HELLOWEEN - The Hellride Is Over... Page 2
By Martin Popoff

What other titles might have enough for consideration?

"You can read on the website (ed. www.helloween.org). We wanted to take the shit out of The Dark Ride in a way and we would come up with the record called All About Evil. And in All About Evil, we also had that rabbit involved. It would've been an evil rabbit; naturally it would've been dark gray or something and look very fierce. And we would've turned everything into bad. Like, you would have had evil cake and evil milk, which would have been dark gray or black. Everything you usually cannot possibly make bad or dark or something, we would've turned into dark, and just taken the shit out of the whole thing. And we would have gone out on tour in shabby clothes, everything dirty and messy. But I didn't feel this would have been a thing actually concluded at that point in time. And we didn't come up with many ideas, enough to allow the concept or finally conclude it as a full thing that we could present to the public. So to me, the pulling rabbits out of the hat thing seemed a lot easier and a lot more logical."

"What Charlie does is provide 100% control," says Michael, with respect to crack-whip producer Charlie Bauerfeind. "He comes along with a lot of experience of his own making. He's the god of the ProTools and he's a wizard and he knows exactly what he wants to do. He has a lot of German qualities, you may say. He sometimes reminds me of a Roman centurion, the way he's sitting there doing things. He'd be comparable to the guy who did those Deep Purple and Iron Maiden records, because they always called him The Headmaster. So we don't exactly have The Headmaster, but we've got the Roman/German centurion. And so, that's what he does. He studied at Berklee for a few years and he studied acoustics and all this stuff you actually need to be a producer. So what he does isn't out of blue air, out of the blue. He's just doing it because he knows where all those things are. And he even has them set up in his ProTools system, where he can summon them if he has too; he's got them all prepared. So what he's doing is also frequencies, selective recording and mixing. And this, you cannot possibly do unless you know what you're doing."

HELLOWEEN - The Hellride Is Over... Page 3