00:00All right, let's be bold. Let's make a prediction then.
00:05I might regret this big time.
00:13Hello everyone, this is Joakim from Samaton and these are my five essential songs.
00:17Maybe Primo Victoria in this case. I mean, we had done demos before, we had recorded an album
00:23which hadn't been released before, I guess. Well, actually, Metallizer I'm talking about now.
00:27But in a sense that is, for me and I think for Per as well, what feels for us like
00:33the start of Samaton.
00:40I had this crazy idea to arrange the choirs like a church choir, not the traditional way done in
00:48harder music and everybody thought I was crazy when we started the song with only my vocals
00:56and then the choir comes in and I had this idea and I didn't know it was going to work,
01:01you know.
01:03But we put down the vocals one by one, it was me and the guitarist standing there, first harmony,
01:08second harmony, third harmony and then we put it all together because we were kind of
01:14so we couldn't listen to the other harmonies while we were recording one of them.
01:19So we were like going blind. It should be this, you know, music theory, it should be like this.
01:25We did it and did it until we had it and then we put all three harmonies up at the
01:29same time.
01:30And at least for me, I knew that's like, yeah, this is Sabaton.
01:34And I remember Per sitting because this is back in the day when we didn't have so much money,
01:39we didn't have a record label. So we were with Tommy Teckgren who were nice enough to
01:44be with us during the day and then we could record at night. So Per was sitting there punching
01:49and recording us, you know, and he went back from the chair and did like that.
01:52So yeah, I still have that moment in time sort of etched into my head.
01:58So I guess it's our first must-play song. Every band has that, you know, the song that
02:07goes with you throughout your whole career and that's our first
02:13must-play track, if you will. I don't know what you would call it. I think also for memories.
02:18There is a nostalgic factor to that and if you've been a Sabaton fan for a bunch of years
02:25that's going to be with you. For us on stage as well. I mean, we always ask the crowd to
02:30sing with
02:31us and jump with us. And I mean, people are asking me if I'm tired of that song and no,
02:36I'm not,
02:36not at all. Because I can basically close my eyes and think back on over a thousand times I've played
02:43that on stage in different parts of the world. People are, this is usually towards the end of the show,
02:48you know. People know it's almost over. People are gonna usually jump and sing along. If there's a
02:53song they have a relationship with, it's a high likelihood they have a few live memories of Primo
02:59and Victoria. Hopefully good ones. Most recent, I would say, must-play. That we know is a must-play.
03:10It takes a while for these things to crystallize, but I'm gonna go with To Hell and Back.
03:22It's over 10 years old. It's hard to judge if a song is a must-play or not until a
03:28decade has
03:28passed. Because some of them are like super popular around the time of release and then
03:34they sort of drift away. But I had this crazy idea that I wanted to mix spaghetti western,
03:41soundtrack music, Clint Eastwood, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, with heavy metal. Everybody said,
03:46you're out of your mind. It's a stupid idea. It shouldn't be done and it can't be done.
03:52And of course that's the safest way of making sure I'm doing anything. That I'm gonna do it in this
03:58case. So I did and it worked out great. I'm really proud of the song and it has been our
04:07show ending
04:08song for a long, long time now. And I don't see us being able to play many shows unless it's
04:15a special
04:15event then without that. Same thing there. People are happy. It's been with us for a while.
04:22So I guess, you know, for every time we do something that's a bit different, we make
04:27the Sabaton sound or whatever Sabaton is about a little bit bigger. And I think Ghost Division in
04:32this case is the first time around that album, Art of War, where that started happening.
04:48I think it's now considered part of the core Sabaton sound. That style of playing. While
04:55when that came out that was by far the hardest. We had never done anything like that at all.
05:02And it shows that, you know, we're an evolutionary band, not a revolutionary band. Every album
05:08there is evolution happening, but it's not going to be a revolution in between two albums.
05:13So if you listen to our latest album Legends and compare it to the first recordings we did,
05:18it's a huge difference. And that's also a song that's got so, so many memories. And it's a perfect
05:25opener because it's not that complicated to play. So actually, one of the reasons we started with that
05:32song and started opening. I shouldn't be telling you trade secrets here, but I am going to do it anyway.
05:37It's that when you're a young band and you're on festivals, you have a very short changeover.
