Artist:  Lions Share  

Date:  27 June 2007 

Making a triumphant return after a six year break Swedish Melodic Metallers Lions Share roar back onto the scene with their latest release 'Emotional Coma'.  We catch up with founding member and guitarist Lars Chriss to find out more about the new look band, heavier sound and that rather disturbing album cover ...

MM - How did the rehearsals go today?
Lars – It’s been pretty great, we’ve been doing a couple of shows already now so we’re getting better and better.  We had the Sweden Rock Festival a couple of weeks ago, so we’re in good shape. 

MM – I believe you will be playing with Manowar again soon? 
Lars – Yes this Friday we’ll be playing an outdoor festival in Sweden and the week after we will play with Manowar at the Magic Circle Festival in Germany.  We’re looking forward to that because there will be 20,000 people.  MM – Am I right in thinking you toured with Manowar about 7 years ago?  Lars – Yes we were the support for the Scandinavian Millenium tour which was Dio, Manowar & Motorhead.  We did the big ice skating rinks for a month.  That was so amazing, to hang out with my idol Ronnie James Dio every day, he’s like my God!  All the bands were really great to us though and that was actually the high point in my life. 

MM - I’ve noticed the band are also playing the Metal Heart Festival in Norway this August? 
Lars – Yes we will be playing there with Queensryche, Testament, Therion, Candlemass, Nevermore and Dimmu Borgir among other.  It’s our first time in Norway actually.  We’ve been in Finland, played all over Europe but never in Norway.

MM - Do you have any other live dates prior or after the festival lined up? Any plans to tour in support of the new album maybe?
Lars – We have a couple of Swedish summer festivals and then we are doing these foreign festivals.  Then we have a couple of offers for European tours in the September/October time, but you know it’s all about timing and whether or not we think it is the right package, so we haven’t confirmed anything yet.  Hopefully it will take us to the UK as well, who knows, it would be great.  The UK invented the kind of metal we are playing. 

MM – Saxon toured over here recently and they were well received. 
Lars – That's good to hear. We’ve toured with them two times in Scandinavia and Europe.  They’re really great guys.

MM - What can the fans expect from a live Lions Share show? Will you be concentrating on mainly new material or will there be a mixture of older material included in the set?
Lars – Yes we’re playing seven new songs and three old songs.  That’s what we did when we did our one hour set at Sweden Rock.  Now for the next couple of festivals I think we have 45 minutes, so we’ll be playing two old songs and the rest new ones because we want to promote the new album.  It’s a good live set, uptempo, a bit more in your face.

MM - Why the six year break in between this album ‘Emotional Coma’ and the last album ‘Entrance’?
Lars – Well mainly because I hit rock bottom and I felt totally burnt out towards the end of 2001.  We had been releasing four albums and doing tours back to back for years and I had also been taking care of all the business, the production, doing all the interviews, so it was a shock when it happened to me.  Pretty much over night it wasn’t fun any more and I had to take a break.  I told the other guys this and said this is it now, you need to go off and play with other people because I don’t know when I’m coming back.  I didn’t know what I wanted to do. 

MM - What do you feel Patrik your new singer brings to Lions Share?
Lars – I had a sound in mind and my favourite singer of all time is Ronnie James Dio.  I’m also a fan of similar singers like Jorn Lande, Tony Martin and Russell Allen from Symphony X, so that was kind of like the type of voice I was looking for, for my kind of music.  Obviously he’s a great singer and since joining Lions Share he’s made a name for himself from doing work with Astral Doors and by doing session jobs with Wuthering Heights.  So we have a good guy singing in the band and he was hand picked for a reason.  I think we have some chemistry going on on the record, a lot of energy and it sounds fresh.

MM – Going back to the cover of the new album, that's quite a scary figure it has on it, what does it represent?
Lars – Well we wanted a mascot, a figure that could also be on future covers, pretty much like Eddy from Iron Maiden, so we had this guy come up with ideas for the cover.  I don’t know where he got his inspiration from, I think it was some ancient thing.  At first it didn’t have a nose, so we said to put a human nose on it.  I came up with the idea to have the symbol in the middle of our new logo, in between Lions and Share we have like a star, I wanted the figure to look like he’d had this burnt into his forehead.  The guy who did the booklet he came up with the idea of having chains instead of arms.  Maybe for the next album he might have arms or wings or something different. 

