Interviews

Millencolin

Interview with Larzon on Mar 10, 2002 by Archive Bot

I really want to thank Larzon for taking the time to talk to punkbands.com and Tomas and Laure from Burning Heart for all their help. This is an interview with Larzon, the drummer of Millencolin.

PB: The new album will be out in few days?? What is your state of mind?
MC: We’re totally exited about it. We’re really satisfied with everything, you know album cover, songs and everything. We started to record it October 2001 and not so many people have heard it yet so it’s gonna be fun to see/hear what people think about it. We think it rocks. 

PB: Millencolin is now a well known band. You sold more than 1 million records worldwide. Did you get under pressure before and during the recording ?
MC: Not at all actually. We had lots of ideas and quite some time to rehearse and work on the songs. Lou was a great guy working with and he really knew how to bring out the best from us. The time we spent in the studio went pretty smooth and we had a good time.

PB: The song "Punk-Rock Rebel" is quite interesting. It sounds like an old Millencolin song mixed with "Penny Bridge’s" sound and the lyrics deal with your "introduction" in the punk scene… Could you explain to us more?
MC: The song is basically a tribute-song from Nikola to a local punk-guy and a real good friend of ours who got him into punk and inspired him to start to play punk back in the day. Nikola wrote the song and we like it a lot. It’s a bit different but good in my opinion.

PB: A question which is going to be a "classic"... Do you feel this album is the one of maturity?
MC: No not really. It’s just our new album with a bunch of new rockin’ songs. We try to come up with new interesting songs for every release that will surprise people a bit. When you listen to our albums I guess you can hear that we try new directions but still try to keep the typical "Millencolin-feeling".

PB: For "Pennybridge" you went to USA for recording and for "Home..." it was Sweden ! What are the main of reasons in the choice of Lou Giordano ?
MC: It’s actually not that strange. When we were about to record Pennybridge we heard that Mr. Brett Gurewitz was interested in producing the album in his studio (Westbeach Recorders) and of course we wanted to do that since we’re all huge fans of Bad Religion and the stuff he recorded in his studio back in the days. He’s also a friend of ours and we thought it would be a nice experience to go there and record and we had a blast!When we were about to record Home From Home we all decided to try a new place and thought it would be nice to record somewhere in Sweden so we could go home once in a while during the recording. We picked a studio outside of Stockholm called Little Big Room and Lou as a producer because we all loved his work on Samiam’s "Clumsy" and some other stuff. He did a great job and he was also a really nice guy.

PB: You spent three months in the studio. Have you got some frustrations? When you spend three months in a studio it may be easy to loose attention. Is it ? I read on the net that a lot of money has been found in the sofa, what is that story???
MC: The recording took place during middle of September to middle of November but Lou went home to the States for a couple of weeks after about a month of recording and came back for the mixing and mastering. It’s a little hard to say exactly how many days it took since we went home once in while. Anyway, we didn’t have frustrations or anything.The little story about the money in the sofa was just a little thing that took place a day when I was a little bored and started to tear up the sofa and found some good money from previous bands who had recorded at the place.

PB: Do you think experimentation can kill a good song ?
MC: I don’t know, I guess a little experimentation is good sometimes but if you work too long/hard on a song it might take away some of the spontaneity from the song, at least for us, I think.

PB: Why did you re-record the song Kemp and Black eye ?
MC: We re-recorded those two songs because we think they both rock and not too many people have heard them. We also wanted better lyrics and better sound and we thought we could play them better too, and I think we did. We had lots of songs and ideas so it wasn’t because we were short on songs or anything.

PB: What is the question you hate the most. "What does Millencolin mean?" or "Do you think you’re gonna play ska songs one day", and why?
MC: I don’t hate any of them. I can understand that people wanna know what Millencolin means and also that people who like the more ska-ish songs wanna know if we’re gonna play any of those songs. We haven’t been listening to ska/reggae that much the last couple of years so naturally we don’t make any new ska-influenced songs and at the same time we try to come up with new stuff every release.

PB: "Hi8 Adventures" was a very good documentary/video about the band. Do you think one day there will be a following video?
MC: Yeah, I’m pretty sure we’ll put together some footage for another one in the future some time. It’s gonna take a while though because we need lots more material for it and we have touring and stuff to do before Erik/we can start to put something together.

PB: Where is the naive and careless Millencolin gone? Pennybridge sounded more optimistic than this new one…. Where does it come from?
MC: You think so…I think the opposite. We’ve never been as satisfied and happy with our new stuff as we are now. Nikola (who writes the lyrics) writes mostly about personal stuff, you know stuff he experienced or think is funny or whatever and I guess when good and bad things happen he just writes about that. Anyway, we’re really happy and totally appreciate that we can keep on doing this!

PB: Is it important for Millencolin to be close to your fans? Were you happy with the Millencolin cover contest? Will there be a new contest like this?
MC: Yes, it’s definatley important! That’s why we make our website by ourselves and also answer e-mails/letters ourselves. We really try to keep up the answering but we get so many mails right now so it’s hard to be able answer all the mails fast but we’re working as hard as we can with it. I guess the cover contest is always up and running, just send us your cover versions.We’ve received a bunch of cool versions.

PB: If tomorrow you can make a split CD with a band what this band would be and why?
MC: I don’t know really…Rancid, Jimmy Eat World or Bad Religion maybe….because they all rock!

PB: If you had to promote this new album with one word, what this word would be ?
MC: Diverse! I wish you the best of luck with everything and thank you for doing this interview! Cheers!