack all the lyrics, but if you don’t mind, I wouldn’t mind touching on just a couple of songs specifically from the upcoming album.

Daniel: Yeah sure.

Damnation Magazine: I would say Wait jumped out pretty quickly lyrically.  It felt like it played on that theme but maybe from that a different perspective.  I have a desk job so when I’m sitting at that desk and I have that internal feeling of not fitting, a song like Wait, to me, felt like it was in that idea that you are trying to fit yourself into that box. Is that kind of where that song comes from?

Daniel: I guess it’s like a mixture of… just like you say, there’s so many different activities of mankind that are so bizarre, if you just look at them objectively from the outside for a while you go like, “Jesus Christ”, if I was looking at this, being an alien I’d go… “this is what you spend your precious time doing?” Everyone has had that feeling throughout their life. So there is that. Also that feeling that I’m trying to capture a little bit in Restless Boy as well where if you’re on the spectrum, regardless of where you are, I think that we’ve all had that feeling when you feel like time is passing at a different pace than your surroundings.

Like you’re focusing and 12 hours just fly by or something intense happens and all of a sudden it’s like you can almost see every split millisecond of what’s happening. I’ve noticed that this seems to be exaggerated for people with ADHD or autism or whatever it is. So there is that part.

Also, I think what, from the start, initially triggered my approach to that song was… I don’t want to depict any sort of diagnosis as a superpower. It’s beneficial and really cool in some respects, and then you have your drawbacks. One of the drawbacks that I’ve seen, in my surroundings and especially my family, they will have to wait for me because I will lose track of time. I’ve always found it a bit difficult with social situations. I think the trigger for this lyric was a very distinct memory I have where I had been working at a place for a while and I had quit, I was helping younger people with music in a big building for an institution. I was just going to their office to return the keys to the rooms. We stopped the car outside, I ran up the stairs with the keys to leave them to whoever was in charge of keys. Then it turns out that someone had a birthday and they’re like, “Oh Daniel. Nice, come in, have a piece of cake.” I just felt I was unable to find a social way of expressing that I don’t have time, I need to get back to the car, so I ended up being there for half an hour. My wife Johanna, then my girlfriend, she was sitting in the car, she was parked on the side of the street outside this building just waiting, having no idea what happened.  That has been, for me, significant of things that can happen when you are around me, and I’m aware of those costs. So I guess the song is about that at the core level, but also bringing all of those different sides of the waiting.

Damnation Magazine: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense absolutely. We’ll jump to the end of the album with the song Icon, which is a phenomenal way to end the album. You kind of have a way of taking lines that have simple wording but still have a huge impact. For example “I’m mostly doing fine, they rarely see me cry, but you were always on my mind,” when that hits, I find it to be one of the most powerful moments on the album.

Daniel: I like to hear that, because that’s how I wanted it to be. So it’s very nice to know.

Damnation Magazine: Can you go into a little bit of Icon lyrically and maybe some of the ideas behind that song?

Daniel: There are a few different things that I wanted to catch in that lyric. I mean, I can spend so much time with lyrics, like years and years. My lyrical or poetry hero’s are from when I was a kid, The Beatles, and especially Simon & Garfunkel. They managed that very nice thing of just, like you say, in fairly regular words, capture a truth that just resonates with you. Even though I loved Dio for instance, I always felt as a kid that well, it sounds cool but it also sounds a bit heavy on the props. I was always so fascinated when someone could just capture something that made it hurt inside with just regular words, just the right ones.

So I’ve always spent a lot of time trying to, I don’t know, decide for myself, is this the perfect phrase? If it’s not, I’m going to keep going until I feel that I’ve captured what I want to capture. I can’t say that I feel like I’m succeeding all the time but I’m trying all the time. For this song I felt there were a few things that I wanted to address in sort of the same thing, because they came from the same emotion in me, and that had to do with the circle of life. Maybe again, I think that this is even more clear for people with different diagnoses, there is a certain presence of nostalgia throughout life.

It’s like everything you see and you experience, you measure from some sort of objective mind, and you’re always measuring it from an emotional point of view. One of the things that still feels weird to me is just the entire concept of growing up, it’s so slow and it’s so fast at the same time. I think, as a kid, I always thought that you would come to a point where all of a sudden you would become grown up and you would have all of that wisdom and self-assuredness of grown-ups. That there was almost a magical line, not that I was thinking this out loud even to myself, but there was… thinking that at some point you’re going to change into something else.

Obviously that never happens, you bring yourself into all of the situations. Even in adulthood I can feel that I’m still trying to understand some of the things, I’m still trying to find my way. All of a sudden you have your own kids looking up to you and now they follow me where I go, obviously first thinking that I know what I’m doing and then coming to the age where they think that mom and dad has no clue about anything, and then you split the differences over the years I guess.

