Here is the audio file with the guys’ answers translated to German by the hosts (click)
And here is the ‘lighter version’, without translations from the hosts (the questions are in German, but they’re understandable enough from the answers- click).

Enjoy listening! :)

Host: That was of course Korn and Narcissistic Cannibal. But let’s move on to Finnish music: Marko from Poets of the Fall hello.
Marko: Hey.
Host: It’s been a little while now since your album came out.
Marko: Yeah, it’s been a while but it’s still a very current thing for me. We’re just buzzing, running around and going abroad and different places in Finland, talking to people about it on radio, on TV and at gigs. And magazines.
Host: A little here and there.
Marko: Everywhere.

Host: Temple of Thought is the name of the album. And like you said, you’ve given a lot of interviews to other countries as well. What’s the most exotic one that you’ve come across so far?
Marko: Right today I had one from Egypt. Nothing special there, the English was good and all but if I remember correctly I’ve never done an interview to Egypt before. I’ve given some to Israel and some other places which you wouldn’t first think about giving an interview to.
Host: Well at least when it comes to rock music consumption, it’s not the first country that comes to mind.
Marko: At least it’s not the first and foremost country that Finnish rock musician would think of.

Host: But this is your fifth album already. So how is the creating process… does it become easier or more difficult the longer you’ve been around?
Marko: Well, some of the things we know how to do already. So in some ways we have our own ways of doing certain things already and they work very well. But there are times when you need to take a break from everything and live your life and to experience and run around and bang your head on the wall. You have to have experiences so you will know what to write about and what to feel and what to bring forth in the songs. So the more you go into the extreme there, the more difficult making the music gets. And as an artist you’re always careful not to repeat yourself.

Host: Your new album is kind of… it makes you feel very visual. When you were planning… When you started to work on the new album, did you have any specific vision about the way it should sound or did you have some landscapes on your mind?
Marko: Let’s just say that the landscapes appear when something starts playing in your head. For me personally… Actually I should map out how Olli and Captain see this thing, or feel, or hear. But I see stuff like pieces for movies and I can just look at it and write about what I see. Or it feeds the feelings and feelings in turn feed the music. If anyone plays something that creates a feeling, I automatically start to hum or sing something on top of it.

Host: When it comes to making notes… When this clip of a movie comes to your mind, how do you write it down so that you will remember what it was about even later on?
Marko: It has been pretty much a mess and a stream of consciousness. And usually I write in a bit of a panic, because I need to find a piece of paper to write on or a mobile phone so I can turn on the recording program. And then you hum something very vague into it which is really difficult to interpret later on. But then I always get empty envelopes from the paper trash basket. Maybe we could photograph some of them and put them into the booklet, like “this is how we worked on it”. And they’re full of all kinds of little doodles and pieces of phrases which end up in the final song either partially or fully. That’s the first impression on the song and a stream of consciousness, like I’m trying to say something here and I have something to say. And you write something like la-la-laaa and then in the end it ends up being the third phrase on the right in that song. Maybe. Something like that.

Host: Maybe… How was the album making process this time? Was it blood, sweat and tears or did it come easy?
Marko: It never comes easy. It really is blood, sweat and tears in many different ways. You have to experience and live and take in the painful things in life and take in the painful things at the studio when we don’t agree on something. We have happy moments too of course, like this worked out perfect. But we get into arm wrestling when the timetable is starting to get tighter along with everyone’s nerves. And last year we were doing a lot of management stuff at the same time, we were going through a large amount of possible affiliates in Finland and abroad, bigger and smaller record labels and we negotiated contracts with them and it was like “read up this contract and then work on the lyrics a little before we start to record some of your vocals and I’ll do the guitars in the mean while and program in the drums and we should think about updating our website and check out our Facebook” and stuff. It was a really bizarre mix of things. I… Last year I learned to escape from the studio somewhere to the beach with my recording device and some paper. Every time I got a piece of music from Olli for example, like he had created a structure for the song and I went to write the lyrics at the beach so that no one would know where I was.
Host: Like “Please, let me just have a moment of peace”.
Marko: Yeah.

Host: Let’s listen to a song I just had to pick from this album: the last song, The Happy Song, which is very different from the rest of the album. What can you tell us about it?
Marko: I think it’s really great that it’s on that album. When you’ve listened through the album in a certain kind of mood you have to let go of it before you can listen to it again. That’s why it’s in there as some sort of a… well, a bitch slap to your face if I can say so.
Host: That’s exactly what it is. Let’s listen to it now, Poets of the Fall – The Happy Song.
—–
Host: I’m guessing that there are quite a few people out there who are now wondering if this really is Poets of the Fall. But it really is. We have Marko here in our studio to talk about the band’s new album but… That really was a different kind of Poets of the Fall.
Marko: Yeah, you have to be able to do the kind of stuff that feels good and what comes out. It’s fun to look at some of the things in hindsight, like “so that’s the kind of stuff we used to do, guys… what were we thinking?”
Host: What were we thinking…
Marko: But that was a really fun song to record. Because there are like 5 to 8 different characters that you have to pull off. Like first you’re this schizophrenic killer and next you’re the miserable stalker and this character and that character and this one again and then you have to sing through the whole thing like that. Like “Ok, how does it sound? I told you I’m a psycho!”

