GRAVE DIGGER - Digging Up Roots Page 2
By Martin Popoff

"Yes, I'm a big fan of his," explains Chris. "I've read all his books and poems. When we finished the songs for the new record we thought OK, we have to move away from this middle ages stuff so we went to Edgar Allan Poe, started with his stories and poems and combined his ideas and fantasies with my fantasies. And I relate the story with my view, through my eyes. But there are only seven or eight songs inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and the rest are about my experiences and my darkest fantasies. Funeral Procession and The Grave Digger relate more to my experiences. Funeral Procession is a song about an old member of the band (laughs). Evil Son relates a little bit to the movie The Omen. If you listen to the piano intro, it is similar to the soundtrack to The Omen."

One of the cool things about this band is the very concrete and earthy traditional metal sound they possess, one markedly away and aside from the by-rote power metal clogging distribution pipelines these days.

"Ah yes, power metal, or true metal, and a lot of people also call it Teutonic metal," sighs Boltendahl. "I think for us, it's only heavy metal because our roots are based more in the '70s, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Grand Funk, with a little touch of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, the '80s metal bands like Iron Maiden, Saxon, also Kiss. It was a big mixture of everything, also Michael Schenker, Scorpions, Accept a little bit. A lot of people say my voice is quite similar to Udo's, but I think it's a little different. So OK, with my voice perhaps and my language, it's a combination of English and German (laughs). I think that gives the music perhaps this foreign touch, the special touch of a German metal band. But we see ourselves as more of a normal rock metal band, a heavy rock band, nothing special."

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