With the release of their debut Een Verloren Verhaal, epic symphonic, folk act VANAHEIM are becoming a well known presence on the scene. Rock Out Stand Out’s Lotty Whittingham grabbed a chat with lead guitarist Michael van Eck about the album, their sound, the folk metal scene, mental health and Stranger Things. Here’s what happened.
For those haven’t heard Vanaheim before, how would you describe your sound?
Well, let me get this beauty [shows vinyl] This is our debut album which we have released and it is, if you look at the cover, I think that describes a bit on what the musical style of Vanaheim is. Basically, I would describe it as very spherical, storytelling kind of cover. It’s a story book and that’s how we currently describe our music so we have evolved our music too. When we released our EP, I was not part of the band at that time but it started out as pagan, folk metal with some accordians and epic stuff here and there but you could hear a Moonsorrow, Finntroll vibes in it.
Over the years we have developed a big passion for a lot of things; for example movie soundtracks. We also love Disney soundtracks and Disney movies, we love fairy tales and big fans of Nightwish so those really help. That shifted our music more towards a symphonic metal aspect but still with the roots of what we had before. We try to do a groovy, epic; it has to be epic, like you’re inside a story or playing a Dungeons & Dragons campaign and you can put the music on as a soundtrack.
That explains why I drew to it so quickly, I am a huge fan of movie soundtracks. You formed in 2015, this is your debut. Were there factors that pushed the release date back?
I joined the band around 2018, a year after the release of the EP. Vanaheim went through a couple of line-up changes, I can now say we are a stable line up. With me joining the band, I also think the tastes of music have changed a lot. It has not been a surprise or secret that we took our time with this album, we of course did a lot of the work for the album during the pandemic and to us, the pandemic was a blessing in disguise as we were at home a lot and we could work on the album. We took almost four years to write, produce half the album. If it weren’t for the pandemic, a year or two could be added to that.
When we started the album, we didn’t really talk with each other to set our scope. The only thing we said to each other was that we wanted to create an epic album but what does an epic album mean? For someone, one church organ is epic but for someone like Zino [van Leerdam], our vocalist, he wants to have a three hundred piece orchestra with three or four hundreds tracks of things happening at the same time. We never really talked about it. We were writing the songs and everything, then at one moment we were like ‘the choirs and orchestrations need to be finished. That’s probably going to take a year’ because Zino did everything in the orchestration sections. He wrote all the orchestral sections; every single violin track, french horn, he wrote everything himself. It takes a lot of time.
The girlfriend of our bass player arranged all of the choirs for the album, it took a lot of time and we were very unstructured I would say. That resulted in taking a lot of time but we really didn’t want to compromise. It’s the debut album which is your first stamp on the world so we took our time with it. We learnt a lot from this process, particularly on how to be more efficient and we are already talking about the scope for the next album so there aren’t any surprises anymore.
Your vocalist sounds like a folk metal version of Mozart, he composed parts for other instruments even though he could only play piano.
Zino is very special in this regard, he is the pianist/keyboardist. A lot of it was written through the piano and keyboard, he describes it as when he closes his eyes; he sees an orchestra in front of him and he sees these people playing their instruments. Basically what he did was what he had in his head and translated into what you hear on the album. Nowadays, we have programmes; we don’t need a full orchestra anymore. You can have a keyboard with samples on it and you can write it in your computer. Your expressive freedom is immense and yeah that’s a skill not everyone has, it’s unbelievable.
That’s an awesome skill to have. You mentioned your music looks into aspects of mental health. Could you explain a bit more?
It has multiple aspects I would say. If you talk about our music itself, it has quite the message. This album has quite the message. It’s not always necessarily mental health related but it is quite a humanistic message we try to bring. It’s basically about how people are ruining the earth based on greed, it’s based on a lot of things.
We went through a lot of struggles during the process of the album. We had our first fight in the band, a huge disagreement in the band and we had a lot of stress. We had burnout peroids and generally a misunderstanding of character. This is something we have really learnt with this album. Basically the album is talking about things like over-consumption, human greed, respect towards others and the environment.