MM - This album is the bands heaviest release to date, why the change in direction from the normal Progressive / Keyboard sound of previous Lions Share material?
Lars – Well I formed the band together with the keyboard player, so obviously we wrote the music together and we had in the keyboard parts.  We were very impressed with bands like Dream Theater and wanted to experiment with that kind of music back then.  It felt more original back then because when we released our first album in 1995 there was grunge and hiphop everywhere, it felt like it was only us, Rush and Dream Theater doing this.  Then towards 1999 everyone started to release progressive stuff and it wasn’t that interesting any more. 

Also I felt that when we played live it was more fun to play the more straight ahead rockers.  I think it’s been a natural progression for me.  To me I feel like I’m returning to my roots because I am a child of the NWOBHM stuff and back then I hated Rush! (laughs). I wanted Lions Share to be my heavy metal band and to be more focused and these new guys are also more into metal stuff, even from a thrash element like Megadeth.  In the past we were more into Toto so I think a lot of it has to do with who’s in the band at the time as well. 

When I started writing songs I knew where I wanted to go, so these guys were hand picked to help me go where I wanted to go.  Maybe it’s because we don’t have the keyboards because my song writing style is not that different.  I have tried to maybe write a bit more uptempo, but if you take away all the keyboards then obviously the guitar would stand out more in the mix and it would sound more heavier.  Also I early on decided I wanted a more modern drumming style and I think that Richard has brought a lot more energy to the songs as well, plus Patrik’s voice is pretty raw and aggressive.  But I still have the same influences music wise, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath etc, so to me being on the inside it’s not that different from a song writers point of view, I still write the same riffs and melodies it’s just the production and mainly the absence of keyboards.

MM – What’s been the feedback so far from the fans and the media in general?
Lars – It’s been very positive, especially from the old fan base thank God because you never know, there again you can’t think when you’re making new music … who will like this and will this get good reviews … you must write from the heart and do the kind of music that you enjoy doing.  I wasn’t really that afraid because from my point of view it was not really that different the songs.  We’ve played them beside a couple of old songs and they don’t stand out as like … what kind of music if that?!?

Hopefully we will gain a lot of new fans as well because for the last six years, at least here in Sweden, I’ve seen a brand new generation of metal fans, young kids walking around in Judas Priest and Iron Maiden shirts who were more in kindergarden when we they were released.  So it looks like we can build on these foundations with fresh younger fans as well.  We’re happy and feeling pretty good.

MM - You’ve recently released the video for ‘The Edge Of The Razor’, what made you choose this particular song and what can you tell us about the video and the shooting of it?
Lars – We were going back and forth with which song to do for about three months, it was becoming a joke, then AFM our label said they really wanted ‘The Edge Of The Razor’.  So we finally agreed and we were having a pre-listening session for some journalists and the European media here in Stockholm.  The day after we did the shooting for the video so we did it here in Stockholm with a guy who does motion pictures. It’s always hard to do something that stands out and that is not a typical thing.  We shot it in one day and he worked on it and people can see the video on the limited edition of the album as it’s been included, so they can see it on their computer.

MM - The album also boasts a few guest artists including Bruce Kulick (Kiss), Glen Drover (Megadeth) and Mats Leven (Therion), how did these guys come to get involved with the album?
Lars – Bruce Kulick was in Stockholm to do a Kiss Expo and the studio owner, he used to be the Kiss Army president in Sweden, so it was his idea, he suggested that we invited Bruce.  I’ve been a huge Kiss fan since I was about 9 years old and so I said … Yeh! Absolutely … so he came into the studio, listened to some stuff and he agreed to do the solo. 

With Glen Dover I’ve known him for a couple of years and so usually when he’s in Stockholm or Sweden we hang out, so I asked him if he wanted to do it and he did.  Mats Leven he lives in Stockholm as well.  He did the backing vocals for the first two Lions share albums, so it was a no brainer, we wanted to have an additional voice mixed with Patrik’s doing the chorus’s to help make it better and stand out.  He’s a nice guy and a great singer.  We also had Eric Peterson from Testament, he was supposed to do a solo but we had to go into mixing it before he was able to download it so it didn’t end up on the album unfortunately.

MM – The album includes an interesting cover on the album Angelwitch’s ‘Sorcerer’s, what made you decide to choose this particular song as a cover version?
Lars – Well I was a fan of that first Angelwitch album when it came out, I thought it was really great.  Then a couple of years ago we received an offer to appear on a compilation for a European label so we started working on it along with some other demo’s we’d previously done.  When we were more or less done we felt this song had turned out so great and it fits with our own material so well, it actually sounded like a Lions Share song.  Patrik was especially very happy with it and his vocal performance and wanted it on this album, so we never sent it off and stopped thinking about it as a cover.  We didn’t know when it would be released with this other package so we decided to include it on ‘Emotional Coma’ instead.  It felt very natural to have it included. 