So that was one of the things that… I mean, because it’s such an old, worn out concept but it’s difficult to put that in words that still feels interesting.  I felt that that was the necessary way to go for the ending of this album.

There’s like a mourning process in this, which is really weird because it’s life. As you pass through life, you’re gaining new things but you’re also losing things, and some of them are really hard to measure, they’re hard to put into words and understand. You get a feeling of loss, which is what I think is the nostalgia part of things, that bittersweet feeling we get as we live, it is losing a lot of things that you can’t put words on.

I remember having been asleep and dreaming that you’re in a specific context of your past, like back in the school or whatever, and meeting all your friends in school, and then when you wake up it’s like you lost them. And you realize they’re still alive but exactly those people, exactly those school kids back from that age, they’re somehow gone even though they exist still.  

At one point I remember, I might have been in my early 20s or something, and I followed my wife to her grandmother’s 80th birthday I think. So we were sitting at the table and lots of the family was there, among which her uncle was sitting at that table; and he’s into theater, a sensitive, intelligent person.  One of the things that she was given for her birthday was a collage of pictures and photos cut into a painting. So we started talking about photos and videos, and then he said, her uncle, that he could never watch videos of his own kids when they were small because he broke from that. Even though his kids were and still are alive, watching the videos of them when they were just small kids made him feel like they were lost. They were alive, but those kids, those exact kids, they were gone, you could never meet them again.

It dawned on me that that is really true. I mean, that is one of the really most nostalgic things as a parent, that hits really hard. Once you get older and you have kids of your own, you have that exact same feeling that my kids are alive but all of those different stages that they’ve passed, they’re lost, they’re gone forever, I can never meet them again.

I do think that there is a reason why we have so many rituals for when we lose people to death. That was one of the things as a young person I also thought a lot about. It’s weird, you’d think, from a Darwinistic point of view, at this point in life when the species has been alive for such a long time, what we can really be sure about is that all of the people that have gone before us have experienced the loss of loved ones and still, through all of these millennia, we have not learnt how to deal with this loss. It’s numbing how big this pain can be. That tells me that grief is important to us. It’s important for our empathy. For some reason, it is important that we feel this severe sense of loss when we lose someone, but we do not have any rituals for how to mourn the living and that’s a bit odd, there is no religion for that, there is no ritual, there is no graveyard to go to, which makes that grief sort of difficult to deal with. I wanted to catch that feeling in this song. Not sure that I did, but…

Damnation Magazine: I’ve thought about some similar things but not all the details that you just laid out. The idea of death and perceiving it as just the end of living and not just the constant change and loss of versions of yourself or other people throughout your life. It’s pretty interesting, because we don’t really acknowledge it ever and maybe that’s one of the reasons why the death is so hard for us to swallow because we haven’t been looking at  the little deaths the whole time.

Daniel: No, that’s true. Yeah.

Damnation Magazine: Let’s talk about the album musically now. We  have some new musical elements. There’s some electronic stuff and some of the song-building almost feels like it was influenced by some of the electronic music. I also hear some classic Pain of Salvation throughout as well.

Daniel: Yeah.

Damnation Magazine: What do you think, in general, drives the constant evolution? You don’t really stick to one thing too long. It seems genuine, but is there anything that you find that drives that?

Daniel: I think it just comes naturally. It struck me a few months back that… I mean, this is what attracted me to metal in the first place when I was a kid, that it felt new and fresh and it felt like they were standing up for something and standing up against something, and it felt like a music style that was on the way to somewhere. And to me, that was attracted me with it.

Just like when I listen to Revolver with The Beatles, I just instinctively felt that this is music that comes out of frustration, passion, but also honesty. There is a genuine search for something here. So there is a courage involved, and the want and the quest for some sort of change or at least journey, traveling to somewhere.

That’s what I felt with metal, it felt new and fresh. And then I just felt in a way that it was failing me a bit because it stagnated so quickly as a music style and it just became this recipe and did not have that driving force that attracted me to it in the first place. Then progressive metal had that element again of feeling… they were seeming to be on their way to somewhere.

Not that we have ever declared what kind of music style we belong to or what kind of music we play, but other people have done that for us. I think that comes naturally from the fact that we are using those driving forces. Especially me when I compose, I always try to make it tap the well of passion and honesty and courage and curiosity. So there needs to be an element of curiosity and passion.

I think because that has always attracted me to music, the element of change comes very naturally because I continuously invest as much as I can of myself into the music I write, which means that as long as I keep being curious, as long as I keep changing as a person, then that’s going to be infused in whatever music and lyrics that I’m working on.

So I think, first and foremost it’s all deriving from who you are as a person, as a composer and as a musician I guess. So that element is just Pain of Salvation and me.