Host: Your music has… and always had, a very visual element to it. Your music videos are excellent and so forth. So when are you going to be making a movie?
Marko: Oh-hoh-hoh-hoh, when we have a shitload of money.
Host: But how important is the visual side to the band? Do you all share a love of movies for example?
Marko: I could imagine that the visual side is very important to all of us. And since we all are addicted to perfection in a way, like total junkies, we want to be very much involved in it. The music videos are very much a part of the songs so it’s nice to be able to work on those as well. At least I find all that close to my heart and very important. I guess it comes from seeing the first music videos as a kid and thinking that they suck and I’d like to do better ones.
Host: You were watching Michael Jackson’s Thriller and thought it was just shite.
Marko laughs: Yeah, like I should get to do it myself so that it would be properly done. I guess it came from defiance like that and being a visual person, things really have to look like something and fit just right. And of course one works through their own vision of it and other people will see it the way they do. It’s good to go with your own vision.

Host: Yeah, music videos are starting to be an extinct species. Is it worth putting all the money into really good looking videos anymore?
Marko: That’s a good question. You can basically create music videos without spending much at all. But on the other hand you can spend insane amounts into them and in my opinion there’s no sense in doing that. Even though it’s marketing and a tool for marketing the cost can be something that you start to think if you’d rather just start smoking and get yourself a cancer than pay that much for something like that. But, well… I think some things are worth doing if you want it. Of course there are things that pull you back to reality, like money. But still.
Host: Those little details.
Marko: But music videos are still pretty much necessary in the music business. If you try to get ahead to new territories, they want the whole package. They want the album published, they want the concerts, radio play and interviews. And the music videos. In a way it’s simply a part of it.

Host: How much do you think your music videos, which are really brilliant, have actually advanced your career out there in other countries where they actually play the videos on some channels?
Marko: They are important in my opinion and they have helped a lot. If you think about Carnival of Rust music video, it has over 10 million views. And every time I do an interview to some foreign country they always ask about the videos. So I get to talk about them a lot. And it’s really cool that people take notice of them because we’ve put much thought into them and we’ve invested money into them and we’ve tried to do them as well as possible. And it’s great to see people interested in them. And the characters I play in the videos, they change ever so slightly in their appearance and even name, but it’s very much a part of our concept as Poets of the Fall and so. It’s theatrical in a way, and something we like to aspire to. I think it would be really boring to get on stage if you can’t let go a little bit. If you take on a character do the concert through the character, it’s much easier to depict the stories behind the songs and to live in the moment.
Host: Yeah, if all you did was stand and hold on to your mic, it would be really boring to watch.
Marko: Yeeeeah, and it’s a bit of a performance. You wear your character and you are the character for a while it gives you a sense of surreal madness and everything’s simply a lot more fun.

Host: It’s more fun for you too? During the song we talked about going abroad and your album will be coming out there as well. When was it, at the end of summer?
Marko: Yeah.
Host: What kind of buzz do you have going on in Central Europe for example?
Marko: Surprisingly good. Our fist singles have started to roll and we didn’t even expect something quite so big to happen. We got a list of several radios from large to small ones who have added out single to their playlist. We were like “what?!” It’s really nice and now we have all our fingers crossed and thumbs up so that it would start to go forward from there. We’ve been doing a lot of ground work there for years and now we’ve found a really good bunch of people to help us out with creating a buzz, so all we can do now is to hope for best.

Host: You’ve always done things by yourselves a lot. How difficult has it been to form contacts when you don’t have a bit multi-national record label backing you up? How difficult is it to get people even to hear you out, what you’re about?
Marko: Well, if you think about the fact that today is Poets of the Fall’s 9th birthday and this is the point where we are now. It’s clearly taken a few years to work on all of it and to look for contacts and to find the right ones.
Host: So it hasn’t been the easiest thing in the world?
Marko: No, it hasn’t necessarily been the easiest thing in the world.

Host: Have you ever felt like “oh shit”?
Marko: Yeah.
Host: Like now we really have to get that deal in that country.
Marko: Yeah, you sometimes start feeling like it’s not going to work out at all, let’s just call it quits and something comes along that we could get but it’s just totally shit, but should we take it anyway. We’ve ended up not taking that route.
Host: Like you wouldn’t have to do everything all by yourselves?
Marko: Yeah. Stuff like that comes along. On the outside it might look like we’re going up to the sky like a rocket but when you’re on the inside there’s a fist coming through every single door and window that you bump into before you reach the end of the corridor where the light is shining.
Host: That sounded pretty bad! That’s where the light is shining.
Marko laughs: That’s where the light is shining.
Host laughs: Don’t walk towards the light.
Marko laughs: …towards the light.

Host: This is a good place to end our chat, except please tell us where your next gigs in Finland are going to be.
Marko: During the weekend we’ll be in Helsinki, at Pressa. And we have a couple of boat cruise gigs coming up and then we go to Tallinn. And for the rest of May we’ll record some stuff in the studio. And during the summer there are going to be some open air festivals and nightclub gigs in Finland and we’ll have those along the autumn until winter if I remember right. Check out Poets website for more information because I only know that our tour manager tells me where to be on that day so I should remember to come to the tour bus so that we can put you on stage. I never know where I am on some specific day. All I know that tomorrow I have a gig.
Host: So they tell you that it would be nice if you were on the bus as well so that you can be taken to the gig. You don’t need to know where it is.
Marko: Olli always comes to pick me up from home, like “let’s go, now”.
Host: That sounds somehow endearing.
Marko: Can’t deny that.
Host: You don’t have to worry about a thing.
Marko: Yeah.
Host: But hey, thank you for being able to visit us.
Marko: Thanks, it was fun.

