Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Kino Šiška / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Interview date: 10.11.2009
With the release of their new, fifth studio album, “Saga”, the undisputed first fiddle of Slovenian rock, Siddharta, are kicking off a new development cycle, one of discovering and challenging new horizons. The guys have come out of this story cleansed, strengthened, even more tightly consolidated and with an even sharper focus. It gives this quintet of one-of-a-kind souls a springy suspension to lean back into, relaxed and unburdened, richer for many new insights, and swing up to an even higher level of musical artistry.
RockLine: Siddharta is back with a new album, “Saga”. What does this album mean to you?
Tomi: With this album we kind of “got our doctorate”. We go to this school we call rock n’ roll, and that’s where we learn. This album is definitely a leap for us. I won’t say we know and can do everything now, but with this album we put ourselves “out there” in a way we never have before. This time we weren’t as careless as on the earlier albums, and we’ve never been as honest as we are on “Saga”. Considering that everyone in the band is over 30 on average, this album came at just the right time, the time when we’d matured.
Tomaž: I totally agree with Tomi. The process of making this record was completely different from our previous ones. We’ve changed from record to record, sure, but “Saga” is a really big departure for us. A departure from rules, a departure from control. While the album was coming together there were no rules and no control, and that’s what matters most, I think.
RockLine: You still keep your trademark of simple tricks but rich atmosphere. Even when you listen to the new record, the verdict that nobody goes more “Slovenian” in rock than Siddharta still stands, untouched.
Tomaž: Maybe as far as rock n’ roll goes. Though lately there’s been quite a bit of good rock n’ roll in Slovenia.
Tomi: We’re kind of proud to be shaping the face of Slovenian rock n’ roll. Even though we went off to the USA to make “Saga”, we can’t hide the fact that we come from this part of Europe. We’ve carried that in us from the very beginning. We have to hold on to that red thread, because right from the start we created such a wide musical range of expression. We didn’t focus on one particular style, we let ourselves go wherever we wanted, and a listener would still get that it’s Siddharta. That’s good, because this approach doesn’t choke us. It’s like climbing a tree from branch to branch. One time you’re on the sunny side of the tree, another time in the shade, a third time you’re digging into the roots and so on… This time we went straight up the trunk to the top to take a look around at what’s out there, because that’ll make it even easier to keep going down our path. “Saga” is nowhere near our last album.
RockLine: Where did the idea for the album title “Saga” come from? Is there a concept hidden behind it, or something else?
Tomaž: At first there was a concept in the background, but in the end it turned out that the concept, which was supposed to be the guiding thread of the album, outgrew itself. We can hardly control it and we actually don’t even want to. The original idea was to go record the new album in Iceland, but the point was that we were going off to create a story. Then the offer from the USA came and we took it. We first wanted to show how the album was being made, so Saga would come out in segments, based on snippets written down from the recording in the USA. But we learned right away that you can’t pin down a Saga up front. It’s something you write as you go, along your way. And that Saga we thought we had under control ended up taking over all the reins. We got to the USA and the sky opened up for us. The album release and the concerts that follow it are a continuation of Saga. So for our listeners in Slovenia, this is only the beginning.
RockLine: So the decision to change your surroundings, to leave your home turf at the point when you decided to record a new album, played a very important role.
Tomi: First and foremost, after 15 years of making music you want to change your environment. That affects our relationships with each other, and especially how you channel all the music and ideas you carry inside onto the record. In principle it can be small deviations, but the listener picks them up more strongly. This was actually our first experience recording abroad. Luckily it didn’t bury us, it made us stronger. I can honestly add that we had no problems at all, the kind that tend to crop up on trips into so-called “unknown territory”. The situation emboldened us and gave us momentum going forward. So we made something we tried to keep under control and set a quality target for in advance, and it ended up beating all of that by quite a few notches. That’s the kind of surprise that doesn’t happen often in life. The energy Saga carries inside is something really serious. This album has so many different layers that the listener keeps discovering them over time, so I can say it’s a typical non-instant record, the kind there are sadly very few of today. That can be our big pride today.
RockLine: In what ways did the bonds between band members get stronger during the making of the new album?