MM - Having been in the music business for some time now you must have seen some radical changes over the years.  Some good, some bad.  What do you think has been the biggest shake up over the years and what if anything would you like to see change?
Lars – Since we started out with our first album in 1994/95 I think music wise it is much better today.  Hard rock and heavy metal is probably more popular now than it has been in the past 10 or 20 years when it was the end of the eighties. Especially here in Sweden and in Germany etc.  So for that reason it’s really great to have a lot of new fans.  But on the down side there is also the illegal downloading which makes it very hard to sell records because people use that, even before the albums are released. 

We did the Sweden Rock’s festival on June 7^th and our album was out that same day in Sweden, people were singing along so obviously they already had all the songs! That’s not very good.  I’ve heard it’s even worse in places like Spain and Italy, someone told me that no one ever buys records there any more, everybody is downloading.  It means less money for the record labels and less money for the bands, and of course you need money to put out your product because every time you do it it cost’s money.  It’s not very good. 

MM – I think perhaps the younger generation are maybe more inclined to download an album, even if they pay for it from a legal site, but I still think perhaps the older generation who still remember when we had vinyls and remember when cd’s were at a premium, they still prefer to have a physical cd in their hand and look through the booklet and enjoy it for everything, the words, the pictures, the music, everything as a whole package. 
Lars – Yes, now it’s all iPods and stuff and they don’t care about that stuff.  In some ways I do think the record industry have themselves to blame for this because they were charging too high prices making cd’s too expensive.  From what I understand they have lowered the prices pretty much in the USA so hopefully Europe will follow otherwise we will end up with a lot of imports anyway.  It’s very easy to go on Ebay or Amazon and buy cd’s now. 

MM - As some music fads come and go the Metal fanbase has always remained strong, what do you think makes Metal fans more loyal than perhaps other genres?
Lars – Usually teenage girls listen to what’s on the hit list and that music changes.  It’s usually the bands that are really hot that get the sixteen year old girls screaming, but then maybe two years later they’ve lost them because they’re listening to something else.  With the hard rock stuff the audiences tend to be older audiences and mainly male audiences and that could be one of the reasons.  You tend to see a lot more girls following whatever is trendy.  But as you said before, the older crowd are more into the whole package with t-shirts and having the album to listen to rather than just a hit song to listen to on a compilation or whatever.  It’s more album based music and being able to experience the live show.  I think many hard rock fans are also musicians in one way or another and they have a lot of interest in equipment, rather than just whatever is on the hit list.

MM - Have you had a chance to consider which direction your next album will take or are you concentrating on promoting ‘Emotional Coma’ for the time being?
Lars – Yes, well I never want to release two albums that sound the same but I think we want Lions Share to be more a heavy metal project or band, so it’s probably going to be in more or less the same direction because this is the music I really like.  We’re a riff band.  We’ve always been about having good riffs and great melodies with some hooks.  I think we’re going to stay pretty much the way we are right now.

MM – What does the future hold for Lions Share?
Lars – Continue doing interviews and summer festivals and then we are looking at a European tour as support. We’ve had two offers so far but we haven’t decided yet.  It’s all about timing and going out with the right package so we haven’t confirmed anything.  The dates we have been talking about are basically in September / October time, so we will see what happens.  We would love to come over to the UK and play as well but we don’t have any offers and we don’t go to the party uninvited! (laughs).  Hopefully the kids will like our new album and we will get a request to come over to do a festival or whatever.  We’ve never been to the UK before, although we have played all around Europe. 

MM - Finally any words of wisdom or messages you’d like to share with our readers and all your fans out there?
Lars – We’d like to thank everybody for their support in the past and hope everyone will like the new album and will actually go out and buy it and not download it! (laughs).  Because then maybe we can come over and play.  It’s good news as well that metal is coming back to the UK because I know from tours we did with Saxon they said it was not very good towards the end of the 90’s.  Check out our website – www.lionsshare.org for news and information and don’t be a stranger!

MM - We'd like to thank Lars for staying up so late this evening to chat with us and wish him and the rest of the band every success with their new album.  If you haven't heard it yet then check it out via their website - www.lionsshare.org .  If you like what you hear then go buy the cd, the perfect solution to giving your kid sister nightmares! 

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