In Kiev Poets of the fall were back for an encore 3 times and said “Thank you!”
Poets of the fall were working with such a zeal, that the hall got ROCKED from the first minutes.

In March, the 25th, the Finnish 9-year-old band Poets of the fall visited Kiev for the first time. People were let in one hour before the concert; the gig began with the 15min delay (what’s new to the Kiev’s public). In the smoke screen “Poets of the autumn” went out one by one, met by storm of applause.

The musicians greeted the crowd: the guitarist Olli, his colleague Jaska, the bassist Jani, the drummer Jari, the keyboardist Markus and the band’s leader, inimitable Marko Saaresto, all in the good mood and ready to meet their fans.

In a black cylinder, a tight-fitting vest and a black boa around his neck – Marko is a dainty elegancy, like a personage from the film about the Doctor Parnassus. And here the crowd is bursting, hearing “Kamikaze Love” from the new album.

Marko doesn’t want to stand still, he just “flies” on stage, flirting with the fans, he rules human emotions like a conductor: here it must be louder, there it must be quieter – the musician manages the hall with gestures, and the crowd gives him their love so passionately, that it becomes HOT.

The band’s members feel free on stage and gladly contact with the public. Evidently each of these gallant Finns enjoys the music, the show, everything around. Jaska together with Olli and Jani constantly change places – the hall is raving.

Saaresto pulls out feathers from his boa and gives them to the fans, the public blows soap bubbles, and in all this interaction MUSIC becomes the main and the most important religion for all, who have come to the concert. Marko speaks to the fans, you can even hear the Ukrainian “Djakuju” (“Thank you” on Ukrainian)!

It gets hotter and hotter, the new songs are taken with a great success, the old ones are sung along: “War”, “Locking Up the Sun”, “The Lie Eternal”, the public sings along together with Poets the words “little things, little things” from the song “Stay”; after that Finns go away from the scene and then come back under the screams.

There appear two acoustic guitars and one electric guitar on the scene, and now Marko is without his boa and cylinder. Having performed two songs, the band goes away, but the public returns them again. The concert is near the finish, “Dreaming Wide Awake” and “Carnival of Rust” are played, the crowd sings with Poets of the Fall in unison. The musicians are contentedly playing and showing the gesture of gratitude.

The last composition – “Lift” – is played wholeheartedly, Saaresto kisses the fan’s poster with a inscription on Finnish – “Me rakastamme sinua!” (“We love you!”). Pouring out their thanks, the band still leaves the scene, not having disappointed the public.

Talk about tour, fans, Temple Of Thought, and more ;)
Go get it here!

POETS OF THE FALL – the rockers who put all in on just one cart

After Him, Nightwish, The Rasmus and Negative comes Poets Of The Fall. To argue that these Helsinki-based guys who just released a new album are local superstars is hardly an overstatement. Their first four albums have all reached the number one spot at their Finnish home field and they’ve sold either platinum or gold. But curiosity towards abroad is increasing and fans can be found in countries such as Germany, Russia and as far away as India where the band last performed for fifteen thousand fans.

-Yeah, we really have a lot of fans there, depicts the singer Marko Saaresto. The fans in India can sing along to all our songs and we hear a lot from them and they want us to have a gig there every week. But we already know that it’s all about promoting our most important areas first. The rest of it we just take as it comes.

Marko says that the band already has a big plan. It’s not a specific idea because conditions change from year to year, he explains. Sometimes it’s better to have the back up of a big company, sometimes to be an indie label. Under certain circumstances a good advocate is vital whereas other opportunities call for promotion as the most important part and so on.

The only certainty in the front man’s eyes is that it’s always better if your path is going up instead of down, and that one can only be satisfied about it. For Poets Of The Fall the trend has been a positive one ever since their beginning in 2003 even though the group started literally from nothing. When Marko started working with guitarist Olli Tukiainen and keyboardist Markus Kaarlonen, they gambled all they had on one card.

-In many ways we sacrificed everything else for this band. I personally gave up my apartment. I was 30 years old and moved into my parents’ basement. I sold my car so that I could afford to get the CD done but that alone wasn’t enough to finish it up.

-But it was solved as your first two singles Late Goodbye and Life became hits?
-Yes, but we were without money for four months before that, which was somewhat stressful. We were losers without money. We couldn’t even afford to go out to eat something if we felt like it. But in the end everything was solved and it became absolutely fantastic. When our first full length album Signs of Life came out we made it to number one spot and no one told us about it before we played live on TV.

Seven years have passed since the debut saw light of day and in this group the band without a doubt belongs to the rock elite of Finland. They also form a confirmation to the country’s talent in creating sad melodic rock that doesn’t look to latest trends. For the new album Temple of Thought to continue on the same road is hardly an overstatement but it also shows proof that the band wants to go bigger.
-I would like to say that this is the third part of a trilogy. Musically it’s very alike to the two previous parts of it but we’ve also tried to approach the whole of it in a different way. We really go all the way from very nice and fragile to the truly insane last track.