Tomaž: Yes. The best thing is to lay out a few circumstances that confirm it. We lived for three months under the same roof, in the same house. In those three months we didn’t have a single fight. It was actually the longest stretch of hanging out together since Siddharta began. That time was really useful for us, because it let us get to know each other even better than we already did. The fact that there were no egos or other tensions in that situation to cloud our relationships shows how well we clicked and how much we really belong together as members of the band in this lineup. I’d also like to mention that this time we were very far from home. For example, if we’d stayed in Slovenia, we could have recorded in Novo mesto, say, and come back home to Ljubljana in the evening, where we’d face the problems of everyday life. This time we got a dream situation. You didn’t have to think about paying the bills back home and so on. So that was kind of blissful for us, over a period of three months. A situation where you can be free while you create, which is supposed to be your mission anyway. Together we were opening up a new world.
RockLine: With all his experience, the producer Ross probably just steered you with small corrective nudges and things flowed on their own.
Tomi: In this case there wasn’t really any hierarchy, okay, as far as the work itself goes, sure. We all knew who the boss was, who shapes the final product, but Ross came in as a kind of advisor and friend. He was learning in this process too, alongside us and from us. Ross Robinson is a very broad personality, with lots of experience gathered in the past, and he approached it in a similar way. He never forced his views on us in our work. We learned a huge amount from him, and he himself admitted that he’d never had an experience like the one with Siddharta, not with any band before. A whole process like that takes a pretty big person, to accept someone he doesn’t know and to be ready to grow himself, which just shows how much music itself really means to him. He enjoys it. He showed us making music, or rather recording itself, in a completely different way than we were used to. He acts like he’s not part of the music industry. He even despises it. He just creates and lets the music made that way find the space meant for it. In the spirit that there’s no need to sweat it if you don’t become the number 1 band with an album, he has a lot of respect for music and takes making it very seriously.
RockLine: How did the instrumental of more than ten minutes that you put on the album come about? Did you record it as one piece, the whole band in the studio at once, or is it “glued” together from several parts?
Tomaž: We were all in the studio at the same time, the whole band, and we recorded it.
Rockline: So you only needed one “take” for it?
Tomaž: No, there were several “takes”, but the track isn’t pieced together. I’d have to ask Ross for the exact details. We were locked in the studio and asked if there were still 10 minutes of tape left, since we were recording to tape. Ross said yes, and then we started playing.
RockLine: It feels like a studio “jam”, played off the top of your heads, first go.
Tomi: Well, it is a jam.
Tomaž: Yeah, yeah. It’s a jam.
Tomi: We had the harmony set up…
Tomaž: Two harmonies and a motif. That’s it.
Tomi: We’d been thinking about having a somewhat longer track on the album that would work as a kind of “breather”, because we expected the whole thing to be very intense. In that breather we wouldn’t have to think too much, the music would act as a sort of backdrop, or just “carry you away”. We basically created it on the spot. We were watching each other, nobody knew what move was coming even half a minute ahead or how many sections we’d drop into. That track is a really special moment on the album. Nothing about it was agreed beforehand. We played it at the end of a recording day, when we were all already a bit “off”. It was a moment of release for us at the end of the long hours of recording that had gone on through the day.
RockLine: Of all the records you’ve made in your career, from the first to the last, which one is made most after your own heart?
Tomi: It’s hard to settle on just one record. Every one of them is honest. It’s just that the periods they were made in were different. The way of thinking is different. Trying to remember back, “Saga” strikes me right now as carrying that so-called feeling of triumph more than any of the others. Maybe when you carry your soul with you all the time, and today we can all say we’re over 30 in the band, you kind of get used to it, but with “Saga” I noticed the soul can actually be a very interesting thing again, if I can put it that way. In it the band, through its five members, matured quite differently than before. I can say that in Saga’s case this is the peak of our musical expression, no matter how listeners receive the new album.
Tomaž: What needs stressing here is that this record, unlike the others, is a lot more “first-person” personal. Quite a few of the songs, if not all of them, are written in that direction…
Tomi: “ID” is already that kind of album too.