05:42And you've got 20 minutes to plug everything in and start playing. That's tricky. So you hide
05:49yourself under hoodies, pretend you're a crew because you can't afford to do that much crew.
05:52You plug everything in, you hope it works, and then you're going to set your live sound with a...
05:57Maybe you don't have your own monitor engineer who's got to guess this. And that's tricky.
06:02And if you have a complex song to start to play, you're going to make mistakes.
06:08So we decided on Ghost Division because it's pretty basic. It has all the stuff. It has the
06:13harmony vocals, but not too much of it. And the riffs are quite easy. So you can head bang,
06:18and you can almost play it if you trained it enough without hearing anything. So we actually chose that
06:25based on the fact that, okay, at least if everything is hell and nothing works, we can still rock and
06:32sort of
06:33get this song sound pretty good, even though we don't know what's happening on stage.
06:37If everything is technically wrong. And then during the solo or something, I can run to the monitor
06:42engineer and go, do that, you know? So, and then, yeah, became a tradition.
06:49That's interesting as well, Last Stand, because it had a second life through social media coming,
06:54you know, I don't know, eight years after the release of the album or something like that.
07:06It was popular among the most popular when it came out on the Last Stand album.
07:10However, it wasn't really the flagship track. It was always there among the most popular,
07:21but it had higher staying power than other tracks. We see that usually with every album release,
07:28there are some songs that are hugely popular at release, and then they just dwindle and disappear.
07:33Others are growers, that sort of just gets more and more popular over time, even though nobody
07:38basically cared about them during release. And this was trickier to see before, but these days with
07:43streaming, you got the hard data, you know? It's not that complicated. And Last Stand was always like,
07:54it was always standing there at number two, or number three, among the most popular songs. And today,
08:00I think it's probably the most listened to. But when the album was released, I think a lot of people
08:06initially liked Sparta, for example, but that one fell really quick. It's like, okay, it's awesome,
08:11cool, but then you don't listen to it. But it's natural. I mean, we all have, when we listen to
08:16a
08:16new album, some songs we like, and then, you know, five or ten listens later, some of the tracks you
08:22initially liked, you're not that much into, but you discovered two or three new tracks you didn't like
08:28on the first listen, you know? So a bit of a weird one that we, because it's the only time
08:33we had a
08:35social media driven song. We always had organic, you know, fans listening or fans enjoying or discovering
08:42through some somewhere else, you know? All right, let's be bold. Let's make a prediction then.
08:51I might regret this big time. But from the new album Templars, because from that album, I think
08:59that's the one who has the biggest staying power. I could be wrong. But no, I think Templars is going
09:08to be one that's going to be with us for a very, very long time in our live set. There
09:12might be more,
09:13but that's up to you guys to decide, actually.
09:22It sounds very Sabathon without feeling a repeat of what we've done before. It's a fine balance
09:27to go as a songwriter. How do you keep the band's musical DNA while offering something new? And some
09:35people like it when you branch out and do something completely different. Some fans like it to stay as
09:42it is. It's a hard balance. And for us as well, we want to be Sabaton. We like being Sabaton.
09:48We play
09:49this kind of music because we genuinely like it. But we don't want to do the same thing over and
09:53over
09:54and over exactly in the same way. And it's hard to know in advance when you're writing the song,
10:01because some of those that feel the same aren't actually the same. And it's weird enough. I mean,
10:06I might have the hard data because in many cases I've been writing, if people are talking about two
10:11different songs, it's a 99% chance I wrote both of those songs. And I will know exactly what's similar
10:19or not similar between them. And when I read comments on social media, it's like, yeah, this song reminds me
10:25of this.
10:25And I know exactly the chord progressions, the harmonies, the tempos. It's like, I'm not saying
10:32they're idiots. It's just weird to me because in some cases, oh yeah, I can see that. But in some
10:37cases,
10:38it's like, what? They are nothing alike. But there is something in them that reminds that person.
10:47I'm assuming people don't lie about those things, you know? So it's very different and personal as well,
10:53what people feel are the same. So it's the trickiest thing, I think, about being a songwriter.
11:00And this is not Sabaton specific. It goes for any musician. How do you stay the band that the fans
11:07want without having to reinvent yourself all the time, you know?