-Perhaps that’s the reason why I have always thought that it’s quite difficult to put you into a box. On Temple of Thought there are for example album oriented rock songs like the strange Happy Song as a singer/songwriter experiment as well as soft ballads?
-Yeah, I can understand that you see it like that. We don’t believe in genres, just writing music flat out. Before this album we had 24 songs and we picked out 12. We didn’t want too many songs that sounded alike, it would have been boring for both fans and us.

-But can’t you verify that you do have the typically Finnish melancholy touch to your music?
-I’ve heard that many times and I can hang on to it being so. If a song isn’t in minor it’s nothing for me. You can crassly recon that there are two types of music, namely the kind that moves your ass or the kind that moves the soul, and we belong to the latter category.

-For how long do you wish to move people’s souls, then?
-Well, I hope to continue for a good long time still. This is what I love to do. But only if I can keep my feet on the ground: as long as that happens the future can always be good, so it’s important to me. The one who falls in love with a fantasy falls down hard but if we have luck people will see to it that we stay where we are now.

Here you can see the whole interview: how they started, how they write songs, what success is to them… all in English! Enjoy! ;)
Part 1: http://t.co/VuBATHU1
Part 2: http://t.co/fxxq9aQH
Part 3: http://t.co/DPj1tbBW

Innanzitutto un grande grazie a tutti i fan da tutto il mondo che hanno partecipato.. adesso potete vedere storia, dettagli, “dietro le quinte” del progetto su questo blog http://bannerproject.potfmedia.com/

Da Marta, Stef, Lisa, Oliver

Photo captions:
1.The singer shields his ears while the band is getting noisy during sound check.
2.Signing the back stage roof.
3.Marko dressing up for the evening.
4.Last check up on clothes and then off to the stage.

INTERVIEW
The singer of Poets of The Fall holds on to his inner child

Poets of the Fall published a new album, Temple of Thought. Metrolive.fi snatched Marko for a revolver interview.

Why don’t you seem like your age, 40-something?
-(imitating the voice of a small child) But I’m not, I’m four plus one. If you were here, I’d show you with my fingers, like four fingers up from one hand and one finger up from the other.

Society creates a pressure to drift to a certain track: a house loan, kids and everything that’s traditional. Have the paths of your life ever been defined by the way one should live?
-Yes, many things have, the “should” is something I’ve found a good choice to learn away from. It would be good if people learned that it’s the most useless word in the vocabulary. Even curse words are better than “should” because “should” creates pressure to be someone or do something that they should.
-Whatever you do or whatever you are ought to come from what you really want to be and what you want from life. A house loan has to be paid of course, and children need to be taken care of, for sure. I for one have a very high work ethic. Anything that’s agreed upon will always get done.

A couple of years back you had a skateboard in your car. When did you last use it?
-Hey, I have a new skate board! The weather being what it is, I’ve skated inside my apartment (laughter). I do it just about every day.

You’ve studied several different professions and you have many hobbies. Do you have too much energy or is this some ADHD of life?
-I want to try all kinds of things. If I get into something, then I’m willing to go far with it, but if not then I’ll leave it at that. Maybe it’s some kind of an ADHD of life rather than too much energy, because I get tired easily sometimes. In some people’s opinion I’m perhaps like… Well, I once wrote a song that goes “like a child forever”. That’s the kind of philosophy of life that I perhaps have: to preserve your child-mindedness and to be curious and to want to learn and see new things all the time.

What’s the most childish thing you did this year?
-Probably got angry over something useless.

What’s the most grown-up thing you own?
-It may be that Le Corbusier divan. In my opinion it’s somehow really grown-up.

Do you remind some comic hero?
-Hmmm, yeah, spider man! Or actually maybe Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. Yeah, Calvin!

What would you build out of lego blocks?
-The Eiffel tower and a Sphinx.

Which one of these would entertain you most on a road trip: a book, a pen, a phone or knitting pins?
-The first three! No, some good book. Yeah, a good book.

To what movie would you like to do the score for?
-I cannot say at all. Perhaps some Harry Potter. Yeah, that could be something with dramatic stuff going on, so you could do something tasty with it. Finding Neverland came to mind as well.

If your recently released album Temple of Thought was a movie, what movie would it be?
-It would be a strong dramatic thriller about love and relationships. There would be many different people in the story and relationships between them… and one of them would do paragliding as a hobby.

How do you want to describe your coming album?
It’s sizzling blend of the good old Poets of the Fall sound with always something new and unpredictalble added in the mix. All brand new songs, ranging stylewise form the nigh fragile emotionality to the dangerous and gnarly grindcorish lash outs. In between these there are a wide variety of titles to effortlessly carry the music from one piece to another.

Is it different from your four other albums?
Yes and no, meaning the underlying story is different, yet Temple of Thought is the third part of a trilogy, consisting of Signs of Life, Carnival of Rust and now Temple of Thought. So there has to be similarities to the previously released music, as well as something new to take the music on and allow us to evolve :) Musically, with The Happy Song, Temple of Thought also leads on to the next trilogy we started with Revolution Roulette, followed up by Twilight Theater.
That second trilogy is still waiting for its completing third album :)

You are going on a tour soon: what can we accept from that?
This time around we’ve chosen some of the good old tunes we haven’t played in years, to go with the new ones, and of course most of the favorites are there as well. It’s a night of crazy rocking fun vibe and energy.

How did you choose the title for the album?
We we’re looking to complete the trilogy I mentioned earlier. We already had Signs of Life. We had Carnival of Rust. Temple of Thought kept us waiting many years, but when it came to us, there was no question about it.

