PASSENGER - Sweden's Stone Sour? Page 2
By Martin Popoff

"We looked back a little bit to the mid-'90s, to bands like Helmet, Quicksand. And the two guitar players from that band did a band called Handsome, which we completely praise, basically (laughs). And Tool was an inspiration, of course, later Deftones. There's another band called Chum who only released one album on Century Media, as far as I know. Alice In Chains as well."

"I scream more in In Flames," laughs Anders when asked about his approach to vocals. "And I don't do that in this band. I mean, we just wrote the music and this is how it came out with the vocals. It didn't fit screaming vocals. The music just flew through me and out came the vocals. I never really thought about whether I should do this or that. Of course I wanted to sing more. It's just a matter of what fit the music."

What is perhaps the most daring or "out there" song on here?

"I don't know," ponders Friden. "What is daring? I don't feel like we did anything like that. I think the biggest departure, from how the album sounds, is the first single, In Reverse. But it's not a strange song in any way. It's a very straight-forward rock song. But songs I really like are Circles and Eyes Of My Mind, which is different. There's almost a pop song on there as well, For You. Otherwise, we tried to have the dynamics in there and make it so there weren't one or two hits, so to speak. We wanted to make an album that people can listen to from the beginning to the last song, an album where you always want to try and go to the next one to find what is happening around the next corner. Lyrically, it's way more open than anything I've ever done in the past. With In Flames, I use more metaphors; I kind of hide behind them. And I never thought I would write lyrics like this, so direct; I open myself up to the world, basically. I like it because there's a lot of I and you and me and so on. The people who read the lyrics and listen to the music can put themselves into that same character and kind of follow along. I think a lot of people, when they grow up, go through the same things that I had done. And it's basically all about relationships; it could be between friends or boy and girl and so on. It's about realizing where you are and trying to change. You feel like you're in a downward spiral but you should try to change it and learn something from it and try to become a better person."

PASSENGER - Sweden's Stone Sour? Page 3