Sabaton are one of those bands known for touring. Due to the pandemic, we had to wait quite a while before we saw them stateside. Last year, they hit the road in North America with Judas Priest for their 50th anniversary tour, which was also cut short due to a health scare with guitarist Richie Faulkner, who has since recovered.
And now the band just wrapped up their 2022 Tour to End all Tour here in North America. I caught up with frontman Joakim Brodén to talk about the tour, and I also attended the Detroit show which you can check out our Sabaton photos from that night.
Thanks again for taking the time to speak with me. How are you guys doing on the tour?
Pretty great actually, we’re very happy with the reception so far. We’re at the tail end of things now I guess with only six shows left counting today. A little bit tired, but that’s to be expected. Other than that, all good.
Now that the tour is coming to an end and given the bumps of the last few years, how does it feel to finally get to tour The US?
Well, we thought we’d have one last year with Judas Priest, but, hell. That’s one of the first things we said when we arrived in Seattle some weeks ago. We were just like, let’s finish this thing. We were just like, let’s go on tour, and let’s finish it.
I shot this show in Detroit and it was fantastic. It was great seeing you guys paying homage to Detroit Rock city,with Tommy doing a cover. Ever since Hellfest 2019 he has been doing vocals for Swedish Pagans, or brief covers. Can you take us back to how hectic that was when you lost your voice and he and Chris had to take over vocal duty?
Oh that was super hectic. I’ve never had trouble with my voice like that.I mean it just disappeared. I was feeling bad earlier,that happens all the time. Then I started warming up just to be safe, and nothing really came out. They didn’t even know until about an hour before the show.I just wanted to the production office and started printing lyric sheets, and removing everything that’s unnecessary.
Printing two copies of every song so they can put them on the monitors. Because they know the chorus and the choirs on the songs, but not really anything else. But that was very last minute. I actually came up to the stage with the papers as the intro was rolling. so it was that close. And I said I’m going to sing two or three songs depending on how my voice does, then I was on secretary duty and ending up the papers for their monitors.
It’s very tricky because there’s guitars that need to be played, but your singing in a different rhythm which can be challenging if you have a practiced. But in any case it was like, oh shit! They found that out the hard way. But they did a great job, both of them.
It seems like they had fun with it too.
Yeah, they were polite enough to smile! I think they did enjoy it afterwards.
Oh I’m sure Tommy didn’t mind too much.
Yeah, any second he can be in a singing position he really enjoys it.
Have there been any highlight or stand out moments for you on this tour so far?
Several. There has been good shows in many places, including just the general atmosphere of the crowd. Not too brutal, and, pretty damn polite. There’s talking between songs, but people are civilized and jumping around and ummheadbanging but nothing too violent. There have been no shows that have been outright boring. It’s been good.
When I walked in and saw the helmets, I knew that this was going to be a good show.
We brought as much as we could over from Europe, but seeing as we’re a smaller band over here as in Europe, we can’t bring the full production that we would have for a 15,000 seater arena.
I got excited when you came out with all the smoke, and I was expecting some fire or something.
It’s been a little tricky with pyro here in the US since the Great White incident.
The band has crossed paths with Epica many times, they even played Sabaton Open Air, and it’s finally great to see you guys on a tour together. How did that come about?
I actually don’t know how that came about but you know, with a band like Epica, we’ve ran into each other so many times over the years, quite a lot as we’ve been on the same festival circuit, and with these things it’s always about timing. We always joke because we see so many bands, and we’re like we should do a tour but something or another never lines up. So it’s been one of those things we’ve been waiting to have happen, but it’s just been about luck and timing.
It’s definitely a great team up. And I wanted to say all the new songs have been playing so well for a live crowd. I had mentioned to Par, that it almost seems like these songs were written with the intention of having it be in this kind of setting. Is that something you take into consideration when writing?
Sometimes. But not always. I would say something everyone in sabaton has in common with having different musical taste, being of different ages, some of us grew up with different things. Where Chris might like some of the more brutal side of things, Tommy is more into Power Metal and Gary Moores stuff, but the one thing we all have in common is the classic 80s arena heavy metal. So I guess that comes out in the writing.
Given there seems to be so many new fan favorites with this album, do you think it’s increasingly difficult to write a set list, and what songs do you think will have a frequent appearance from the new album to your list?
It’s always hard to tell, but sometimes you do know quite early. Like from the last album, we knew pretty early that Attack of the Dead Men, and The Red Baron we’re going to be with us for a while. Now I’d say Stormtroopers. Because everybody in the band likes it, and it goes really well with everyone in the crowd. So I guess that that will be the first song that’s going to be with us for quite awhile.
The place was shaking when you played that. I was trying to take a still shot with my camera from the balcony, and it was just moving up and down.
Oh that’s good news! But I guess not for you. (Laughing)
Oh it’s fine, I was just like, this is a good one! Speaking of the set list, do you come up with it based on maybe the country, or the town or even the city that you’re in?