How do you work during the creative process? Do you work together with the songs?
Definitely. We all work by ourselves first, then we get together to review and refine our original ideas, then we go away and work on them some more by ourselves and come back again, and finish them together.

Usually it’s a long process and many different things happen along the way. Sometimes we start with a song and in the end what comes out of it is something completely different. You wouldn’t even recognize them as the same song we started out with. Other times the process is very sudden, and the song almost seems to write itself on the spot.

Can you tell us something about the new songs?
They should be heard, really heard, so they can be felt and once you feel them, if you close your eyes, you can see them …

Is there any songs which is very special for you?
They are all our babies, so sure, all of them… for me especially, titles like Cradled in love, Skin and The Ballad Of Jeremiah Peacekeeper touch a deeper note…

What are your influences in music?
Life.

What do you do when you are not making music?
Sleep.

Part 1

Pauliina: And here at Pauliina’s Boudoir the guest of the day is Marko from Poets Of The Fall. Good day.
Marko: Howdy.
Pauliina: You’re a sporty young man, you ran up the stairs to 6th story.
Marko: Yeah, it’s… using the lift is so difficult, that I rather took the stairs.
Pauliina: It pleases me that the first thing you did after stepping into the studio, you took off your leather jacket and vest and your tie and you opened up a couple of top buttons of your shirt and now you look more relaxed.
Marko: Yes, it’s relaxing. I like to wear that type of clothes but… there’s a limit to everything. I’ve been wearing them since morning. So when I arrived here and the atmosphere was so warm and easy going, I thought that strip tease is my life and I lost the clothes immediately.

Pauliina: Why on earth don’t we have a TV camera or a webcam in here yet?
Marko: Phew, I’m glad!
Pauliina: I shouldn’t have said anything, maybe you would have realized a moment later that we might have one.
Marko: Exactly so. You know at one point you got used to thinking that radio interviews are easy, you don’t have to preen your face. And then all the studios started having webcams and other cameras and it took a while to realize that maybe it’s best not to go anywhere wearing your old pajama pants with holes in them.
Pauliina: Is that what you usually wear, Marko Saaresto?
Marko: Well.. at home I usually spend my time wearing my boxers, it’s comfortable.
Pauliina: The most important thing is to wear at least some kind of pants, from a woman’s perspective. Or at least I think that they should be a) clean and b)if they have holes in them, the hole isn’t in the crotch area.
Marko: Right. Yes, yes, I understand that and that’s what I do myself.

Pauliina: What were you wearing while you were recording vocals for this new album Temple of Thought?
Marko: Ummm, usually I was wearing shoes. And yes, I had pants on as well.
Pauliina: You were wearing proper pants?
Marko: Yes. But what’s amusing is that, eahhh, I’m going to tell something I’ve never told before, but you at least take your shirt off at some point because it gets hot at the studio when you sing, especially in the singing booth that I use, it gets hot in there. So in the middle of a song a shirt might just fly out of there. And then I just sweat in there. Then I have a habit of stuffing my hands into my pockets when I sing to the mic and when I get excited, I press down so hard that my pants slide down. You know? And at one point I just notice that it’s happened again, I’m moon shining, and then you shout out “Wait a sec, I need to pull my pants back up! …Alright, let’s continue!”
Pauliina: Do you go commando, or do you push your underwear down as well?
Marko: The underwear either follows or doesn’t, it depends on how it happens to go.
Pauliina: You have a stylist who helps you out with clothes in addition to her real job and she’s also quite talented in designing clothes, perhaps you could order a harness from her. A bondage style harness that you could…
Marko: Brace pants.
Pauliina: Brace pants.
Marko: With jockstraps underneath.
Pauliina: Yeah. So no matter how hard you pressed down with your fists and your trained arms…
Marko: Oh, thank you.
Pauliina: …they just wouldn’t budge and your chastity at the studio would remain intact.
Marko: That’s true. But then again, I don’t really care about it, it’s just funny. I’ve gotten some laughs out of it because it’s such a silly thing.

Pauliina: On your new album the opening song Running Out of Time has a pretty strong Pantera riffs right at the start.
Marko: Yeap.
Pauliina: Where did they come from?
Marko: It has to make you feel out of breath because time is running out. So the song has to sound like what it’s about. And when I’m the most heavy metal dude out of us all, I would want heavier and harder all the time. But finding the right mood for the song is very important. The music has to serve the lyrics. For me the whole song comes from what the story in it is.
Pauliina: That song has a quirky ending also.
Marko [whispers]: Time.
Pauliina: Yeah, I was just going to ask if you could sing it for me. Could you sing a little before the [whispers] “…time.” Can you?
Marko sings: Crazy running like we’re running out of… [whispers] time.

Pauliina: That was Cradled in Love, a more sensitive Poets Of The Fall, but brand new. And here in the studio, the man behind that voice, Marko Saaresto visiting us.
Marko: Yeap. It’s probably our most sensitive song ever, but pretty good.
Pauliina: From what moods did it come to be born?
Marko: From tempestuous moods. Can you see it? Going through different tumultuous events and looking through them to see what the situation is. There are a lot of story there, very personal stuff, and it’s fun to revel in that for years to come. Like these were the experiences that made that happen and those stories brought something else forth: this was from here and that was from there. There are bits and pieces that created it, but it’s been developed by a certain period of time.
Pauliina: And with this answer you tried to go around my next question…
Marko: Really?
Pauliina: Can you tell what kind of tempests we’re talking about?
Marko: No. That’s the personal part that I don’t wish to bring forth. Plus there a hell of a… sorry for swearing, but there’s so much story behind it that it’s impossible to… we don’t have enough time for that.
Pauliina: Well… We could go for a cup of coffee after the transmission. You would be surprised for how long I can just listen.
Marko: Sure.