Tomaž: Yes, but between those two albums the lyrics come from the plural, “we are”, “we admire the world” For me personally, “Saga” is the American “ID”.
RockLine: So what path of development have you walked, from the album “Rh”, your probable commercial peak, on through “Petrolea” to “Saga”?
Tomi: Yeah, “Rh” was a kind of “Harry Potter” for us. Everything made fairytale-style, and the masses embraced the album. With Petrolea we went into the so-called more marginal world. We basically wanted to get that rock n’ roll back, because to be honest, by then it had all kind of gotten out of hand. A strong symphonic element had latched onto our music. “Rh” was an excellent record, I won’t deny that, but it was harder to perform live because of the many guests who appear on it. With Saga the real fight is only starting for us now. It has lots of “uncontrolled” sounds that we project into the room through our own musical perception, without guests. We could still lay more layers on top of this album, but this is it, and it’s enough. Siddharta in all its essence.
RockLine: You can feel in the material on “Saga” that this time you came at it completely unburdened and that this is an album that isn’t subordinated to the hunt for hits.
Tomi: While we were recording the album, Ryan and Ross, Ryan is Ross’s technical collaborator, would comment every time we started on a particular track: “Alright, let’s go record a new hit!” and follow it with a booming laugh. Ross himself doesn’t make songs to prep them as hits in advance, although some of his songs do actually become that over the years.
RockLine: Tomi, on the new album you were once again 100% convincing in bringing your emotional side to life. The new environment probably had an extra effect on you, so that certain feelings were amplified in you even more clearly…
Tomi: On the new album Ross helped me a great deal here. He takes a lot of time and talks with you about individual songs. With all of us. At first with the band, when we explain what a track is even about, and then he motivates us emotionally to the point where you actually start thinking about that feeling. So it’s not like: “Let’s knock out this song today, and maybe that one too, etc…” Before recording the songs, Ross tries to take you right back to the beginning, to the core the song comes from. To the situations that, in his view, led to that particular song being written. It didn’t matter that much to Ross if you hit a wrong note or sang a word in the verses a bit clumsily, because what mattered at that moment was the energy you set off. If it turned out that the energy wasn’t right, we went back to the discussion. Once you feel that after a few notes things are heading the right way, it’s not hard to “fall in”. While you work, Ross stands just a meter away from you during recording. He seems very unobtrusive, but at the same time he gives you incredible support. Far from this approach making you feel uncomfortable. Quite the opposite. It makes you feel good. It even happens that Ross is more focused than any of us in the band at times.
Tomaž: Ross helps with channeling. When Tomi was talking about setting off energy, even if you “botched” a word, the message of this record and of Ross too is that it doesn’t matter what language you sing in, because if the energy is right, every person in the world will understand a song and its message at any moment. Okay, not literally understanding the lyrics themselves, which we think isn’t their purpose anyway. In art the purpose of text is to set off your interpretations and identification.
RockLine: You carry an extremely rare quality, you’re even the only ones in Slovenia in this respect. It’s the ability to build Slovenian into the verses in a way that doesn’t take away from the melodiousness of the music itself, but on the contrary, fits perfectly into the framework of the songs and even boosts the melody itself. Given this rare quality that makes you unique, have you ever thought about trying to break through abroad with the new album and finally leave a mark on the international scene too?
Tomi: Our aim is basically to kind of “tweak everyone’s mind behind their back”. We’re ready for the foreign market. I’d like us to draw as little attention as possible with it and for this arsenal to grow on its own. I think the right time is coming now, when this could be interesting to people. There’s the music and the soul along with the vocals, which are part of that music, and the listener is free to interpret the messages in the verses in their own way. That’s our secret plan. I figure people outside Slovenia will accept this kind of use of the Slovenian language too.
RockLine: It seems to me that precisely this interpretation of the Slovenian language that you use, Tomi, is the main reason you can say there’s no more Slovenian rock band than Siddharta.
