DREAMSEEKER is the exciting new project concocted by multi-instrumentalist and song writer Johannes Fryholm. Rock Out Stand Out’s Lotty Whittingham caught a chat with him just after the release of the first single Medieval Mystery. They spoke about the project; in particular how it originated, being inspired by a video game and the upcoming album title is revealed right here. Here’s what happened.
Hello Johannes, thanks for joining us today. So we’re here to talk about your brand new project Dreamseeker; so can you tell us more about what that’s about?
First of all, what Dreamseeker is taken from the name of one of the strongest weapons in the game Chrono Trigger. Chrono Trigger is a Super Nintendo game from 1995, it’s about time travel and finding out the world is going to end, but then going back in time and travelling throughout history to stop the world’s apocalypse. I first played the game in 2007 when I was in high school, it instantly became one of my favourites of all time. I think around that time, I was starting to listen to more and more power metal; so around 2011/2012 when I was writing some of the earliest Skyblazer songs, I started working on a song that was 24 minutes long and it was going to be inspired by Chrono Trigger and also inspired Symphony X’s The Odyssey, a song I was listening to a lot at the time. That’s also a 24 min song and that’s about The Odyssey. So this is going to be the Chrono Trigger version of The Odyssey as such.
I know this is one of my most revered games of all time but I haven’t seen much music ideas come from it or anything that felt inspired by it in the sense. I’ve definitely not seen power metal inspired by it.
There seems to be a tiny rise in Video Game inspired power metal these days, it seems people who are fans of metal love video games too.
Yeah exactly, I think maybe 13/14 years ago it was a lot about movies and the songs inspired by movies. One of my favourite albums of all time is ReinXeed’s Welcome To The Theatre, the entire album has songs that are inspired by Tommy’s Johansson’s favourite movies. Then you listen to another album called Majestic, every song is inspired by a different Disney Movie. I’ve always admired that way of writing a song just completely inspired by a story or just something that resonated with me then of course trying to work in all the musical ideas that comes from watching the movie. The best ways to do that is when you’re listening to it and you can envision the original movie or the story it’s inspired by.
Do these ideas come up when you’re playing Chrono Trigger or any video game? Do you just hear something in the soundtrack and think ‘ooh I would like to re-create that’ or pick up inspiration?
Yes sort of. I think like with a lot of different songs that I made because I usually hear something that I really like and then I want to recreate it in someway. Usually, it’s more if I hear a musical idea that I really like; I immediately think, I would really love to do something like this.
You’ve released your first single Medieval Mystery recently.
Yes, we released that about a week ago now. The origins of this Chrono Trigger metal concept are that it started with a 24-minute-long song, it was just going to be one song with a lot of different parts. Then about five years ago, I started re-working it into a concept album and had that in the pipeline to be released by Skyblazer at some point. At one point a few of the songs were just song titles, I had no musical idea for them whatsoever; all I knew was I was going to have one song called something like this and another called something like that.
When you’re trying to recreate the story of the original game into a musical album inspired by that story, then you have to think ‘this song is going to be inspired by this part of the game’ and so on. I can’t say they follow exactly how the story goes as that would be copyright infringement so I can’t do that anyway [laughs]
For example with Medieval Mystery, I think I finished writing it in May or June last year so it was only recently it was finished. From the original 24 minute long song, I’ve only kept maybe five minutes of it and written everything else for the last two years. Most of the music is extremely fresh.
Medieval Mystery takes me back to playing those old video games, particularly when you go into the villages when you first start. Would you consider releasing the twenty four minute version?
At somepoint, maybe as bonus content but I wouldn’t make it full and whole. I would probably release it as some extra content incase anyone wants to see it. I think it’s a good idea to go through your song writing process with your fans and show how the song has developed. As a fan, I really admire when an artist shows you their craft and shows you the process because I think that can be inspiring to a lot of people.
As a journalist, I love learning about that process as well. You’ve announced quite a few guests for this project already as well.
I have. So it’s going to be a double album, part one and part 2 of the same album. Part one is pretty much finished, it just needs mixing and mastering. The thing is, the guests I have announced so far are all on the first single as I wanted to build up to that and only announce the guests that were on the first single to give it more focus. It was really nice to be able to work with them; for example one of my friends who is three hours away from Stockholm is Kristen Starkey and I asked her if she could recommend anybody for this project, I was looking for a female singer who could hit the high notes, sing with emotion and be a good fit for this project role. She then recommended Narcissa and I asked her immediately if she was interested in singing this at all and when I got the recording from her, I thought it was perfect. It was nice to get to work with Narcissa and she has an amazing voice.
There’s some musicians on this project that I am getting to work with for the first time. What I knew about Narcissa was that she sung with Powerglove and she was the new vocalist for AfterTime but I hadn’t heard that much from her before so it was really nice to get some fresh voices and music on this project and hear their take on it. I was really blown away by her vocal takes on this album. I’ve played with and performed with a Swedish band called Vandor many times; they have several different vocalists and mostly it’s Vide Bjerde and I have had him sing on one of my songs before, which was Across The Heavens by Skyblazer, and this time I wanted to work with Jack L. Stroem because there was one role where I envisioned someone sounding like Jack so I had to have him for this role. I asked him to perform this role and he accepted.
Of course we have the instrumentalists for this song, so we have Max [Cruz] from Quest Bound who is one of the best guitarists I have ever seen. We also have Fabio [Garau] from Grimgotts as well of course. He has an amazing keyboard solo.