The album is in Dutch so if you’re not a Dutch speaker, it’s a bit more difficult but even if you understand Dutch, you have to search for the message. We have one acoustic track Valoren where it talks about mental health. This is written by Bram [Trommelen] our drummer, out of nowhere he came up with these lyrics. It’s about these people that are in this big city and they are explorers, they just want to go out in the world and discover something. During their travels they find this island where the story is based on. They are depressed in their own life and want to find something new again. Everything is dark and grim for them, in the end it doesn’t end very well but they tried.
That’s really awesome to hear about, I was going to ask what challenges you faced recording the album. Was there any particular track that gave you challenges?
I think everybody in the band had health problems afterwards or injuries. When Bram recorded the drums he couldn’t really play drums anymore for some months because it was too hard. We had a limited budget so we didn’t have time to record all the drums so he had to go super hard on them and I think he sprained something in his arms. Zino destroyed his throat so he had to go to a doctor and had to really learn how to use his voice again. I had tendonitis, the wrist pain; I had a lump on it after recording the album. The only one who didn’t have any issues was our bass player Mike [Seidel]. Rikke [Linssen], our violin player, she didn’t have anything.
It wasn’t necessarily difficult the songs but it was a lot. We can’t complain as we had the best situation we could have. We recorded the drums in a professional studio with Joost van den Broek, he does work for Epica, Powerwolf and Blind Guardian so we knew from the beginning we wanted to work with him. We recorded the drums there. I recorded the guitars at home and so was the bass. The violin, vocals, choirs and other parts were recorded at home. The most difficult part was delivering it all to the studio in the end.
We had this entire project with all the orchestral and it had to be balanced and mixed. When you have an orchestra, they have specific volumes. The French Horns are supposed to be a bit louder and you have to balance everything out. We spoke with the engineers on how we wanted the tracks to sound and how we wanted the tracks mixed. There was four hundred tracks so in the end we gave him one big USB key to use and he said it was one of the more difficult albums he had to mix in his career. It was because there was so much. We learnt it was cool to have a full orchestra, choirs, french horns but you have one frequency range that is full. The important lesson was that we can do a lot more with less.
You did a couple of shows with Heidevolk, how did those go?
Amazing. We had played with them before when the band were just some years old and we didn’t have every band member because we had session musicians, those were the old days of Vanaheim. To me, it’s logical that if Heidevolk do a show and need a band, they ask us or Valderstrom. In the Netherlands, you have Heidevolk, Vanaheim or Balderstrom. That’s the perfect Dutch metal package. We were asked to do these two shows which was super cool as it’s Heidevolk. They are pioneers in this genre in the Netherlands, they have a heritage in this genre.
Our album is in Dutch and I do think Heidevolk inspired that because they do it in Dutch. It’s so convincing in the Dutch language as it is so close to us of course. They are not afraid to do it, their new album is super kickass. It’s really heavy and has a lot of folk instruments in it, it’s like old school Heidevolk. After the two shows, I became a fan of the band. They are really good live. That’s one of the fun things with Vanaheim, I discover so many bands that I never heard of.
What I love even more is the scene, the people. I come from a Death Metal mentality where everyone is just crossed arms and just standing there. With these festivals, people are dancing, they’re happy, drinking and they just enjoy it. I think that’s one of the things I enjoy so much about Vanaheim and this genre of music, it’s been such a revelation to me. The people make a genre.
As you say that; I remembering the time when Korpiklanni played at a festival I went to and a conga line started in the mosh pit.
I’ve seen my fair share of rowers, wall of deaths, hugging pits and everything. It’s just awesome.
I love that with metal, you don’t know what you’re going to get sometimes.
It’s a very heart-warming crowd. The fans of this genre of music are very open minded and a lot of them are very progressive. There is something I really like about these people and it’s always a party. It’s always fun, that’s super interesting of course. When you play the music and see people dancing, you get energy from it.
There’s a similar vibe at power metal shows too. That side of things helps to lift people’s morale, particularly if they struggling with something.
Absolutely, we have heard multiple times that our music helped people. When they come to our concerts, they tell us they have been through some bad times and when they come to the festival, they tell us we made their day or week. That gets you emotional that you can have this much of an impact on people by just playing your music and this is something I wouldn’t have gotten in another scene. I think the folk/pagan/power metal scene is so heart-warming.
As you say that; I remembering the time when Korpiklanni played at a festival I went to and a conga line started in the mosh pit.