Tomi: Yeah, many Slovenes say that when they listen to our music, they can’t make out exactly the words I’m singing. If, say, an American and an Englishman found themselves in a similar jam and actually wanted to know what it means in translation, no problem, we’d bring them a translation. But we’d like this use of Slovenian to draw attention beyond the Slovenian border all on its own, so that other countries notice this special quality too. It’s similar to the opera or theater, where you get the text before the show starts. I doubt anyone there understands what anybody is singing during an opera performance.
RockLine: You’ve played abroad before and tried to break through there. How did that experience affect you back then? Was it a success or a failure for you?
Tomaž: At those concerts abroad we gave everything we had and did our thing. We didn’t care whether we were playing for ten or two hundred people. Every time we went in full throttle, because concerts are our best form of expression. On top of that, there was also the German partner, or label, who didn’t know what to do with us, I’d rather put it this way, they didn’t know how to present us to the German audience. Not the way every band would want. For example, you call up your partner and say, we’re the music, you’re our channel to the audience, bring us the audience, and well, that moment sadly never came. That didn’t stop us.
Tomi: To use a metaphor, this manager took us to the seaside with a sled, then we took that sled, stuck it in the shore, opened a beer and used the sled our own way. We came home from that adventure renewed, rested and broadened. Of course the German market is different. You can’t just succeed overnight there and “smash it”. That adventure was just one pebble in the mosaic of a picture that’s getting bigger and bigger now.
RockLine: How far do you think you are from the position of being stars on the international scene too?
Tomi: Pretty far, I think. Because the first thing is the question of whether Siddharta even wants that. Especially the way it’s shown to us through mainstream channels like MTV. We’ve moved really far away from that mainstream, from the principle they try to sell us, so in a way we’ve moved away from stardom too. Abroad we’d like to reach the status of a cult band that lives very well but isn’t exposed the way the media channels show it to us. We’d still like to keep a healthy connection with reality and live our own lives when we do get that success. So we won’t just sell out like that.
Tomaž: What you see on MTV today, we don’t want to be in that company at all. Everything there is a circus, it’s all staged. We don’t work on that principle. We talked about honesty earlier. MTV doesn’t have that, everything’s calculated, all the levers and the target audience that will grab onto an artificially staged product.
Tomi: The trick is that someone who’s honest doesn’t even stress it. The ones with their mouths full of honesty are the ones who are afraid they might not be honest, or that someone will expose them as not being honest. Those types will tell you: “Don’t you feel how honest I am? People know me for not lying!” Come on, come on. I don’t buy that kind of nonsense anymore. It’s like spoiled yogurt.
RockLine: Can we say that by the time you Siddharta got to “Saga”, only then did you grasp your own honesty, even though it had been in you the whole time and you were expressing it unintentionally anyway? Only now, with the new album, you’ve maybe finally learned to value being able to be honest.
Tomi: We were more or less honest all along. But “Saga” is exactly where we reached the moment of baring ourselves like that and actually feeling good about it, with no shame about any criticism, or about having done anything wrong. We feel really good now. Before, we were maybe too careful, and that carefulness can hold you back at times and leave you kind of hungry.
Tomaž: With that approach you’re always clipping your own wings a little.
Tomi: You know something’s going on that’s wrong, and then you need someone to show you what you’re doing wrong. We’re glad we’re not burdened with that anymore.
Tomaž: Like driving with the handbrake slightly on the whole time.
Tomi: Yeah. Or the tires underinflated. So a good car, but something’s off.
Tomaž: Maybe “stripped bare” is really a better expression than honest. That fits the process we went through with Ross. He worked with each of us for so long that he completely stripped us bare. It went so far with every one of us that in the end each of us noticed only that we had an instrument on us, while Ross knows everything about each of us. All you can do in that case is communicate with Ross by playing him something back in reply. So no hide-and-seek, to the point where all you’re left with is playing what you spent so long talking about with Ross, or what you told him.
RockLine: To reach the point where you’re not afraid to react while stripped bare, you need some extra self-confidence, something more. Few people have those qualities today…
Tomi: It has to become clear to you that you can’t have everything under control, and at that point you reach the ability to be bold enough to take a step into the unknown. You have to be aware that you could slip on that step, or you could hop on some kind of escalator that takes you a few levels higher. Taking that step is the hardest decision. Especially for a band with five individual, distinctive minds. That courage is needed, and we’re lucky we managed to take that step, and I’m really glad to be part of a team where you can decide spontaneously and put quite a bit at risk for the sake of personal growth and to achieve a concrete result too, which is more than obvious now with the new album.