Damnation Magazine: It’s cool to hear you lay it out like that because as a fan of the band, over time it is definitely something I look forward to each album, is to kind of be caught off guard among all the familiar elements.  It always seems to be coming from a genuine place but keeps us curious as listeners what’s coming next.

Daniel: That was good to hear, good to hear.

Damnation Magazine: Regarding the current state of live performances, how are you just personally adapting to the world in which you don’t really know when you’re going to be on the road again? 

Daniel: Well, I think, again, the spectrum parts of me embrace that idea very quickly. I’ve always had huge problems with small change, but big change I almost find refreshing somehow. I’m not going to say that this is a refreshing thing that’s happening but the positive sides to it, if I’m allowed to say that, is that I felt that the topics, maybe not anymore, but especially in the beginning, the topics of mankind became much closer to what I would like them to focus on. I felt much more in sync with reality when there was something that was real, because I feel that so much of mankind is make pretend.

This was something that could not be dealt with in that way. It just was what it was, and it didn’t really bother about borders, it didn’t bother about financials, we just had to up our level of what we figured life was about.

Just like when someone as a person is going through something that is really difficult and all of a sudden your priorities in life become more tangible. I think that happened for the entire global community for a while. I think that’s good for us, being aware that some things will just happen regardless of how immortal and powerful we think we might be.

So when those restrictions came about and they started talking about it, it was almost ironic how close that was to my regular lifestyle. It was like, “Well, try to work from home if you can.” And I’m sitting there at my computer at home, I’m like, “Check.” “And try to stay away and not be so close to other people.” Oh, wonderful. “Do not go to parties.” Yes, thank you. It was just so many things that just felt totally sane. “Only go on vacation… Don’t go on vacation, only go abroad if it’s really, really necessary.” And I’m like, “That should be the case always.”

As a band we were lucky because we were just at the end of an album production cycle. So it was hard from a financial point of view to lose all touring and everything, but on the other hand, we did have huge problems logistically trying to get those tours to happen.

Damnation Magazine: That makes a lot of sense.  Shifting a bit to a more general concept.  What would you say the greatest lesson you’ve learned about creating art?

Daniel: I think that it’s another thing that’s been very heavily infused into this album, and that’s let life happen. There is this sociology concept by Randall Collins I think is his name, of rationality, which I think is much more interesting than Max Weber right now.

The thing is there are different types of rationality, and he’s differentiating between method rationality and goal rationality. I think we all know those two concepts by just looking at life. Method rationality is that typical bureaucracy administration and a way of living or organizing things where every step of a specific process needs to be exactly measured and paid back in full in order to be called rational.

Whether that investment into that step is financial or emotional or energy-based or time-based, you have to make every little step of the process make sense from a rational point of view, and it needs to be measured and returned in full or with a profit. This is method rationalism. That’s a good thing to have, it’s a good tool to have. Your drive should always be goal rationalism where you look at the goal and you know where you want to go, and then you will have to take some chances and you will have to make some investment that you’re not sure will be returned.

As a creative artist, I think anyone who’s working creatively have really sensed the power of goal rationalism. When you’re working on a problem and you can’t solve it and then something completely different will suddenly just trigger the solution for that one single problem.

For any musician, you will have spent hours and hours and hours learning your instruments, you will have spent so much money buying instruments, investing in gear, rehearsal rooms, and you will have invested so much of your social circles and time that could have been spent on other things.  All the sacrifices you have made for all the things that you could have become, and instead you’ve just perfected your musicianship or skills as a composter or whatever it is.

Every step, every single step of the way, for years and years and years, are invested with the hope that one day there will be a reward. That reward might not even be financial. I mean, the reward might be very hard to measure. Just the fact that you’re standing on stage and you’re connecting with people who understands your music and then get an emotional feedback from that music, and you have some sort of energy passing between you, that is a reward that is huge, but it’s very difficult to measure that from a method rationalistic point of view.

So I think most people who work creatively will figure that out very early on that method rationalism will not get you where you want to go, it will stop you, it will really just make everything impossible. Every step of the way you would have to ask yourself, “Does this make sense?” Of course, it doesn’t.

There’s very little chance that all of these investments are going to pay off in any shape or form. Just like when you do a jigsaw puzzle, that’s not paying off either. You have to find satisfaction in what you’re doing and in what hopefully you will become. When mankind uses that as a driving force, it is beautiful.

When mankind is passion-driven, we are a more beautiful species. Then as I’m sort of hinting at in Accelerator, every once in a while there will be a Hitler coming out of these ranks, we apologize. On the other hand, they would never become anything if there weren’t enough normal people following them, because that’s what a lot of normal people tend to do.

