Live-Metal.Net - Interviews: Lacuna Coil

April 22, 2007

More than a year after the release of their latest album, Karmacode, Italy’s Lacuna Coil continues its assault on U.S. audiences, winning over new fans with each tour. They will soon go from a support slot on the Jägermeister Music Tour with Stone Sour and Shadows Fall to headlining “The Hottest Chick in Metal Tour,” also featuring Within Temptation, The Gathering, In This Moment and Stolen Babies. When the Jäger tour recently stopped at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, Pa., Greg Maki of Live-Metal.net caught up with guitarist Cristiano Migliore on the band’s bus. The day included an acoustic performance at Russo Music in Trenton, N.J. (which guitarist Marco “Maus” Biazzi missed, forcing Chris to rearrange the songs on short notice), a signing session at Relapse Records in Philadelphia and the show that night.

This was Live-Metal.net’s second time interviewing Chris, one of the friendliest people we have had the pleasure of meeting. A big thank you goes to Chris and Gus, Lacuna Coil’s tour manager, for making time for us on a busy day.

Cristiano Migliore: Yeah, yeah, I remember you.

Yeah, Jerry. He’s always with us. We don’t go anywhere without Jerry.

That was right before Karmacode came out, and you told me then that it had the sound that you, as a band, had always wanted to have.

I think we got pretty close to what we always wanted to have. But I think that after a while you also probably change, also, your tastes, so we’ll probably do a few different things in a different way. But, overall, I think it’s the closest result we’ve ever achieved.

Yeah, today was crazy.

Not the whole tour, but we’ve had a few days where we’ve had to do a lot of stuff. Today was probably one of the worst days. We had a day in Boston where we had to get up at, like, 6 for the early show at FOX TV, FOX News, and then we had an acoustic set in the afternoon, and then the show. That time was pretty crazy.

You know, it’s not like we’re doing much. It’s not like going to the office for eight hours a day or going to a warehouse and working. But, still, it actually requires a lot of energy because it’s really stressful to perform. We had to perform live, for example, on FOX News. You get kind of nervous, you know? So it’s like you’re there, and everything, of course, goes totally fine, but, I mean, until it’s done you’re always like—you didn’t sleep much, and then you can’t go to bed because it’s already late in the morning, so you don’t feel like sleeping anymore, and then you have other stuff to do. You’re always running around, rushing everywhere. It takes a lot of energy, but it’s not the worst job in the world, for sure.

It was quite an experience, actually. I didn’t have time to rehearse, because since we play together, it’s not like I do the rhythm parts and he does the lead or the other way around. We just, like, kind of mix. So there is not a single song where I actually play the whole rhythm part so that I can follow the voices or the voices can, like, stand on top of the music that I play. So I had to rearrange the songs really quick, mixing my parts and his parts so that the songs would actually sound full, not too empty. It was crazy.

It was alright. Even the fuck-up, even then it was the song [“Heaven’s a Lie”] where I didn’t really have to change anything either. [laughs]

I was like, “Oh, yeah, it’s so easy.” Then I was like, “Oh, what am I playing?”

Was it hard to strip down the songs and arrange them to play them that way to begin with?

It’s not easy. Also, because the songs were born in a completely different way. When we write songs for the album and they’re electric songs with distortion and everything else, it’s like they actually come out like that. When we write music, it’s not like we sit down with the acoustic guitars and then we just play, you know? We use computers and we try different samples, and we record bass and electric guitar right away. So it pretty much sounds the way it’s gonna be on the album. When you have to rearrange that into two guitars and two vocals, it’s pretty tough. You just have to have a lot of imagination.

I think it’s probably the best tour we’ve done since Karmacode was released. Not in terms of maybe the amount of people seeing us, but the response is just amazing. We’ve had some really good responses also with Zombie and then Ozzfest, but this is really, like, way beyond anything that’s happened on any previous tour. Last night and, I must say, pretty much on every show, we have signing sessions after our set, and last night we were signing for over an hour. You should’ve seen the amount of people. I mean, they kept coming. It was like being at the market, stock market or something like that. It’s crazy. It’s going really, really well.