So the single is out, what else is in store for Dreamseeker?
So the plan is, in the next immediate future, is to keep announcing the rest of the guest musicians from the album. There are a lot so it will take some time. From just looking at the track list of the album and the amount of guests, there’s going to be twelve vocalists on the album and even more guest instrumentalists so likely this will take a while to announce everybody. I don’t want to announce everybody on the same day. I also want to give everybody a chance to share the posts and invite others to be a part of the project as well.
Otherwise, the plan is to then release more singles once they are ready and the plan is to release the first album this year. I do have the cover art ready but that will wait until later in the year. The album title is going to be called A Trigger In Time Part I.
That all sounds very exciting, can’t wait to hear the rest. I am wondering if you did take this to a live setting, if it would become an Ayreon type scenario.
Maybe, several of guests have actually said that if it comes to that, they are definitely in. It’s not a plan of mine at all, the plan is to make it into the studio project that it is. Get all the influences down and get all the songs, present the album somehow. The album is being mixed and mastered right now, it’s Konstantin [Naumenko] who is mixing the album. I’ve worked with him in Symphonity before and have admired his way of hearing and producing stuff and his visions on what that’s meant to sound like. His musical influences and the music he has made with Sunrise speaks a lot to how this album would have a melodic, epic sound to it.
One of the things I have found is nostalgic comforts help. From what I understand, this is what this album is doing. Are there any nostalgic comforts that you turn?
Of course. When it comes to doing stuff for nostalgia sake and comfort, personally it’s one of the things I do the most. Even if it’s not nostalgic from when I was a child or a teenager. For example, my wife and I re-watch a lot of shows; I usually re-play a lot of video games that I have played already, I don’t play that many new games for example. When I play a video game, I use it to escape reality and try to do something else to just focused on something. One of the games I am playing at the moment is a great way to help me get focused; it’s definitely a nostalgia factor, the ones I have grown up playing and the ones I play the most are the ones I am most comfortable with as well.
We touched upon this earlier that it touches upon your music making.
Sort of, I think with the music; it goes back to something I didn’t talk about before but the influences on the album as well. When I wrote to the different parts and tried to describe what is this inspired by and things like that, mostly I was thinking ‘this part is inspired by Avantasia because they are the first metal opera’ That’s what came to mind but when I thought about every single song on the album, they all have different influences. For example, the first song was written way back when I was writing the first Skyblazer song so it’s very much inspired by Power Quest, Avantasia and other stuff that are very nostalgic to me.
Some of the songs such as Medieval Mystery, are inspired by more folk metal like Elvenking, Ensiferum and those sorts of bands. Then a couple of other songs are inspired by more traditional metal and US Power Metal such as Manowar and Virgin Steele. A couple of other songs are more inspired by Sci-Fi Power Metal such as Gamma Ray and Calbion because without spoiling it all depends when the song in the inspired story takes place and also when I wrote it. A lot of of these songs have been written in very different times for me since there are musical points that I wrote five years ago and then another one four years ago. I was in different places mentally in all those different years as well. So that effects how different the album is going to sound, since I am the only one that’s listened to the album in full; I can tell you that somehow it works.
It sounds like a nice mixed bag of stuff, speaking of video games; which video game characters would you like to see on a reality TV show?
That’s a difficult question.
I’ll narrow it down to a Survival Type Reality show.
Hmmm, so I might be boring as I am trying to tie it back to Chrono Trigger. The thing with that is that all the characters are really good and when you play the game, you only play as three characters at the same time. Whenever you take different characters with you, get slightly different interactions and dialogue; what I miss the most when I play the games is that I would love interaction with all the characters. If I can play the game with all the characters at the same time, that would be amazing because then you can get the most character interactions. So probably the cast of Chrono Trigger would be the best for that type of show.
Do you have a message for anyone that is reading this interview today?
Sort of because I want to talk about writer’s block as it’s one of the things that I also have; it’s the reason I’m aiming for a release this year and not last year. Early in 2025, I was going to make it so that it was ready for a release in 2025 but somehow, I couldn’t get the last two songs as good as I wanted them to be and so it took a long time. At one point during the summer, I was thinking “OK, I have done everything else. I just have this one last song to make and I have to finish it because I need to send it to the guest vocalists”. At that point, I had secured the guest vocalists but now I needed to send it to them so I could get the recordings and then finish the rest of the stuff to send to mixing.
At one point during the fall, I realised that it was going to be impossible to release it in 2025 and it was hard because last year was the 30th anniversary of the game so I really wanted it to coincide with it. I realised that it wasn’t going to be possible and I also decided during August that I can make this part and see what the other guys think, so I sent the finished song to see what they were saying and they messaged back to say it was one of the best songs they had heard.
As a creator, we are programmed to never see anything we do as perfect so striving for perfection all the time is probably not the best idea. I think it’s always to keep an open mind, sometimes stuff you think “I guess this is good enough but I want it to be perfect” it might still be way better in someone else’s eye.
So my message to anyone currently working on what they think is their masterpiece, not mocking anyone’s masterpiece of course, I have said “this is going to be my masterpiece” to about six different things. It’s healthy to do that but it’s not healthy to hold onto it forever and wear each other out because we want it to be perfect. At a point, it’s OK to say enough is enough, this is good enough and release it. You would be surprised how much of a positive reaction you can get.
Find DREAMSEEKER here.