I’ve seen my fair share of rowers, wall of deaths, hugging pits and everything. It’s just awesome.
I love that with metal, you don’t know what you’re going to get sometimes.
It’s a very heart-warming crowd. The fans of this genre of music are very open minded and a lot of them are very progressive. There is something I really like about these people and it’s always a party. It’s always fun, that’s super interesting of course. When you play the music and see people dancing, you get energy from it.
There’s a similar vibe at power metal shows too. That side of things helps to lift people’s morale, particularly if they struggling with something.
Absolutely, we have heard multiple times that our music helped people. When they come to our concerts, they tell us they have been through some bad times and when they come to the festival, they tell us we made their day or week. That gets you emotional that you can have this much of an impact on people by just playing your music and this is something I wouldn’t have gotten in another scene. I think the folk/pagan/power metal scene is so heart-warming.
I think they say music heals, in the series Stranger Things this is actually shown where the character Max is saved out of the dark space through the song Running Up That Hill. There’s a phrase “music reaches parts of the brain that words can’t”.
I think they also perfectly visualise that scene, I was genuinely almost crying at that point. It was so emotionally heavy and they managed to transport it from the series into your soul. That’s the effect music can have on you. It was beautiful. This season was an emotional rollercoaster, the show knows how to get you emotionally. Everyone in Stranger Things plays their role well, I am curious for Season Five.
As family members, friends, band members; is there anything you think we can do more off so people feel comfortable about reaching out when they are struggling?
Don’t be afraid to share your emotions and don’t be afraid to talk up. In Vanaheim, we are always emotionally open as possible. The moment there is something, you talk. It’s one of the reasons why we are such a tight band together because we really open up to each other on an emotional level. We talk about everything; life experiences, stuff that happens in life. Never be afraid to show your emotions. You have this stigma, as a guy, that you aren’t allowed to show your emotions. Everybody should be able to show their emotions, never keep it to yourself and find someone to talk about it with. It’s such a relief to be able to talk about it, even with complete stranger; sometimes, it’s good to open up to a complete stranger and they can ask you objective questions. That gives you the opportunity to look within yourself and find out why you are sad and depressed.
We had during the album process, lots of bad stuff happening; relationships breaking up, family members passing away and lots of stuff happening at school. You have got to open up to each other and talk to each other. Don’t be afraid to share your emotions.
Definitely as the more you bottle it up, you feel worse.
That is something that is definitely happening, people try and make out it’s not as bad or they don’t take it seriously. It’s very toxic. If you talk about everything, life is so much better but you need to find the right people to talk about it with. In Vanaheim, we are always open to everything. If there is something going on, tell us. Always be open.
It’s important to be open about the negative things going on. I also think it’s really important to be open about what helps you get through these hard times. I mean we are better than we were but there is still a long way to go due to the stigma.
There is a stigma. One of us in the band went to therapy recently and he was afraid to say so at first. You don’t have to be afraid. It’s completely normal, everyone needs someone to talk to from an outsider basis. Someone who has a different perspective on it. Why should there be a stigma around saying something helped you? There shouldn’t be. I do sense it’s becoming more normalised now.
What is awareness like in Belgium around mental health?
In the Netherlands, it’s a bit better. People are also more open minded there I think, more progressive. In Belgium, it’s a bit different and a bit more closed. I find it’s a shame that it’s stigmatised like this. The world would be a much better place if people could talk about their problems. For me personally, one of the aspects I have difficulties with is that I tend to see the negatives first before the positives. I know this is something a lot of us do, it’s a human nature thing.
What do you like to do to unwind?
It’s something I am not good at doing is unwinding. It’s something I am looking into talking to a therapist about as I do have problems destressing. I have started reading; one of the things I find about reading is that I am focussed on one thing. I also like walking and going outside. I am really still trying to discover myself and I am doing this everyday. I also love eating and making food.
Do you have a message for Vanaheim fans and Rock Out Stand Out readers?
Don’t expect an album in the next two years so I hope you are happy with Een Verloren Verhaal. Enjoy it, cherish it. We’ll try to get it out faster this time. Love each other, respect each other, enjoy music and be open about everything. Don’t hide your feelings and find someone to talk to.
Thank you so much Michael for talking with Rock Out Stand Out today.