Yeah, some nights Shadows Fall will be main support and some other nights we’ll be main support.

We’re playing some shows together, yeah. We’ve played two so far, and both have gone really well, actually. For being the same kind of package that somebody can find on the Jäger Music Tour, there’s a lot of people.

Since this is the Jägermeister Music Tour, is there a lot of Jäger flowing backstage?

Yeah. [laughs] Unfortunately, there is. We try not to exaggerate too much. I mean, we knew since the beginning that it was gonna be like this, so we try not to get too involved, like, OK, I’m gonna just go to the bus, pretend like nothing’s going on.

Straight from this tour you go into a headlining tour. Will that be your first full headliner in North America?

Yeah, this is gonna be the very first headliner we’ll do here in America . We’re quite excited.

Who came up with the package, “The Hottest Chicks in Metal,” they’re calling it?

We were actually talking about this tour since a long time. We were trying to put a package together that would make sense, that would attract as many people as possible. Then we found out that [singer] Cristina [Scabbia] was gonna do this hottest women in metal photo session for Revolver, and we thought, why don’t we try to put together a package that has all female singers? It would be, probably, interesting, and people would be interested in seeing, maybe, bands like Within Temptation and The Gathering that didn’t really tour much over here. They have a new album out, and, also, bands like In This Moment and Stolen Babies are quite interesting, you know, they’ve been playing a few shows around. Let’s wait to see what happens. And so far, I must say, the ticket sales are doing really well.

Yeah, yeah. That’s what we thought. We might as well put something together that people won’t see very often around. So let’s see what happens.

No. In a way, it’s actually like playing at home because you’re playing in front of your fans, the people that already know you.

You don’t have to win them over, yeah. It’s a lot more stressful to play shows like these ones with Stone Sour or Ozzfest, for example, because you play there and you know that most of those people have never heard of you, you’re one of the many bands that will play there that day. So I must say that on this Jäger Music Tour every night has been great. But to actually play a headliner show is more like you just have an evening with some friends, and it always goes well.

Playing in the supporting slots, you’re doing almost all songs from Karmacode. Are you planning to dust off some of the older ones for the headliner?

For the headliner, for sure. We actually have a contest on our web site, the EmptySpiral.net web site. We are asking people which songs they would like to hear on that tour, songs that we probably have never played over here.

Not yet. It’s not out yet. We’re still waiting to see. But, I mean, we gave a few titles that people could choose from, stuff that we haven’t played in years. So we even have to, like, rehearse and practice a little bit. But we want to see first what people think. It would be nice to play songs that we haven’t played in a long time.

It was great. It was weird. It was weird, though.

Yeah. It’s a very strange atmosphere. When we did Ozzfest in 2004, playing on the second stage, the atmosphere is very wild. There’s a lot of energy, people moshing all the time. Even though we were of the softest bands in the bill, there was still quite the wild reactions down there. But when we did Ozzfest this year, it was so different. I mean, the reactions were great pretty much every show, but it was weird to play in front of people, like, sitting down. They were there listening, and it was very hard to keep a lot of energy on stage. But playing on such a huge stage actually helps because you can move a lot. It was actually very good, very different from 2004 but very good.

You also did the Blackest of the Black Tour last year. Glenn Danzig seems so intimidating. What is he like?

He’s actually a very nice guy. He’s been around for years. People know him everywhere he goes. I can see if he gives the impression that he’s an asshole or he’s a rock star or whatever, but he’s a really cool guy. Sometimes when you are in this business for so many years and you have all this pressure, all these people want to meet you and blah, blah, blah, I can understand. For us, it’s not like that, of course, because we’re not as big. But, I mean, I can see where this comes from. Sometimes you just want to chill out. But it was really good to be on tour with him. He’s, like, one of our godfathers, you know?

We don’t really do anything special. Usually, we’re always, like, either lying down or trying to take a nap. We’re always very lazy and stuff, like right before the show, Gus, our tour manager would come in and like, “It’s time to go, half an hour.” And then we start getting ready very slowly. And then as soon as you get there and you’re ready to go on stage, this adrenaline rush gets there, you wake up and just go. Maybe the only ritual we have is, like, if we make an espresso coffee right before we go on. That’s something that is never missing.