RockLine: That’s exactly Siddharta’s strength, that the band developed along a natural path and built a solid foundation on which it can keep developing safely and independently.
Tomi: We don’t go to a job. We only do music. We can think about it a lot and for me that’s a huge pleasure. That thing about courage we were talking about showed up at university too, when you’re faced with a choice and have to decide where you’ll take a risk on your path forward. What’s interesting is that people with advanced degrees and doctor titles and so on… they don’t get it when you tell them you do music and that’s your work and source of income. Here everyone sees music as an extra hobby you do in your free time. We’re among the rare ones in Slovenia who can live off music. And even then, if you set everything else aside in order to make it happen, the odds that you’ll succeed go way up.
RockLine: Tomaž, you’re also involved with the band Revolute. What led you to start the band, and what does making music with Revolute give you that you don’t get, say, with Siddharta?
Tomaž: Actually, that question isn’t so easy to answer. Revolute’s history goes back even before Siddharta came to be. Something similar happened to me as to Tomi, and at some point at university I was faced with a choice. A professor was offering me a spot as a moderator and later an assistant, and I decided to start doing music. For bread. That’s when we met up with Siddharta, and I started expressing myself in music through Siddharta. On top of that I had another band. Things went so far that the problem wasn’t that I couldn’t manage something, it was mainly that you want to try something else, somewhere else. It’s hard to draw a line between my musical character in Siddharta and in Revolute. Okay, Revolute has a female vocalist, Siddharta has a male vocalist. I’ve always felt like someone who writes music for a female voice.
RockLine: How come you didn’t go for a song with a female vocalist back in the “Rh” era? That would undoubtedly have brought you a mega hit.
Tomi: Precisely because we probably already carried it in us subconsciously back then, that we don’t see music mathematically, with a pencil and a sheet of paper in hand, analyzing and planning hits in advance. We preferred to wait a bit on those combinations. Only recently did we decide to collaborate. And with a male vocalist. With the band Dan D. That’s what felt like the best fit to us back then.
RockLine: How did the sudden explosion of internet downloading show up in sales, if we compare sales of the album “Rh” and then the album “Pertolea”?
Tomaž: A lot. They were cut in half.
Tomi: “Rh” sold 30,000 copies, and “Pertolea” between 12,000 and 15,000.
Tomaž: We want the situation on the internet to get sorted out and for music to start being sold online. So we get our bread back. You know, there’s a big difference in the simple fact that when you hold an album in your hand with a cover that an artist drew specially for the music, immersing himself in the music while he made the cover, you know one doesn’t work without the other. An album isn’t just a recording on a CD, an album is everything. Packaging included. That has an artistic stamp too, which is an undeniable part of the album itself. Like what Blaž Porenta did for us, you know, he wasn’t commissioned to draw pictures for us. He’s our fan. When he was given the task of drawing for the album, he got the songs in advance to listen to, and as he drew, the drawings grew with the music. That’s why “Saga” is partly his product too, not just ours.
RockLine: And to finish, a totally generic question. What are the plans going forward? Probably promoting the album first, etc…
Tomi: Yes. Promotion first. A release concert is planned right here, at Kino Šiška, on 21.11.2009. After that we’ll hit the road and try to play as many stages as possible. At the same time, of course, we can’t rule out that we all have tons of ideas all the time and never know where the road might take us. A path into the unknown is exactly the most attractive puzzle, usually. What’s set in stone, though, is simply part of the story of every rock band that loves playing live and for whom that’s basically the core mission. So, concerts in December, a massive album promotion in the spring, and we’ll also be focusing on offers from abroad, which we can already sniff out and feel in passing. And use all of it as a springboard for what comes next. It’s very important that this springboard is as springy as possible and gives us momentum, and that we keep that momentum going.
interview by: Aleš Podbrežnik and Robi Lipej
text edited by: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Robi Lipej
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