LACUNA COIL

It's friendship not a business

With their previous album „Karmacode” this Milan based female-fronted act joined the company of another top-selling rock-goth-metal bands. First official DVD „Visual Karma – Body, Mind and Soul” has strenghten LACUNA COIL’s position as one of the hottest names on today’s scene. So it’s quite obvious that the expectations connected with „Shallow Life” are really high. I’m definitely not a prophet but something tells me that quality of new, melodic songs – together with undisputtable Cristina’s charm – will let those really nice guys reach another level in their astonishing career. So if you want to know how the gold – or even maybe platinum – was made please follow this conversation. Our guest today is Cristino Migliore, LACUNA COIL’s guitarist.

-Hello Cristiano. Let’s go back in time for a while. Do you remember the day when you joined LC? I guess that if someone would tell you that this decision will change your life completely, it'd be rather hard to believe?
Yes absolutely. It was something that actually none of us could imagine. The same with me. We took our chances. We did what we had to do and we had a lot of luck. So I’m pretty happy with that decision now when I’m looking back.

- Since 1998 there were no line-up changes in the band. it's quite unusual. How would you describe the force that keeps you together - friendship or maybe business?
Well I wouldn’t say that it’s business, ‘cause we don’t really make that much money. So it’s gonna be friendship. We were friends even before we started playing together. We used to hang out to the same bars. We used to go to the concerts together even before we were musicians. This is something that has always been there. We have always tried to understand each other and to work together as a family rather than seeing it as a job. Of course it is job, but we look at it as something that we have all together and I think that it is very important factor for us. Of course when you spend so much time together sometimes you argue or you fight, but it’s like being in the family as I’ve said before. In every family there are arguments and fight but then the important thing is to work together and to work things out to make things better. We are really aware of this and we try to be very supportive to each other and to help each other in any situations.

- Media always pay most of the attention to Cristina. Of course it's quite natural 'cause she's a great vocalist and beautiful woman. Did you ever have had any troubles with it? Don’t you think that it's a little unfair that other bands get less interest 'cause they usually have sweaty and ugly men behind the mics?
Ha ha ha. I think that when you’re speaking about rock or metal band the fact that we have a female singer and like people look at that and say: wow! There’s a girl singing. She’s nice. Check’em out it’s quite natural. And we are not really jealous of this and we understand that if there wasn’t some good music to back it we’d be doing something else since a long time. Because people that realize that there’s more to LACUNA COIL than just a nice girl on the cover of the magazine. I see other bands that this didn’t work out so well, but in our case I must say that we don’t have any problems with that. And we always try to give everybody the same importance. But people like press or TV usually ask of her and we think it’s a kind of natural, because of the kind of music we play. In different kind of music that would be more normal ‘cause there are lot of bands with female singers, but when it comes to metal I understand that it’s kind of unusal.

- "Shallow Life" is first concept album in your career. How would you describe the links between all songs from the new album?
First of all I’d like to point out that „Shallow Life” it’s not really a koncept album. At least not a type of koncept album that maybe DREAM THEATER or QUEENSRYCHE would come up with it. It’s true that there’s a link and there’s like a common thread but it’s not like the album that tells one story and there’s a concept behind it. We just wanted to portrait today’s life where the look of people is very important, where the money is very important, if you have a fast car is also very important and so on. We just wanted to show how we feel it our personal vision of this. And that’s what „Shallow Life” and the lyrics are about.

- Who or what symbolize the shalowness of modern lifestyle? Btw can we see the perfume-like hand grenade as a symbol of "Shallow Life" and in some way the crisis that we have now?
When we started to write the lyrics for the album of course the situation wasn’t as bad as it is today. But we could feel just by watching the news, by reading the newspapers that something was going on and something was going wrong. It was kind of natural that we were focusing on that subject. And we just came out like that. We wanted the really strong image to be put on the cover album. We have that hand-grenade which is in the shape of perfume bottle. It’s kind of symbol of the situation of the world today.

- Do you see any links between album's title and band's name which means "empty spiral"?
Well it wasn’t exactly what we were thinking about in the process. We always like to combine two words. We always used it on our albums like „Karmacode” or „Comalies”. There are two words combined in one word. „Shallow Life” is not exception. We like the meaning of it. We like the fact that those two words sound good together.

- In one of her statements Cristina said that "'Shallow Life' is a natural metamorphosis from within the band; we explored different musical territories while maintaining our own style. She said that album feels more rock. How would you describe those new elements in your music? In which songs in your opinion those elements are most visible?
I agree with that. If you listen to new album and compare it with abums like „Comalies” or „Karmacode” you’ll see that we kinda lost – of course not completely – those orchestral elements that we used to have. The songs on „Shallow Life” are more direct, more rock. But without losing the main ingredients that our music has always had like: two voices or harmonies and so on. I think that this album and the songs on it are more easy to understand in the way although I’m not talkin’ here about pop songs at all. If you listen to the song „Spellbound” or „Wide Awale” they’re totalny different songs from each other, but you’ll recognize the band and find new elements in it. I think this is due to the fact that we wanted something that is less complicated then for example some stuff from „Karmacode” where we tried to put as much stuff as we could. And we absolutely love this album, but this time we were like that we should sit down to write something that we’ll like because it’s simple. And not because there is a thousand different layers. It was just our mood at the time when we wrote. Maybe next album will be totally different, it’ll be super proggressive and super-orchestral ha ha.. With this one we just wanted to – maybe because we really needed it – have something really simpler than in the past.

- So was the creating process more relaxed or more challenging this time. Some say that it’s hardest thing to achieve the simply result…
Absolutely. I have to agree . I have to explain you how we worked on this album. This was the album that took the longest in the writing. We took an entire year off from the touring and playing live. We just concentrated on writing new stuff. It wasn’t easy, actually it was really hard to come up with a good ideas. We were kind of like stuck in the usual writing process that we used for „Comalies” or „Karmacode” but than we were changing ideas and we wanted to make those ideas simpler. And I think that it was a move into w right direction. The songs are simple but they’re not like stupid. There’s really a lot of work behind those songs.

- You went to California to record album with Don Gilmore who has previously worked with LINKIN PARK, TRAPT, AVRIL LAVIGNE, GOOD CHARLOTTE, THE VERONICAS, PEARL JAM, TRUST COMPANY and DURAN DURAN. How would you describe his influence on the album's final sound could you call him a producer or sound engineer only?
Well I think he’s both. Beacuse although he didn’t really change or write parts or completely come up with songs himself, but he really led us into the right direction. He really took the best out of the songs. But we basically were 80 percent done. Of course his contribution was essentials, ‘cause he also helped us in trying to get the result that we wanted. So he really helped in that way. He’s also a very good sound engineer. So he could actually get the sound that we wanted very easily. Just by letting us explaining him what we really wanted to achieve.

- Did you had a chance to visit some famous places or meet some famous California residents. Which one impressed you most?
Unfortunately not. We spent almost two months there. But most of the time we were in the studio recording. We really couldn’t afford to waste any time. Of course we have a lot of fans over there. We’ve been there many times. But this is business not pleasure. Of course we had some days off and we went to the beach or we’ve met some friends, but we were mainly in the studio working on the album because we really thought that this is a really important thing in our career. We wanted to get the best result.