Then what about when you’re done? You’ve got all that energy and adrenaline, so what do you do?

Oh, we scream and shout all the time. It’s like Italians, like, “It was great!” “No, it was shit!” Then everybody thinks we’re fighting, like, “What’s going on?” We’re like, “Oh, no, we were talking about the show. It was great. We had fun.”

Well, today you saw it.

But I have my excuse. I didn’t really have much time to practice. It was fun, though. The thing is that when you play a show, even if you fuck up really bad—once, we were actually playing at Ozzfest, and we were playing “Heaven’s a Lie,” which is a song we’ve played since—I don’t know—four or five years. I don’t know for what reason our drummer just miscounted one of the measures and just cut an entire part, and he just started playing the next one instead. And we were all playing and we didn’t really know where we were anymore because he was playing something completely different. “Oh, no, it’s not that part yet. What are we doing?” But we kept going, and for whatever reason, we were able to finish the song in a completely different way, a completely different version. [laughs] But people didn’t know, of course. Most of them didn’t even hear the song before, so they were like, “That was song was great, especially the end.” We were like, “Uh, yeah, it’s not really supposed to be like that, actually. Glad you liked it.”

One of the things I always like to see when you guys are playing on stage—I guess part of it is because there are so many of you—is the synchronized headbanging.

[laughs] Yeah, yeah.

It actually did. You wouldn’t believe the first times we actually tried that. When you’re just, like, spinning your head in a circle like that for a little while, when you stop you get so dizzy. We used to get dizzy. Now it’s, like, you don’t feel it anymore, but in the beginning sometimes I thought I was gonna fall down. It takes practice, but now it’s like autopilot. You just do it.

Well, we’re gonna be here till, like, mid-June, and then we’re gonna go back to Europe , where we’re gonna play a few festivals. I think we have five or six scheduled for the summer. I don’t actually think we’re gonna do anything else because we want to start writing new songs for the new album, and it will be a good time to write after the festivals. We don’t really have anything planned yet.

We didn’t really start yet. We have some ideas that we had left from the Karmacode sessions, but I don’t know if we’re gonna actually use those because they’re almost two years old and we don’t know how they could fit with—you know, since Karmacode came out till today, a few things also changed in our music tastes, and I don’t know what kind of album the next one will be. Of course, we like very much Karmacode, so it’s, for sure, gonna be an evolution of that. We’ll see.

It sounds like there’s definitely going to be a much shorter gap between albums this time.

Yeah, yeah. We definitely want to keep it shorter. What happened between Comalies and Karmacode was totally exceptional because of what happened over here in the U.S. The album came out in Europe in 2002 and in America , as well, but it wasn’t until we came here and toured that it actually started selling over here.

Yeah. Actually, it was 2003 when we did Opeth. And then we were doing a Type O Negative tour and Anthrax, and that’s when it started really going. And then Ozzfest, P.O.D. and whatever the next year happened and kept us from writing new stuff because when you’re on tour it’s impossible. I don’t know how all these bands that write on the road do it because you have so much stuff to do all the time. You can’t sit down and actually play. You don’t have time to do that.

Yeah. We are actually trying to collect as much stuff as we can, but it’s not really easy because the thing is that to actually have a proper DVD with behind-the-scenes, professionally done, you really need somebody that’s there only to tape anything that happens. We try to tape stuff ourselves, but you always have to walk around with a camera. Sometimes you have to take a picture or whatever, you have to do something, and you can’t be there with the camera and signing autographs and stuff. You can, but, I mean, after a while you just can’t be there all the time. It takes a lot of time and a lot of people and energy to do that. But we’re trying to put together as many things as we can. We want to have something special. We like, for example, very much the Type O Negative DVD that just came out. That was pretty cool. We’re not gonna do something like that, but we like that kind of stuff that people can actually see things that they usually wouldn’t see otherwise. A live DVD is cool, but that’s something that if you went to the show you know already. If you actually put some backstage scenes or whatever or stupid shit happening, people will be probably more interested. We’re trying to put things together.