Chad Bowar Give us a preview of Karmacode.
Cristina Scabbia: It's one of the albums of the year. That's pretty modest of me! I totally believe in the potential of this album because I can't find a weak point. It's not a boring album, it's really dynamic, really listenable. It's powerful at the same time. It's amazing. I really cannot find a weak point with it.
With the success of your last album did you feel any added pressure this time?
No, not really. There is not a recipe for success, so you can never know. If you have the intention of writing a successful song it doesn't work like that because you can never know about the changing tastes of people. We just wrote for ourselves without any kind of pressure and the result is awesome. For us it's important that we like the music we did and if people will share our enthusiasm it will be even better.
With the recent success of harder edged bands like Avenged Sevenfold, do you think that bodes well for your album?
It means that rock and metal are getting more and more space. I just hope that people will be even more open minded about this kind of music.
Your song "Our Truth" is on the soundtrack to the movie Underworld: Evolution. How did that come about?
They really liked the song and asked us if they could use it. We did a remix of the song for them, but they realized they liked the original one better and put it on the soundtrack.
Talk about the recording process.
The producer for this album is Waldemar Sorychta, our close friend who has always helped us out. This time he helped us co-produce the album. All the mixing was done without him in Belgium. It has been a combination of different people and different places. We recorded part of the album in Germany and the other part was recorded in Milan, Italy.
With 6 people in the band, how do you divide songwriting duties?
The main thing in Lacuna Coil is that there is a lot of democracy. We're close friends. We hang out even when we're home in Milan. We are like a second family. We split up the songwriting. Everyone has computers so we put all the ideas we have on the computer. We can send them to each other over the internet. Once we have a basic idea for a song we go into the practice room and try it together. That's where all the advice comes out. If somebody doesn't like a part we try something different until everyone is one hundred percent happy.
Do you write most of the lyrics?
I'm much better in writing vocal lines. It comes much more natural to me. Then I write the lyrics together with Andrea (Ferro). I write the melody of the voice. What we try to do with our voices is use them as arrangements on the song. That's why it's harder for us to write the lyrics. When we write the vocal lines we use a fake language that sounds good and then we arrange the lyrics to make them sound how they did in the fake language. It sounds complicated, but in the end every single word has a study behind it.
How did you come up with the title Karmacode?
It was created at the end because we had to look at all the lyrics and how they came out. It's something Andrea came up with. It's inspired by a book by an Italian professor that talks about research that explains religion with mathematical formulas. It's pretty weird, because it was the first time we heard about something completely spiritual without too many explanations being studied like that. We got inspired by that and started to think about the evolution of spirituality, especially in these days where everything is electronic. Everyone has a cell phone, everyone has a laptop and can contact with a click. But we lost a little bit of touch with reality in relationships with other people.