Pauliina: I’m not going to bully you more than this. Poets Of The Fall released their new album today, Temple of Thought. A temple for thoughts… And again on this album, one can’t escape to take notice of your voice which is completely in the league of its own. Marko Saaresto, for how long have you been singing?
Marko: Mmm… Quite a long time, since I was three. That’s when I discovered singing. And now I’m a 20-something.
Marko chuckles.
Pauliina: Just like me. So you didn’t have a super mom who decided that her son will be a rock star or a pop singer and then they took you to music kindergarten by force.
Marko: No, no. I did go to a music oriented class at school, which was nice and when I was… seven, yeah, I got a guitar for birthday present and they took me to guitar lessons by force. And it’s all been very useful and all. But when I was… I never did my homework so I never really learned to play the guitar like I should have. Or it was pretty much force fed, I was almost choking on tears at lessons. I did learn, but I hated it. I’ve always been the type of person to do things I want when I want. But it doesn’t work for me to have a schedule and then to have homework to do. I never did any of my homework at school either. I learned everything at class. And if I didn’t, I went to additional lessons, like before my final exams in high school. I had a hard time with math. Cos at one point my family moved, I had to change school and the class I went to was ahead of me at math and I couldn’t pick up. I was very lousy at it in high school still, until I took extra classes and realized how easy it actually was. It took me about a week to learn everything I needed to learn. It’s quite funny how it went, but it just happened that there was a guy who explained it the way I could easily understand. Well, once I start talking, I get lost from the original topic quite a bit.
Pauliina: It’s fine. Can it have been that as a junior high school kid you weren’t quite so mature yet but during your senior year you realized that you have to get it down and you had more motivation for it too?
Marko: Yeah, it’s possible there was that too. But I admit that… No, I mean… Well I admit that point, but the opinion that I have about it is that when I just didn’t know how to do it, and I didn’t get it when someone tried to explain to me, I just didn’t get how this formula or that integration or derivative or anything works. And when that teacher or any teacher realized that that guy’s just not getting it, they grew tired of trying to explain. And after that I just drew graffiti during the class or stayed at home to play the guitar.
Pauliina: Yeah. I still don’t get logarithms ad I didn’t learn it in high school. I understood everything else but logarithm was just beyond me.
Marko: Right.
Pauliina: Do you remember what it is?
Marko: Nope. I haven’t really needed it for anything since… it’s that curve which goes up a little stronger than exponent, but anyway, I haven’t needed it until this interview for the first time.
Pauliina: But you remember stuff like that by heart, still.
Marko: Yeah.
Pauliina: My goodness, I want to take the same extra lessons that you did. Do you think they’ll take me up…
Laughter.
Marko: Of course!
Pauliina: …now that I’m way past high school and getting excited about this. I think I might get logarithm too with such great teachers. Let’s continue in a moment, but now we could have a short break for commercials and then a bit of new Slash.
Marko: Brilliant.

Pauliina: And that was new Slash with a song You’re a Lie. That sounded, to my ears as well as Marko’s, a lot like Axl Rose, that guy.
Marko: I wonder if it’s coincidence or calculated? I really don’t know what I would do if we had to get a new singer. Would we take someone that sounds like the previous singer so that the sound would change as little as possible or would it be better to go for something completely different in some ways.
Pauliina: Our friend, the internet, claims that it’s a person named Myles Kennedy from a band called Alter Bridge, if you can believe that.
Marko: Ahh. Okay. Oh.
Pauliina: Axl Rose comes off to me as the kind of guy that once he has decided to be angry about something it won’t be easy for him to give in or to forgive or to make peace.
Marko: Yes, could be, I don’t know him at all. But he’s always struck me as impulsive.

Pauliina: Today I’m having Marko Saaresto as a guest at Pauliina’s Boudoir. Why don’t we continue talking about singing, now that we listened to Slash’s new vocalist with a practiced ear. You, Marko, have a very beautiful singing voice and you’ve been singing since you were three. So you thing that singing is something you can work on even if you’re not gifted?
Marko: Yes, it’s something that can be worked on. I think when it comes to anything at all you can work on it to a certain point. There are a lot of technical points to singing which come from the basic anatomy that everyone has. But when it comes to the sound you have, it’s one of those things you just get from birth. But then again, there are many skillful imitators out there who have been able to find someone else’s distinct sound from their body. Or the sound of a machine or different animals, and the imitations can be similar to the point of confusion. That would indicate that if you practice something enough, then… you can find anything in there. It’s a little difficult to speculate on that more but I think I said quite a bit already.

