KING DIAMOND - Highly Strung Page 3
By Martin Popoff

"Suddenly these weird thoughts start coming into your brain, almost forced into your brain. And coming back to the hotel early that evening, I sat down and on the stationery of the hotel I started writing all kinds of twisted ideas down, the impression that I had gotten that day. And then it was put away. And then Abigail II was the next project that we did; we had pretty much agreed on that. But I have a big pile of notes that could possibly be stories, excerpts from possible stories for the future, and I went through all those when it was time to do this album and I came across this old stationery from this Budapest hotel. And reading through all these notes, it gave me exactly that feeling that I had that day, and I thought, God, I would love to get this into a story. I had a great foundation for it so that was it. And I started to go crazy, wrote a short story and then following the normal procedure we do, when we write songs, I write my songs, Andy writes in Sweden, and we present the demos for everybody, and then we select the songs and that could be the 12 that are on this new album. From there I split the short story into these 12 chapters and then I try and attach the music onto each chapter, try to see where is the feel of chapter five etc. Which song would that be? Oh, that would be song number nine, and then work the chapters into actual lyrics."

And it's really cool, but when you get talking to King, he has no trouble delving into the story - no matter how complex - and this time out was no exception. Rather than give you his whole run-down (a good ten, 15 minutes worth of it - note, a special version of the album will contain a DVD of him doing just that), here's a taster of the storyline, and a taster only...

KING DIAMOND - Highly Strung Page 4