So that is one of the things that I’ve really learned, that as soon as I try to apply rigid planning and really aim for something very specific and really try to plan that down to the smallest detail, things have a tendency of not happening, it just never really turns out the way you wanted it to.

I think that is the problem again with our society as well and our culture; we’re applying more and more method rationality, and the problem with it is that when that fails, when you have a system and it fails, like our students are not showing the amount of knowledge that we would want to, the solution is always for method rationalists to apply more method rationalism. They will never ever come to the conclusion that maybe we’re using too much method rationalism here, because method rationalists tend to look at other types of rationalism as irrational.

I made a parable once that it’s like having a parking lot and you have a machine where you are supposed to pay, and obviously there’s going to be one or two cars going there and they’re not going to pay it, so the ones in charge of the parking lot will go, “Hmm, I think the problem is that we need more signs telling them how to pay.”

So there will be more signs, too many signs at one point. The other people that really want to pay will start getting confused because of all the signs. It’s still not working, so they will apply a second method of payment, a third method of payment, online methods of payment, more instructions.

In the end, the machine is a pillar full of instructions and everyone is just totally confused and they’re standing there forever just trying to read and decipher all of that information. They notice that the payments are still going down because of this, so they will add even more method rationalists in trying to make the steps even more efficient. And that’s what happens in society on the whole I think.

I’m not saying that we should skip organization or laws, really, no, I’m totally not into that; but it needs to be sort of sane, we need to remember that we’re human and the system needs to be built for humans. If it’s too rigid, it’s going to break.

It’s like on the BE album, “Help me bend to stay unbroken,” and that’s exactly what a system needs to have as well, it needs to have a certain give, a bendability, flexibility, otherwise it will just falter and fall apart at some point or explode.

Damnation Magazine: I do think that’s a pretty valuable lesson, do you find that your self-worth sometimes gets entangled in your art? Or can you always separate the two?

Daniel: The creativity point seems to be unfaltered. At the core level, I think all of us, to some degree, have a need to be appreciated and loved for who we are, great, but also for what we do.

Luckily I have this cycle I’ve noticed, that in the beginning of an album process, not that it’s actually an album process until a bit into the process, but when I start writing music or let’s say after an album has been released and I’m working on new material again, I always have that sort of fearless attitude somewhere where I just go like, “We don’t have to bother about what people think of us, we can do whatever music we want to.” I just feel so confident in that.

Then towards the end of the album it’s like all of that nervousness will just hit me very hard and I’m going to go like, “Oh my God. Will people love this? Will they like it? Are we going to scare fans away?” And I’m just so glad that that person is not involved in creating the album, because at that point it’s too late to turn back.

I think that almost every time I promise myself that for the next album I’m going to dial back the courage.  Luckily when that I start writing again, it seems like I’ve totally forgotten that.

I think that’s good because it is a feeling that is based in fear. I usually say that fear is a good thing. I mean, it will probably save you if you meet a bear in the woods, but it should never be in the driver’s seat of any vehicle that is destined for creativity. It’s just a really shitty creative driver.

Damnation Magazine: Yeah, yeah. Fear definitely is a great passenger to say, “Hey, watch out for that,” and then you just need to say, “Thank you. but that’s not a bear.  Just tell me where the bears are and I’ll avoid them.”

Daniel: Exactly. Yeah.

Damnation Magazine: I think that’s actually really, really good. I think you make a good point about just people not only needing to be loved but needing to be loved for what they do or just seen in general. I think just being seen for who you are and what you do is important. I’m glad your courageous side sticks with you during the writing process because I feel like that’s the “panther in the dog’s world” kind of thing.

Daniel: Yeah, yeah, it is, for sure.

Damnation Magazine: I also like that you get nervous and unsure too, because I feel like had you said, “Yeah, what are you talking about? Everything’s good always.” I’d be like, “Oh, okay. What’s wrong with me?”

Daniel: Yeah. No, no, that’s always there. I think the trick is to realize that you have both those driving forces and then just try your best. I think that goes for all strong feelings, whether it’s grief or anger, just look at it for what it is, accept it, and then you make your choice, and as long as you can you will make a choice. So not trying to blindside it or have it blindside you.

Damnation Magazine: Yeah. Honestly, I think I’ve gotten everything that I wanted to touch on and way more. So I definitely appreciate the conversation. 

Daniel: Awesome.

Damnation Magazine: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

Daniel: I would just hope to be back. I mean, we were so much looking forward to get over, and then we had so many plans for that to happen. So now we’ll just hope that things get to a level where it makes sense to be able to get on the road again. And just stay safe and wait for us, we will be there. And who knows? Another side of this is that I’ve already started on the follow-up to Panther, so maybe when we come we’ll have two albums to tour, who knows?

 

Interview conducted by: Sean Cantor