Pauliina: How about when it comes to yourself, Marko Saaresto? You have this curious phase in live during your teenage years. It has a profound effect on men’s voices, what was it like for you, being a singer? What happened?
Marko: It was quite radical for me because I was a full soprano before my voice changed. I did all the highest notes at our chorus and I was the chorus soloist. And what usually happens is that if you’re a soprano as a kid, you turn into being bass range. And it happened to me too, I’m bass-baritone. You can still do a great many things with your voice after that but… after my voice changed, I just didn’t know how to sing anymore, at all. I was completely out of my depths, just wondering what had happened. It’s like your head says that this is how it goes, but your body doesn’t follow up. It got difficult at that point. You’ve been given this gift, and it has always come naturally to you as a way of expressing yourself and until then singing was very easy to me, I just knew how it worked. Whereas someone else might have had to work a lot more for it at that point already. And for me it was easy. But then all of a sudden there was nothing. At that point people thought I was good at singing, and asked me to sing in their bands, and I was like yeah, I can, wait a minute, I can’t… you know? It just became very difficult. So I started looking into why it was so difficult, because I knew how it should work. But my body had changed so much that I had lost my ability to control my body and the technique of singing. That’s when I went on to take singing lessons a while after. And then I went through a whole plethora of singing teachers. They all knew what they were doing, but to get it into my thick skull how it was going to work for me again has taken a really long time, but after a while it came back. And as an instrument it’s just like any other. You can’t see inside your body, how your vocal cords or neck muscles evolve, it’s really something you can get better at all your life through.

Pauliina: Did it ever happen to you, like to so many young people, that you developed a crush for your teacher or professor?
Marko: No, no it didn’t happen at any point, nothing like that.
Pauliina: So you didn’t pick your teacher based on thinking how wonderful that person is and whom you kept thinking of when you went to sleep.
Marko: No, it didn’t go like that. I thought about completely other people.

Pauliina: Hey, tell me a little bit about this song, it’s not the most recent Poets Of The Fall: Carnival of Rust.
Marko: Oh, that one. That was a funny song. It came about as a result of just jamming. It was written on a very beautiful day at the beach. It was the kind of day when people were there to sunbathe and we were writing the song with Olli. And Olli said he has this guitar riff and we went through the ideas we both had. And there were all kinds of sounds around us, people talking. And then he started playing the riff to me and I was like “my goodness, that’s incredible… continue, continue”. And I felt something starting to come out of it and I started singing the song. It simply started coming just like that. And everyone around us went quiet. Completely quiet. All the kids had gone quiet, people were staring at us. And afterwards some came to thank us. And it was just a beginning sketch of that song. But we were like “I think this was somewhat good”.
Pauliina: Let’s find out how it sounds now, as a studio version.
———————————
Part 2

Pauliina: And, Marko Saaresto from Poets Of The Fall. Hello again.
Marko: Hey, hey. Hey, Hey, hey. Hey.
Pauliina: A showcase of your range, right there.
Marko: Yeah.
Pauliina: And I’m grabbing on to your singing voice still, because my own isn’t much to speak of. I don’t do karaoke even when drunk and it’s enough to tell a lot.
Marko: Okay.
Pauliina: So you had to learn how to sing all over again after your voice changed during your teenage years.
Marko: Yeap.
Pauliina: But you didn’t give up on it, you never got the feeling like “this is it”. Like “I sang pretty well since I was 3 years old but now I’m just Marko who only sings karaoke if even that”.
Marko: Drunken karaoke.

Pauliina: Is this somehow a very central characteristic trait of your personality?
Marko: There is a certain kind of not giving up mentality that I have, and I’ve always understood that I don’t know everything about this world so I’m pretty allowing of myself when it comes to making mistakes and being wrong about something and not knowing something. But when it comes to something that’s really important to me, such as singing, which is a very natural form of expressing myself, I just think that there must be someone out there who knows this stuff, mentors and teachers. No matter what it’s about, when I find myself at a dead end or something such, I just think there must be someone out there who knows, if I don’t know how to move on. And I’ll search for that someone who knows for as long as I need to. And that’s my vision in the tunnel, to find the person who’s going to help me out with it. When it came to singing, that’s how it went, I found a singing teacher and another one and another one. And often times the teacher didn’t have time for me, or they moved elsewhere. I’ve been tutored by some opera singers as well, but once they got signed with different opera houses in other countries, they had to move. And so my singing teacher changed every now and then. Sometimes things were left unfinished. With some of them I was able to work with for only 6 months, with others even up to 3 years. And then at one point I felt like I could quit with the lessons, that I knew enough. And for quite a while that worked well, but then I wanted someone else to have a listen of my voice again and I realized there was still many things I could learn.

Pauliina: So what happens during a singing lesson, Marko? If I were to go on a lesson for the first time and I would feel nervous and wouldn’t know what to expect. What might be the first thing a good singing teacher would likely ask me to do?
Marko: Ummmh, if I were your singing teacher, I would most likely want to know about your background, what kind of music you like to listen to or want to sing, and that will determine what we should start doing. And then I would listen to your voice, and find something in there that clicks. A good teacher can tell a lot by your posture and how you’re using your voice. The way your breathing functions, how evenly it flows. That’s how you see the areas that need developing and are worth developing. And there are different rehearsals for them and you pick out a couple of those that feel alright and start using them as tools to develop and experiment your thing. That’s how it goes. And then you pick out some songs that you want to do, one by one and you look into the song and spot the difficult parts that need improving or going through a little more.
Pauliina: Throw in some kind of a rehearsal, something basic.