Yes. for example when we were in Nashville, we changed up Steel Commanders for Screaming Eagles because we were close to Fort Campbell, and Screaming Eagles is about the 181st airborne, and that location is only an hour away.
And if we’re playing in Poland, we might play some historical songs about Poland that we wouldn’t be playing on the rest of the tour. So in that sense it’s pretty nice that we don’t have to play the same stuff over and over again. We get a little bit of rotation in the songs.
Before doing a direct follow up album to The Great War, did you guys get bombarded with questions as to why certain significant event wasn’t covered?
Yeah and we had that happen when we announced The Great War as well. Even though we did our research, there were a lot of great stories that we hadn’t heard about. Two of the standout stories that we wanted to do on the Great War, was the Christmas Truce and the Harlem Hellfighters. But we didn’t have the right music.
So they were really targeted for the second time around. And we also didn’t have anything from the southern front and the Italian front on the album either. So we ended up with Soldier of Heaven. A lot of stuff came to us from fans. We’re passionate about history but we by no means are experts. We either get emails, or books given to us. It just today a fan even gave a book to us.
It’s great that you guys take fan suggestions.
There’s so many great stories. Every nation has its own thing, and what’s common knowledge for a kid in Sweden, might be unheard of for someone in America, and vice versa. Then we’ll end up touring in a place like Brazil, and there will be so many things that we don’t even know about.
And there’s always a language barrier. And sometimes it’s harder to get information about these things. If it’s Scandinavian history, we can read that, and American obviously. But it’s places like Eastern Europe. A lot of their history was suppressed during the Cold War.
And do you feel satisfied now that you got to cover these other significant events such as the Christmas Truce, and Hellfighters?
Yeah. I feel like the next album that we’re going to make is not going to be about World War One. I’m not saying that there aren’t amazing stories, we can make 10 more albums about World War One. But at a certain point we have to abandon the subject I guess and move on.
Plus if we want to create a new stage show as well. It’s all kind of gray, and brown, and green and dark. And it’s also not the greatest research as well because it’s very dark period obviously any conflict is going to be dark, but it’s just that whole thing of how warfare became an industrialized machine of death.
At that time a lot of armies were still wanting to wage war the Napoleonic way. With horses and sabers. That was within many armies, but in the middle, it just turned into this industrialized war machine. It was the birth of Modern Warfare.
I wanted to ask about Christmas truce as we’re almost at the one year anniversary of that release. And if I remember correctly, you wrote it a bit differently than you do your other songs. How did you go about that musically?
The music was custom written for the story this time around. And also something highly unusual this time around, is that some of the lyrics were written at the same time as the music. Usually I’ll have an idea of what I want to write about, and I’ll put in random words, or placeholder lyrics.
But in this case the chorus was already written when I was figuring out and composing the rest of the song. It took a long time, and it took several tries because I’m not used to writing waltzes. And it didn’t occur to me until we were recording it. We have songs in 6 by 8’s, but this is properly a 3/4 so it’s a waltz.
You also dropped a surprise song on us recently with ‘Father,’ which is one of your most thought provoking songs. Can you tell us a little bit more about this track?
It’s about Fritz Haber, who was the father of the Haber-bosch process, which is nitrogen based fertilizer. So in one hand he’s responsible for being able to sustain so many people on our planet, but at the same time he’s the father of chemical warfare, in which chlorine gas was one of his first developments.
So it’s the duality of it. The thing I like about it is that it shows that things aren’t always black and white. And how do you judge a man like that? So I think it sends a good message, that you can’t always view things in black and white.
This is featured on your new EP, and it seems like EPS are a great way for you to stay engaged with your fans, and keep a steady flow of new music for tracks that might not specifically fit into a certain album’s concept.
It is, and we did that with Bismarck. We oftentimes will have these stories that we want to tell but it won’t fit with the theme of an album. I love doing both. people always ask us a lot if we’re going to do EPS, or singles, or albums. And I’m just like, both! Of course we’ll make more albums in the future, but we’re also doing tracks, just because we want to.
I know that you guys also have a film, is that something you can talk about?
A little bit! But most of the the details that we can talk about are already out there. It’s based on the war to end all wars album, and it goes deeper in storytelling. It gives the listener something else other than just the lyrics.
How does it feel to be so engaged in history that you’re able to tell these stories and share that with people who otherwise would never even hear about it in this kind of way?
We never set out to educate, but if somebody learned something along the way, that’s a good thing! But there’s only so much that we can tell in three and a half minutes of heavy metal, but if it’s something that can be a gateway to pique someone’s interest, I find that to be a really nice side effect.
There are enough bands singing about Dragons and beer, and there’s nothing wrong with that, I’ll be the first one to admit that. But at the same time I feel like there’s so many fantastic stories, and they’re being forgotten, so why shouldn’t we play that.
i can definitely appreciate that. Thanks again for speaking with me it was wonderful to finally see you guys here, state side. Is there anything else you’d like to add or say to your fans?
Thank you for the good time! We had an amazing tour, and I hope we’ll be able to come back soon.