Marko: A basic rehearsal. Well, this is what I’m going at the moment. My teacher told me that I have to… it’s a kind of a complaining mode. Mmm…eeeh, complete vocal technique calls it curbing. Like I should complain more. Like “eaaaah”. I’m supposed to do that while humming, I easily hum with a much softer sound. [Marko hums for an example.] So now I have to do this instead. [Marko gives another example.] This kind of stuff, like I should learn to lean towards that type of sound. That mode is the sound that I use for singing. And when there are difficult parts, certain higher notes that I find difficult, when I keep doing that it becomes easier and more natural all the time. And when my head tells me to sing something in a certain way, I’ll be able to pull it off. Once that is under control and comes easily, I’ll probably find something else that feels difficult. And at one point there was a time when I was training my vibrato like crazy. I wanted to be able to pull of all kinds of different styles of it.
Pauliina: Show me something. A really loud one.
Marko: A loud one?
Pauliina: Loud.
Marko: Ah, I have to go further away from the mic.
Marko screams out a heavy metal vibrato.

Pauliina: That was one kind of a singing teacher, or a mentor, Michael Monroe. Marko Saaresto, are you familiar with this Voice of Finland format?
Marko: Mmmh, yes, somewhat familiar, yes. I don’t watch TV so I haven’t really gotten into it.
Pauliina: How can you live without a television?
Marko: Quite brilliantly. I have so many different things to do that I think… I watch TV when I watch something on DVD. Like I’ve watched all the CSIs, House and all that so I just bought the DVDs and watched from them. Or a movie, if I want to rent or buy one, I do like to watch them. But just randomly turning on the TV and watching whatever happens to be in, for me it doesn’t work. For me it’s just a brainless waste of time. I rather do something else.

Pauliina: These days you can watch different series online legally, at the websites of different media houses and TV companies, after they’ve been shown on TV, should it interest someone. You can also get music online legally. From Spotify for example. You had a rather interesting coming out about Spotify when it comes to revenues. I have this news from Voice right here, and if it can be believed, your songs were listened for 26 000 times and all you got was 14 cents as a band.
Marko: Yes, this is a funny one. I actually got feedback from Spotify on this and we talked about it and I said a lot of good things about Spotify, it functions very well towards the consumers. You pay a certain amount of money, and it’s the kind of payment where people probably pay a lot more money for Spotify than they would normally pay for CDs within a year. And you get a huge library of music that you can listen to any time you like and so. It works very well to consumers. And without a doubt works very well for Spotify and they’re working on developing the system so that it would work better for artists as well. So the direction is a good one. But so far it’s not quite there yet. And the sums I mentioned were just a vague recollection, just something I took out of my hat. They wanted a correction on my statement because they do a lot of work for rectifying the situation and I agreed, I don’t mind making a correction to what I said, I’ll do it with pleasure.

Pauliina: So, Marko Saaresto, are you trying to take your words back?
Marko: No. Because point is that when they do a good job and I hope they will continue doing a good job… The point I had in my statement, which got a little too much attention, was that it’s still not at the level it should be, to be a good thing for the artist as well. I’m sure it’s going to the right direction. I got some accounting numbers a while ago just to be rightly informed and in my opinion the sums aren’t the point. The point is that the situation is where it is and it’s moving to a better direction. And I’m sure it’s moving to a better direction in their opinion too and they want to keep developing it. But I think according to one revenue document there was 15 845 plays and I think I’ll get bad feedback from this as well, and the amount of revenue was 66 € and change. So it’s still not at the level it should be. And the latest revenue had been over 1000 €. But I don’t know how many plays that 1000 € included. I wasn’t able to acquire that information.

Pauliina: What can a band get for 1000 €, for example? If you think about what amounts of money goes into keeping you guys in the business.
Marko: You don’t get pretty much anything for that. A couple of plane tickets for some gig.

Pauliina: I once interviewed this Jonathan from Spotify. Or actually… no, yeah, their CEO. Yes. And it happened on the phone and we had 15 or 20 minutes reserved for it and he was on his way to Tampere Music and Media event and he was sitting in the taxi, going from Helsinki to Tampere by taxi and I tried to talk numbers with him. Like net sales and coverage and so. And he started his answers by saying “You know, Pauliina, it’s a very good question”. And he spoke to me with his fine English for a long time, and had I been there in person with him he probably would have given me a glass of wine and some flower. And I asked again and said that it was a very fine answer, Jonathan, but you didn’t answer the question I was asking.
Marko: Right.

Pauliina: And we kept playing mouse and cat for quite a few dozen kilometers there. But afterwards he had told his Finnish wife what an expert reporter I was. That I hadn’t fallen for the “You know, Paulina” trap.
Marko: You didn’t fall for it.
Pauliina: But still, I didn’t get any numbers.
Marko: Right.
Pauliina: I never got the numbers. I’m still waiting for Spotify to actually give information about their net sales and other figures in their media statements.
Marko: Yeah.

Pauliina: But it’s a good thing that they’re trying to find some kind of a channel for…
Marko: It’s really great in my opinion as well. And for my own part I want to cheer them on for trying to find new ways to do business in this field and I want to support them in the work they do and in the direction they want to go. I’m just hoping something good will come out of it for us artists as well, in the end. For real.

Pauliina: Next up we have some Def Leppard and Pour Some Sugar On Me and if you don’t have this album yet and would like to have it, remember not to download it for free. Go to a record shop or buy the monthly Spotify membership.
Marko: Yeah.